Despite the detailed attention paid to the sources of “The Secret Sharer” and to Conrad's experience of the Far East,¹ the story's topography has garnered little critical interest. The almost exclusively shipboard setting certainly accounts partly for this, the land playing a role only at the opening and conclusion. At both moments, however, Conrad's graphic descriptions have a signal symbolic resonance. In the first instance, the crossing of the bar—the juncture when the ship sloughs off her final links with the land to reach the freedom of the open sea—betokens a transitional moment: the captain and crew achieve their identities and hierarchical significance by entering into their functions as seamen. The conclusion, on the other hand, may signal a loss of innocence for the narrator and the achievement of a dubiously gained “freedom” on land for Leggatt, won at the cost of the captain's endangering the lives of himself and his crew.

As commentators on “The Secret Sharer” and Conrad's biographers have long recognized, Conrad's experience in navigating the Gulf of Siam in early 1888 forms a principal source for the story's setting. The events aboard the Cutty Sark, which form its main plot source, however, occurred in the Strait of Anjer off Java in 1880,² and in drawing upon these and upon his own memories Conrad typically conflated and reshaped materials from disparate events and sources for his fictional purposes. Although his use of the Cutty Sark background has been adequately commented upon, particularly by Sherry, Conrad's use of his recollections of the Gulf of Siam for the story he composed in 1908 have received little attention. Contemporary sources show that his reminiscences were, as it turns out, remarkably accurate and detailed. To recognize this exactitude arguably helps enrich the reader's understanding of the story and throws further light on Conrad's use and transformation of real-life details in his fiction.

The opening paragraph, which at first glance has an impressionistic character, is a precise presentation of observed reality. Moving from a generalized “tropical” waters location of its first sentence, it concludes by revealing the action's exact geographic position at the head of the Gulf of Siam. While it classically sets the time (late afternoon) and place and introduces the main player of the action, the paragraph establishes a number of motifs, including quotidian economic activities and an antithesis between land and sea. It also focuses on varied evidences of culture, including defensive precautions and a belief system, while, for symbolic purposes, it emphasizes a sense of solitude and desolation:

On my right hand there were lines of fishing-stakes resembling a mysterious system of half-submerged bamboo fences, incomprehensible in its division of the domain of tropical fishes, and crazy of aspect as if abandoned for ever by some nomad tribe of fishermen now gone to the other end of the ocean; for there was no sign of human habitation as far as the eye could reach. To the left a group of barren islets, suggesting ruins of stone walls, towers, and blockhouses, had its foundations set in a blue sea that itself looked solid, so still and stable did it lie below my feet; even the track of light from the westering sun shone smoothly, without that animated glitter which tells of an imperceptible ripple. And when I turned my head to take a parting glance at the tug which had just left us anchored outside the bar, I saw the straight line of the flat shore joined to the stable sea, edge to edge, with a perfect and unmarked closeness, in one levelled floor half brown, half blue under the enormous dome of the sky. Corresponding in their insignificance to the islets of the sea, two small clumps of trees, one on each side of the only fault in the impeccable joint, marked the mouth of the river Meinam we had just left on the first preparatory stage of our homeward journey; and, far back on the inland level, a larger and loftier mass, the grove surrounding the great Paknam pagoda, was the only thing on which the eye could rest from the vain task of exploring the monotonous sweep of the horizon. Here and there gleams as of a few scattered pieces of silver marked the windings of the great river; and on the nearest of them, just within the bar, the tug steaming right into the land became lost to my sight, hull and funnel and masts, as though the impassive earth had swallowed her up without an effort, without a tremor. My eye followed the light cloud of her smoke, now here, now there, above the plain, according to the devious curves of the stream, but always fainter and farther away, till I lost it at last behind the mitre-shaped hill of the great pagoda. And then I was left alone with my ship, anchored at the head of the Gulf of Siam.

