“The estuaries of rivers appeal strongly to an adventurous imagination.  This appeal is not always a charm, for there are estuaries of a particularly dispiriting ugliness: lowlands, mud-flats, or perhaps barren sandhills without beauty of form or amenity of aspect, covered with a shabby and scanty vegetation conveying the impression of poverty and uselessness.  Sometimes such an ugliness is merely a repulsive mask. […] But all the estuaries of great rivers have their fascination, the attractiveness of an open portal. […] From the offing the open estuary promises every possible fruition to adventurous hopes.  That road open to enterprise and courage invites the explorer of coasts to new efforts towards the fulfilment of great expectations. […] The estuary of the Thames is not beautiful; it has no noble features, no romantic grandeur of aspect, no smiling geniality; but it is wide open, spacious, inviting, hospitable at the first glance, with a strange air of mysteriousness which lingers about it to this very day.” Joseph Conrad (1907) The Mirror of the Sea: Memories and Impressions