Henry Whalley is a true sailor, earning years of experience as a ship's captain before his retirement. Faced with unexpected financial problems and a desire to help his married daughter earn her place in the world, Whalley is forced to sell his boat and buy his way back into service on a trade vessel. But Whalley is living so close to financial ruin that any small deviation from his course will put him over the edge . . .

The End of the Tether is one of the many books that author Joseph Conrad wrote about sailors and the sea. Using his own personal experiences as a merchant marine as the foundation for his writing, Conrad produced some of the most realistic sea tales of the nineteenth century.