Joseph Conrad's first collection of stories, written while he was still deciding whether he was a sailor who wrote or a writer who had sailed. Five early tales carry us to where the empire runs out: a Dutch trader married into a Malay family and despised by both sides, a colonial agent going to pieces alone at a river station, a Breton farm where the peasants must deal with a fool. The lagoon and the outpost are already unmistakably his. This edition presents the complete and unabridged collection, newly typeset and illustrated with 30 full-page color plates.