(‘Twixt Land and Sea, 91-92)

The symbolic function of these realistic details can only be briefly outlined here, but it is appropriate to observe how Conrad's selective focus on concrete objects—the absence of human habitation, stakes, barren islets, and ruined military installations—produces a sense of existential isolation and establishes the story's “inner” setting in the captain's psyche. They also reveal character, hinting at a tendency to solipsism that is later fully expressed in the captain's narrative. The adjectives “mysterious,” “incomprehensible,” and “crazy,” seemingly inappropriate to describe the objective world, likewise function as pointers to a cast of mind, just as the motif of doubleness is first introduced by the “two clumps of trees.” Even the fishing-traps casually mentioned in the first sentence serve, in retrospect, as a cautionary symbol of ruse and entrapment that casts doubt on the narrator's reliability and interpretive skills. The words “devious curves” to describe the course of the river are similarly suggestive. By the story's conclusion the decoding of its meanings and the “navigation” of its narrative traps are tasks increasingly fraught with hazard for the reader.

To the greater part of Conrad's contemporary audience, the name Siam would probably have vaguely conjured the distant and exotic kingdom bordering the far reaches of India. For most of his readership the river, its life, and the pagoda, would likely have been mere suggestions of exotic local colour lacking particular denotative character.³ To travellers to the Kingdom of Siam, as Thailand was known until her name was changed in 1939, these would, on the contrary, have been familiar and even quite well known since the principal access to Bangkok was via the Chao Phraya (or Phya) River, or in the styling of Conrad's day the Menam or Meinam. (Both spellings were current in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.) Following the contemporary usage of foreign residents in, and travellers to, Bangkok in so referring to “The River,” Conrad's text gives the impression that a proper name is being used deliberately for the major waterway that empties into the Gulf of Siam.⁴ In Thai, however, menam simply means “river” and was (and is) applied generally and not only to the major river that makes its way through northern Thailand from its source in Yunnan, gives Bangkok its raison d'être, and sinuously empties into the sea about thirty miles below Bangkok proper (see Illustration 1).⁵

The evidence of fishing activities in the river that perplexes the narrator at the opening of the short story were based on direct observation. One foreign visitor describes these with some vividness: “We make use of the floodtide to cross the bar, the half-muddy, half-sandy mass of which, during the low tide, shows, as far as the eye can see, a bamboo forest stuck into the soil, to which the Siamese and Annamite [i.e., Vietnamese] fishermen fix their huge conical nets” (Fournereau 1894; 1998, 7). A guide to Bangkok published in 1894, six years after Conrad's arrival in the Siamese capital, also testifies to the well-established presence of fishing in the area in describing navigation of the river. In commenting on the bar it notes that “The inner part of the bar commences at about one third of a mile southward of the fishing stakes” (Bangkok Times 1894; 1996, 74). Its directions for entering the river similarly mention these prominent features of the landscape:

Entering Bangkok river, West point should be brought to bear N. 1/2 E., and steered for on that bearing until the lighthouse bears N. N. E., 1/2 E., when a N. by E. 1/2 E. course will lead between the sets of fishing stakes (3 sets of each side pointing to the south-west) and about a third of the mile westward; then steer N. E. 1/2 N. until …

Mr. J. Phillips, H. S. H. Vigilant, remarks that after passing the fishing-stakes the bottom becomes very hard on approaching the eastern bank, and very soft on nearing the western bank; this is the principal guide to the pilots.

(Bangkok Times 1894; 1996, 75)

The China Sea Directory likewise twice draws attention to the presence of groups of fishing-stakes in describing the approach to Bangkok (Admiralty 1899, 2: 369).

The defensive fortifications in a state of disrepair—“ruins of stone walls, towers, and blockhouses”—likewise have a basis in fact. The removal of the Siamese capital to Bangkok after the destruction of Ayutthaya in the late-eighteenth century required the construction of defences for the new capital against potential attacks from sea. In 1819, King Rama II ordered various defensive measures, leading to the erection of gun batteries on both banks of the Chao Phraya near Paknam. By the late nineteenth century, the forts and related buildings had fallen into such disrepair that King Rama V, concerned with the defence of the estuary, ordered the building of Paknam Fort or Phra Chulachomklao Fortress, which was completed in 1893 at the entrance to the Bight of Bangkok. The fleeting visual impression of the narrator of “The Secret Sharer” of decayed military structures has its origins, then, in direct observation and thus establishes Conrad's reportorial impulse.

