Goodbye, brothers! You were a good crowd. As good a crowd as ever fisted with wild cries the beating canvas of a heavy foresail; or tossing aloft, invisible in the night, gave back yell for yell to a westerly gale.

In this farewell, Conrad evokes the intense camaraderie of sailors forged in physical labor and shared danger. The speaker’s address—“brothers”—frames the crew as a chosen family, bound not by sentimentality but by collective endurance: fists striking the “beating canvas” of a foresail, voices answering a gale in the dark. The imagery celebrates a rough, elemental solidarity, where human effort meets indifferent weather and sea. At the same time, the goodbye carries Conrad’s characteristic melancholy: such brotherhood is vivid but transient, lasting only as long as the voyage, the ship, or the moment of crisis that makes men feel most alive together.