Captain Froud

Captain Froud is a man of tireless activity and devotion, organizing lectures and lobbying for the merchant service, granting private interviews whose principal motive was to render service. His crooked finger and glance above his spectacles linger in memory as he offers the narrator a second officer's berth on a French-chartered steamer. He matters because this small kindness becomes the hinge between the narrator's shore-bound literary idleness and the voyage that will carry him back toward Almayer's world.