Conrad's “great Paknam pagoda,” a landmark at the gateway to Siam and both the first and last sight a visitor had of the kingdom (see Illustrations 2-4), variously figures in late nineteenth-century travel literature.⁶ An earlier visitor to the country, the controversial Anna Leonowens, governess to the children of King Mongkut (Rama IV),⁷ lushly described her first sight of it in 1862, joining to it impressions from a later, closer inspection:

On the other [island], which I first took for a floating shrine of white marble, is perhaps the most unique and graceful object of architecture in Siam; shining like a jewel on the broad bosom of the river, a temple all of purest white, its lofty spire, fantastic and gilded, flashing back the glory of the sun, and duplicated in shifting, quivering shadows in the limpid waters below … Visiting this island some years later, I found that this temple, like all other pyramidal structures in this part of the world, consists of solid masonry of brick and mortar. The bricks made here are remarkable, being fully eight inches long and nearly four broad, and of fine grain—altogether not unlike the “tavellae” bricks of the Egyptians and ancient Romans. There are cornices on all sides, with steps to ascend to the top, where a long inscription proclaims the name, rank, and virtues of the founder, with dates of the commencement of the island and the shrine. The whole of the space, extending to the low stone breakwater that surrounds the island, is paved with the same kind of brick, and encloses, in addition to P'hra-Cha-dei (“The Lord's Delight”), a smaller temple with a brass image of the sitting Buddha.

(Leonowens 1870, 3-4)

Leonowens' romantic, overwritten description of Phra Chedi Klang Nam (The Pagoda in the Middle of the River) well serves her purpose in introducing her readers to the Far East.

Le comte de Beauvoir, arriving in Siam via sea in January 1867 on an extended tour of the Far East, recounted his impressions of the site with more restraint but in a way that nonetheless suggests the picturesque elements of the pagoda and its riverine setting. Stopping at Paknam for the required customs inspection before proceeding to Bangkok, he described the temple complex on the opposite bank in the following terms:

Pendant les démêlés de l'autorité avec notre capitaine, nous admirons une pagode sortant du milieu du fleuve comme une île resplendissante. C'est un assemblage de maçonnerie toute blanche, une grande cloche de deux cents pieds de haut, surmontée d'une aiguille droite et d'une famille de petites cloches semblable éparpillées sur l'eau.

[During the authorities' troubles with our captain, we admired a pagoda emerging from the middle of the river like a resplendent island. It is an all- white masonry structure, with a spire two hundred feet high, surmounted by an upright needle and a whole group of similar small tower tops scattered upon the water.]

(Beauvoir 1870, 252)

The accounts of Florence Caddy, who arrived in Siam in the Duke of Sutherland's party in February 1888, and of H. Warrington Smyth, a British subject serving as Secretary to the Government of Siam's Department of Mines and Geology from 1891 to 1896, are closer in time to Conrad's own experience of seeing the pagoda in January 1888. Caddy's description is typical of first-person travel writing of the period introducing an exotic world to the home audience. After detailing the arrival of her party in the Gulf of Siam and preparations to cross the bar, Caddy continues:

We were to move on at daybreak, and all of us meant to be up at five so as to see the fine temples [sic] at Paknam, in the entrance to the river. …

The birds sing in the early morning as if they knew it was St. Valentine's Day, and we sail through pleasing scenery of tree-fringed shores, with a spiry white pagoda on an islet, winding round this fanciful building with the deep curves of the stream. It is charming to glide over these lovely sheets of water, the broad ribbon of the Menam fringed with areca palms.

(Caddy 1889, 89-90)

Smyth's extensive descriptions of the country include the following account of his arrival at Paknam:

As the ship turns into the river the long low-lying village of Paknam comes into sight. It is a village of some little importance, with a population of about six thousand, consisting mostly of fishermen …

Across the river lies the low mud island of the Inner Fort, armed with some fine breechloading guns of large calibre … Just to the north of it stands the little Wat, or monastery, known as the Prachadi Klangnam, “The Pagoda in the River,” one of the prettiest and most characteristic things of the kind in the country, highly typical of the land we are entering, where as in Burma, the pagoda and the monastery form such a large part in the life of the people.

(Smyth 1898, I: 5, 7)

Likewise close in time to Conrad's experience was that of Lucien Fournereau, an architect and inspector of art education and museums for the French Ministry of Public Instruction and Arts, whose travels in 1891-92 during his first mission to Indochina yielded a vivid recollection of the Siamese capital. As befits his architectural training, he describes the pagoda as follows:

After having ascended the waters of the Menam for a certain time and having passed the first bend, one soon observes the fortified island of Paknam and the silhouette of the first pagoda. … Built to honour the Lord Buddha, it consists of two principal edifices: the temple or Bôt and the great Phra Chedi; besides, several salas are destined to welcome pilgrims. This pyramid, setting itself off against a background of greenery and reflected at its foot in the mirror of the calm waters is truly grand and gripping in appearance.

