Lord Jim

A young officer abandons a crowded pilgrim ship in a moment of panic and spends the rest of the novel trying to redeem himself, finally as the trusted white man of a remote Malay river-settlement; that settlement, Patusan, is fictional, drawn from the Berau river in Borneo Conrad had known as a sailor.

Jim

The Patna's route (Arabian Sea / Gulf of Aden)

The pilgrim ship

Jim is chief mate on the Patna, an old steamer packed with pilgrims bound for Mecca, when it strikes something in the dark and seems about to sink; in a spasm of fear he jumps into a lifeboat with the other officers, abandoning eight hundred sleeping people. The ship does not sink, and that leap becomes the disgrace he can never outrun. The disaster happens somewhere on the run toward the Gulf of Aden.

The pilgrim ship

disputed The pilgrim ship Patna carries Muslim pilgrims through the Arabian Sea toward the Red Sea; the exact point where it strikes a submerged object and is abandoned is not fixed and scholars locate it only generally on that route. The pin marks the approaches to the Gulf of Aden. Marked outsideSetting: it lies far west of the Bornean frame.

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