Nawab

This was the was the original name of the ship used by Lowry in an early draft of his first novel Ultramarine and the first edition of the novel. Lowry sometime in the 1950's changed the name from Nawab to Oedipus Tyrannus in penciled revisions made to his first edition. This alteration features in all the later editions beginning with the 1962 American Edition. Lowry made the change as part of his revision of Ultramarine, which was never fully realised, in order for the novel to become the first volume of the proposed The Voyage That Never Ends. The change of name would link Ultramarine to Under The Volcano.

The name may have been suggested by the S.S. Nawab owned by Asiatic Steam Navigation Company Liverpool. Built by Charles Connell & Company Scotstoun,Yard No 363; engines by Dunsmuir & Jackson Propulsion: T. 3-cyl. Launched: Wednesday, 30/12/1914 Built: 1915 Ship Type: Cargo Vessel Tonnage: 5430 grt., Length: 404.4 feet, Breadth: 52.8 feet, Draught: 25ft. Broken up at Bombay in February 1950.

Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass

Lowry quotes from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass in Chapter 3 of Ultramarine during a long internal dialogue by Dana Hilliot as he muses after his drunken drift through the red light district of Dairen; "All truths wait in all things, They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it, They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon, The insignificant is as big to me as any."


Leaves of Grass is a poetry collection by the American poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Though the first edition was published in 1855, Whitman spent his entire life writing Leaves of Grass, revising it in several editions until his death which has echoes of Lowry's own The Voyage That Never Ends.