Joseph Conrad was a Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. The Arrow of Gold is a story of a young sailor, the unnamed protagonist, who joins the champions of Don Carlos de Bourbon, pretender to the throne of Spain during the Carlist war of the early 1870s. The Car-lists use the eager youths intense attraction to the sea to persuade him to run perilous enterprises for their cause, ventures he later learns have been financed by the beautiful mistress and heiress of a rich mans fortune.