(Fournereau 1894; 1998, 8-9)

The pagoda remained a prominent feature on the landscape for some time. Charles Buls, former burgomaster of Brussels and a close friend of Conrad's “aunt” Marguerite Poradowska, visiting Siam in early 1900, briefly notes passing by the site in his Croquis siamois: “The fort of Paknam appears on the left, followed by an island where the sharp point of a white temple stands tall: it's the Phra Chedi Klang Nam” (1901; 1994, 2). A 1904 guidebook to Bangkok and Siam draws attention to it in these terms: “The Paknam wat, or temple … is truly a striking erection of its kind. Although by no means the largest or finest of the temples within the Bangkok monthon, or district, its situation renders it most picturesque” (Antonio 1904; 1997, 11).

A German architect in the service of the Siamese government responsible for designing various royal edifices, Karl Döhring, whose onsite observations date to 1906-13, neglects the temple's picturesque qualities to offer a useful summary of its architectural features and symbolic significance:

The whole temple is built on an island in the middle of the Menam River. On the left side stands a sala nam⁸ at the landing, exactly at the temple's main axis. The bot follows this, as does the famous phra chedi, which was erected to mark Siam's sea border. It symbolically represents the Buddha in the Phra Haam Samut (Pacifying the Ocean) posture. Bell towers have been erected on both sides of the sala nam. A cloth adorns the bell⁹ of the phra chedi. Annual celebrations take place near this temple with pilgrim processing in boats, circling round the temple in the direction of the sun. Boat races are also organized during the festivities.

(Döhring 1916; 2000, 326)

The actual structure, now named Phra Samutchedi, still stands, although it is no longer “famous,” to evoke Döhring's word, and its picturesque character has diminished: its spire is no longer gilded, and silting up of the Chao Phraya has joined the mud island on which the pagoda once stood to the river's west bank. (Paknam, on the eastern bank, has likewise virtually disappeared as a separate entity.¹⁰) Envisaged by King Rama II as a means of publicly proclaiming his kingdom's adherence to Buddhism, actual construction began only after his death, commencing in 1827 by order of King Rama III. The Sri Lankan-style pagoda rose to a height of 20 metres upon its completion the following year. By direction of King Rama IV, it was radically altered in the late 1850s, nearly doubling in height to attain an imposing 38 metres and undergoing some alterations in shape.¹¹ At this time too, relics of the Buddha were immured in the pagoda, as per custom. It was this structure, a concrete reminder of aspirations for the spiritual world, that so impressed Anna Leonowens and other Europeans on arriving in the Siamese capital by boat.

The highly detailed and precise topography of the opening of “The Secret Sharer” is not repeated at its close, which nonetheless depends upon knowledge of an exact location among a shadowy group of islands. The ship is on “the east side of the Gulf of Siam” (127) near the “Cambodje shore” (131),¹² a vague enough indication that mostly gives the general setting. The island of “Koh-ring” is specifically mentioned, but in an area peppered with islets of no particular size or significance, it has thus far eluded identification and even been thought to be a fictional place-name (Berthoud 1984, 154). It seems possible, however, that Conrad misconstrued the name or that nearly twenty years after navigating these waters had forgotten its spelling.¹³ He may, moreover, have compressed his description of the coastline for artistic effect, the exact location being nothing more than local color for the general reader and the groups of islands, “Unknown to trade, to travel, almost to geography” (133), serving to underscore the sense of isolation and secrecy.

A likely real-life candidate for the island he calls Koh-ring may, however, be Koh Ryn (also spelled Koh Rin) of the Koh Si-Chang group off the coast of the town of Pattaya, today a popular beach resort for Thai and foreign tourists alike. Fournereau, describing what because of his inability to speak English with Chinese crew-members was a dull journey to Siam, alerts us to this possibility in the following account:

This feat [fluency in English] makes navigation of the Gulf of Siam singularly monotonous and sad for a traveler who does not speak this language. … Thus it is for him a quite deep and intimate feeling of happiness to see the mountains of ancient Cambodia rise up in the purple of the distance, and then the groups of islands: Koh Kwang Noi, Koh Luem, Koh Kram and Koh Ryn, which announce the proximity of the continent.

