The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad: years at sea, and forty out in the East ("a pretty thor-
ough apprenticeship," he used to remark smilingly), had
made him honorably known to a generation of ship-
owners and merchants in all the ports from Bombay clear
over to where the East merges into the West upon the
coast of the two Americas. His fame remained writ,
not very large but plain enough, on the Admiralty
charts. Was there not somewhere between Australia
and China a Whalley Island and a Condor Reef? On
that dangerous coral formation the celebrated clipper
had hung stranded for three days, her captain and crew
 End of the Tether |