The book begins happily enough: as in By Chance when Bolsover sees the lighthouse at Handsome Point, when the captain in A Smile of Fortune sees the first sign of the island named Pearl of the Ocean, “a blue, pinnacled apparition, almost transparent against the light of the sky, a mere emanation, the astral body of an island risen to greet me from afar” he feels a premonition of goodness and fortune, a “good omen” of what is to come.

But then almost immediately, “horrid thoughts of business interfered with my enjoyment.”   Our captain would like nothing more than to sail the seven seas, “just to sail about with here and there a port and bit of land to stretch one’s legs out, buy a few books and get a change of cooking for awhile.“  Nevertheless, “living in a world more or less homicidal and desperately mercantile, it was plainly my duty to make the best of its opportunities.“  We already know from this statement that our  dear lamb of a captain is going to mess with the wolves; wisely, we fear for him.

And it is the monster of business and deal making, the old practice of using desire and scarcity, of withholding what is needed and then suddenly offering it, that is the undoing of our narrator.  We see it coming, we watch on the edge of our seats as it happens, step by step, the net around his heart and soul tightening and yet he does not even realize it until he has lost everything: he has made a profit in the end (felt the “smile of fortune“) but that profit has cost him all joy in life at sea:  “Driving me out of the ship I had learned to love.”

Conrad presents the narrator brilliantly through his own thoughts and actions: we see the pride he has in his even temperament undercut by the nervousness he feels when he first lands at the Pearl and is shaken by the prompt boarding of a ship-chandler, selling his wares smoothly and slyly, and effectively.  The captain knows he is being manipulated but then fools himself into believing he is in charge; he will not be swayed or fooled by the merchants of this backwater little island. He speaks out against rudeness and injustice and prides himself (more and again) on his behavior against the provincial and cruel treatment of the ship chandler and his daughter for a scandal long in the past. He chides the fool captains who would marry and entangle themselves and he feels no sadness for a child who dies at sea: these are not the prideful thoughts of a hard or heartless man but of a young and inexperienced man.  His youth and his warped pride are used against him and the evils of profit and gain win out over youthful energy and naivete.  And in the end, our young captain has not grown wiser; sadly, he has just grown shamed, and with that shame, cynical and bitter.  He comes to the “sudden and weary conviction of the emptiness of all things under Heaven.“   A very heavy price to pay for a snatched kiss and seventeen tons of potatoes.