Youth, The End of the Tether

Do or Die, reads the motto on the stern of a rotten coal barque bound for Bangkok, and Marlow at twenty thinks it the finest thing he has ever seen. Youth is his account, told years afterwards over claret and cigars, of a voyage that never got anywhere: the ship leaks, turns back, loads again, and at last burns from the inside for days while a boy who has never been east of the Channel glories in every catastrophe of it.