(Fournereau 1894; 1998, 5)

The mention of “ancient Cambodia” and Koh Ryn, in close proximity, encourages the identification of this island with Conrad's. The 1894 Directory for Bangkok and Siam identifies Koh Luem and Koh Kam (Fournereau's Koh Kram) as belonging to the Koh Si-Chang Group (1894; 1998, 71). The group includes another island called Kangku as well as “three other islets.” According to this source, Koh Si-Chang has a peak at its north end rising to 697 feet, and Koh Kangku, a third of a mile off, has “a sharp peak 125 high” (71). The “towering black mass” (143) mentioned at the story's close apparently, then, also had a real-life source, even if the real-life Koh Rin (see Illustration 5) is itself not particularly imposing. The British Admiralty's China Sea Directory offers detailed descriptions of these islands, describing Koh Rin as 360 feet in height and with several rocks about it “all above water: the highest are White rocks 50 feet, and Tree rock 51 feet, each with a little of brushwood on them” (Admiralty 1899, 2:363). The chart that Conrad used to navigate these waters has been preserved, but no markings appear on it, and the survey of the Gulf of Siam, done in 1856 and 1857 by the H.M.S. Saracen (Admiralty n.d.), did not include the names of its myriad small islands although the Koh Si-Chang group itself is indicated, as is Koh Rin.¹⁴

Conrad's topography at this point largely serves a symbolic purpose. By this time, the narrative impulse towards myth has submerged the story's realistic protocols. Leggatt is assimilated with Cain, and the ship in the Gulf of Siam is imaged as at the gates of the classical underworld: “on the very edge of a darkness thrown by a towering black mass like the very gateway of Erebus” (143). The shift from the opening's sense of liberation from the hold of the land to the looming “darkness” tends to undermine the triumphalism in the captain's self-proclaimed sense of mastery over his craft. The story's close echoes, then, its opening images of entanglement and freedom (although these occur in a context of decay and desolation) and recalls the man-made mountain of the pagoda. The return of these images, in a different guise, suggests that the sense of progress and liberation may, indeed, be illusory, the captain—the reader's only reference point in this first-person narrative—being deluded about both. His positive tone in his description of Leggatt's guilty freedom is made hollow by the brooding gloom, and his narrative unreliability stands revealed.

Notes

1. See Sherry 1966, 253-69, and Shidara 1998.

2. For a detailed account of the actual events, see Lubbock 1924, 180-98.

3. The name Paknam may have recalled to Conrad's readers versed in diplomacy or interested in international relations the “Paknam Incident,” an armed confrontation between French and Siamese ships over territorial rights that occurred in mid-July 1893. See Tips for an extended discussion of the incident and its background.

4. The locution “River Meinam” or “Menam River” is in the strict sense a barbarism, translating as “River River.”

5. Mention of the river's “innumerable bends” in The Shadow-Line (47) is, as the accompanying map shows, simple poetic licence or an exaggeration for symbolic effect.

6. A pagoda is not as Berthoud, following popular usage, states in his explanatory notes to The Shadow-Line, “A Buddhist temple” (151) but an edifice within a temple's precincts, these normally comprising a number of structures. The principal ritual site, with images of the Buddha, is the assembly hall. A pagoda is primarily a symbolic structure the origins of which lie in the Hindu stupa. Like the stupa, it recollects Mount Meru, the centre point of Hindu/Buddhist cosmology, and like other holy mountains (Sinai or Calvary, for instance), it represents the intersection between the human and upper worlds. When arranged on a square substructure, it also evokes the mandala. In Thailand, pagodas are always reliquaries, containing either primary or secondary relics of the Buddha; they are, in some sense, stylized representations of him (or where there are numerous pagodas, the Buddha and his disciples).

7. Leonowens (1834-1915) is better known under her fictionalized guise as the title-character of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's musical comedy The King and I (1956).

8. A building constructed so as to give entry onto water. It is shown in the Illustrations.

9. The pagoda, or phra chedi, comprises three parts: the substructure, bell, and spire.

10. The name Paknam means “river mouth.” Now officially Samut Prakarn (or Prakan), the city is the capital of Samut Prakarn Province. Touching the borders of Metropolitan Bangkok, it is effectively merged with the capital although it remains separate from it for administrative purposes. For an illustrated account of the contemporary town, including photographs of the “Paknam pagoda,” see Montgomery and Warren 1994, 20-35.

