Evening star., 1924-08-05
LURE MADE CONRAD
AMONG GREATEST OF WRITERS
Passion For Map Study Led Novelist First to Sea,
Then to Travels in Many Climes
Where Stories Originated.

What geography and exploration
Joseph Conrad told recently in some
personal memoirs which he wrote for
the National Geographic Magazine.
"Of all the sciences" he wrote, "ge-
ography finds it's origin in action,
and, what is more, in adventurous ac-
ton, Of the kind that appeals to
sedentary people, who like to dream
of arduous adventure in the manner
of prisoners dreaming behind their
bars of all the hardships and hazards
of liberty, dear to the heart of man.
Descriptive geography, like any
other kind of science, has been built
on the experience OF certain phenom-
ena and on experiments prompted by
that unappeasable curiosity of men
which their intelligence has elevated
into quite respectable passion for
acquiring knowledge. Like other sci
ences, 1t has fought its way to truth
through a long series OF errors. It
has suffered from the love Of the mar
velous, from our credulity, from rash
and unwaTantable assumptions, from
the play of unbridled fancy"
Passion for Maps
Speaking Of a book detailing
Frankn fhs tragic lost fate the OF s5 e0hb
century, he said: THE great spirit
of the. realities of the story sent
me on on the romantic explora-
tions of my inner self; to the discov-
cry or the taste for pouring over land
and sea maps; revealed to me the ex-
istence of a latent devotion to geog-
raphy which interfered with my de-
votion (such as it was) to my other
school work.
"Unfortunately, the marks awarded
for that subject were almost as few
as the hours apportioned to it in the
school curriculum by persons of no
romantic sense for the real, ignorant
Of the great possibilities of active
life; with no desire for struggle, no
notion of the wide spaces of the
world-mere bored professors. in fact.
who were not only middle-aged, but
looked to me as if they had never
been young.
"And their geography was very
thing, with a dry skin covering a re-
pulsive armature of uninteresting
bones.
THE geography which I had dis
covered for myself was the geography
of open spaces and wide horizons
the open air, the geography still mill
tant, but already conscious of its ap-
preaching end with the death of the
last great explorer. The antagonism
was radical.
Preferred Map&Gaxing.
"Thus it happened that I got no
marks at all for my first and only
paper on Arctic geography, which l
wrote at the age of Is. I still think
that for my tender years it was an
erudite performance.
81 have no doubt that star gazing
is fine occupation, for it leads you
within the borders of the unattain-
able. But map-ga8ing, to which be-
came addicted so early, brings the
problems of the great spaces of the
earth into stimulating and directive
contact with. sane curiosity and gives
an honest precision to ones imagi-
native faculty.
"And the honest maps of the 18th
century nourished in me a passionate
interest in the truth Of geographical
facts and a desire for precise knowl-
edge which was extended later to
other subjects.
"For a change had come over the
spirit of photographers. From the
middle of the 18th century on, the
business of map-making had been
growing into an honest occupation,
regist ering the hard-won knowledge,
but also, in a scientific spirit, record
ing the geographical ignorance of its
time.
Fascinated by Blank Spaces.
And it was Africa the continent