The Ferry Disaster: It Is Joseph Conrad’s LORD JIM?
Austin Bay blog
Yesterday I wrote a brief post on the Egyptian-Saudi ferry disaster, and mentioned Joseph Conrad’s novel, Lord Jim. (Here’s a link to the prior post.)
It looks like reality imitates art, in a tragic, ugly manner. Reuters reports that the ship’s captain abandoned the ferry, the Al Salam 98.
Survivors of the Red Sea ferry disaster said its captain fled the burning ship by lifeboat and abandoned them to their fate, as hopes faded on Saturday of finding some 800 missing.
Some passengers plucked alive from the sea or from boats after the ferry caught fire and sank early on Friday said crew had told them not to worry about a fire below deck and even ordered them to take off lifejackets.
Officials at el-Salam Maritime Transport Company, which owned the Al Salam 98, were not immediately available to answer the allegations.
Rescue workers have recovered 195 bodies from the Red Sea and saved 389 people but about 800 more, most of them Egyptian workers returning from Saudi Arabia, are missing.
Like Conrad’s Patna, the Al Salam 98 was an old, inadequate vessel, plying a “backwater” route and transporting pilgrims.
Conrad based the novel on an actual event. At first I thought the Lord Jim and Al Salam 98 parrallels would be superficial– after all the Patna did not sink and hundreds of lives were lost in the Al Salam 98 disaster. With the senior officers abandoning the Al Salam 98, the parrallels run deep. While I doubt that the Al Salam 98 inquirywill be as dramatic as the novel’s inquiry , the issues of professional and personal duty, courage, and honor will be at the center of the investigation.
Yesterday I linked to this essay by George Panichas.
Jim’s “dilemma” as the leap:
For Jim the overwhelming question, “What could I do—
what?”, brings the answer of “Nothing!” The Patna, as it ploughs
the Arabian Sea (“smooth and cool to the eye like a sheet of ice”)
on its way to the Red Sea, is close to sinking, with its engines
stopped, the steam blowing off, its deep rumble making “the
whole night vibrate like a bass ring.” Jim’s imagination conjures
up a dismal picture of a catastrophe that is inescapable and merciless.
It is not that Jim thinks so much of saving himself as it is the
tyranny of his belief that there are eight-hundred people on ship—
and only seven life-boats.
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