11. This account relies upon information, presumably derived from sources in Thai, from the website maintained by Thai Students On-Line 2000.

12. The DCE spelling is an error for Cambodge.

13. Roman-script transcription systems for various Asian languages are sometimes approximate, there being no equivalent English sounds, and spellings and pronunciation even in the original are at times variable and unstable. (To give but a single example of the vagaries of the transcription system currently in use for Thai: the name of the present king, rendered in roman script as Bhumiphol is pronounced Bumipon.) The fluidity of the linguistic situation complicated the accurate recording of place-names during nineteenth-century surveys. To complicate matters further, some localities have two interchangeably used names (e.g., Khorat and Nakorn Ratchisima), while Roman script spellings for others vary (e.g., Ayutthaya, Ayuthia, Ayudhya).

14. Conrad's copy of this chart is preserved in The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. It bears the following attestation: “‘This Chart formerly belonged to Joseph Conrad and was used by him when at sea’ —Jessie Conrad.”

I am grateful to the following for various kinds of assistance: Dr. Andrea White and the Tokyo/Kyoto Conrad Group for stimulating the enquiries pursued here; Diethard Ande, Publisher, White Lotus Press, Bangkok, for providing access to research materials; Theodore W. Mayer for information on Buddhist architecture; Isabel Kelly and Tony Lloyd for facilitating my visit to Phra Samutchedi; Ananta Mainalia for technical help; Yasuko Shidara, Toyo Bunko Library, Tokyo, and Chatwut Wangwon, Maejo University, Chiang Mai, for archival assistance; and Hans van Marle, Ronald F. Movrich, and Owen Knowles for useful suggestions.

Works Cited

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———. China Sea. Gulf of Siam: Sheet II: Koh-Ta-Kut to Cape Liant, Surveyed by Mr. John Richards, Master, R.N. H.M.S. Saracen 1856 & 57. London: Hydrographic Office of the Admiralty, n.d.

Antonio, J. The 1904 Travellers' Guide to Bangkok and Siam. Reprint, Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 1997.

Bangkok Times. The 1894 Directory for Bangkok and Siam. Reprint, Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 1996.

Beauvoir, Le comte de. Java, Siam, Canton: Voyage autour du Monde. Paris: Plon, 1870.

Berthoud, Jacques. “Explanatory Notes.” The Shadow-Line. Edited by Jacques Berthoud. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. 146-56.

Buls, Charles. Siamese Sketches. Translation of Croquis siamois (1901) by Walter E. J. Tips. Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 1994.

Caddy, Florence. To Siam and Malaya in the Duke of Sutherland's Yacht “Sans Peur.” London: Hurst & Blackett, 1889.

Döhring, Karl. Buddhist Temples of Thailand: An Architectonic Introduction. Translation of Buddhistische Tempelanlagen in Siam (1916) by Walter E. J. Tips. Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 2000.

Fournereau, Lucien. Bangkok in 1892. Translated by Walter E. J. Tips. Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 1998. Originally published in: Le Tour du Monde 68 (July 1894): 1-64.

Leonowens, Anna Harriette. The English Governess at the Siamese Court; Being Recollections of Six Years in the Royal Palace at Bangkok. London: Trübner, 1870.

Lubbock, Basil. The Log of the “Cutty Sark.” Glasgow: Brown, 1924.

Montgomery, Jock and William Warren. Menam Chao Phraya: River of Life and Legend. Bangkok: Post Books, 1994.

Sherry, Norman. Conrad's Eastern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966.

Shidara, Yasuko. “Conrad and Bangkok: Another Excursion to his ‘Eastern World’.” In Journeys, Myths and the Age of Travel: Joseph Conrad's Era, edited by Karin Hansson, 76-96. Ronneby: University of Karlskrona, 1998.

Smyth, H. Warrington. Five Years in Siam: From 1891 to 1896. 2 vols. London: Murray, 1898.

Thai Students On-Line from Sriwittayapaknam School. “History of Samut Prakarn” [online].

———. “Phra Samut Chedi” [online].

———. “Temples in Samut Prakarn Province” [online].

Tips, Walter E. J. Siam's Struggle for Survival: The Gunboat Incident at Paknam and the Franco-Siamese Treaty of 1893. Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 1996.