The Arrow of Gold

Joseph Conrad drew on his own restless youth in Marseille for this story of love and intrigue set during the Third Carlist War of the 1870s. The narrator, a young sailor known as Monsieur George, is pulled into smuggling arms across the Spanish border for the royalist cause. Along the way he falls for Doña Rita, a woman who rose from peasant girl to wealthy heiress after inheriting a painter’s fortune, and finds himself entangled with the possessive American captain Blunt. Told as a confession framed by two notes, the book trades adventure for the ache of passion and jealousy. It stands apart from Conrad’s sea tales as his most openly romantic work. This free PDF and EPUB edition brings it to new readers.