Éric Tabarly, "the idol of swells"

To hell with anachronisms, Joseph Conrad must have had Eric Tabarly in mind when he painted the portrait of the commander of Nan-Shan in Typhon . His words seem made for the French sailor. Captain MacWhirr was a man of few sentences, he writes, for whom "the facts speak for themselves with unsurpassed precision . " Tabarly knew the price of words when they relate to an essential act. And he preferred not to waste them.

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To put it simply, the sailor had his hands. They “told everything their master kept silent,” writes Daniel Charles * in his biography. To shake hands with Eric, it was to understand how much sailing repays in pain the overtaking of oneself. " There were those fingers bent by the driver's disease, testifying to thousands of hours at the helm, those hilly palms of calluses, notched with crevices. Suffering made flesh. Tabarly seemed to be carved out of the granite from which houses are made and which often gives its color to the sky, on the side of

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