Complete and unabridged, with 96 full-page plates by James McNeill Whistler, Thomas Baines and Narcisse Virgilio Díaz. A steamer captain tells, over a slack tide on the Thames, how he took a ship up a river in Africa to fetch out an agent who had stopped sending ivory and started sending nothing. Conrad had commanded such a steamer on the Congo in 1890 and came back with the fever that dogged him for life. What the company calls trade the book calls plunder, and the man at the end of the river is the company's best man. Ninety-six river and harbour plates, from Turner's sunsets to Whistler's Nocturnes, follow the current of Conrad's tale from the Thames to the Congo.