Section 1

THE MALAY EDITION OF THE WORKS OF JOSEPH CONRAD
NOSTROMO
A TALE OF THE SEABOARD
| “NOSTROMO
) BY i JOSEPH CONRAD
With Decorations by WILLIAM KEMP STARRETT
Rr eesy;i2 hyeee
MALAY EDITION
DOUBLEDAY, DORAN & COMPANY, INC.~ GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK
PRINTED IN ees STATES AT THE — COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, bass CITY, N. ¥.
, 0 é JOHN GALSWORTHY
Me
orphan erie
AUTHOR’S NOTE
“Nostromo” is the most anxiously meditated of the longer novels which belong to the period following upon the publication of the “Typhoon” volume of short stories. , ~ I don’t mean to say that I became then conscious of any impending change in my mentality and in my atti- tude towards the tasks of my writing life. And perhaps there was never any change, except in that mysterious, extraneous thing which has nothing to do with the theories of art; a subtle change in the nature of the inspiration; a phenomenon for which I can not in any way be held responsible. What, however, did cause me some concern was that after finishing the last story of the “Typhoon” volume. it seemed somehow that there was nothing more in the world to write about.
This so strangely negative but disturbing mood lasted some little time; and then, as with many of my longer stories, the first hint for “Nostromo” came to me in the shape of a vagrant anecdote completely des- titute of valuable details.
As a matter of fact in 1875 or "6, when very young, in the West Indies or rather in the Gulf of Mexico, for my contacts with land were short, few, and fleeting, I heard the story of some man who was supposed to have stolen single-handed a whole lighter-full of silver, somewhere
vu
viii AUTHOR’S NOTE on the Tierra Firme seaboard during the troubles of a revolution.
On the face of it this was something of a feat. But I heard no details, and having no particular interest in crime qua crime I was not likely to keep that one in my my mind. And I forgot it till twenty-six or seven years afterwards I came upon the very thing in a shabby volume picked up outside a second-hand book-shop. It was the life story of an American seaman written by himself with the assistance of a journalist. In the course of his wanderings that American sailor worked for some months on board a schooner, the master and owner of which was the thief of whom I had heard in my very young days. I have no doubt of that because there could hardly have been two exploits of that pecu- har kind in the same part of the world and both con- nected with a South American revolution.
The fellow had actually managed to steal a lighter with silver, and this, it seems, only because he was im- plicitly trusted by his employers, who must have been singularly poor judges of character. In the sailor’s story he is represented as an unmitigated rascal, a small cheat, stupidly ferocious, morose, of mean appearance, and altogether unworthy of the greatness this oppor- tunity had thrust upon him. What was interesting was that he would boast of it openly.
He used to say: “People think I make a lot of money in this schooner of mine. But that is nothing. I don’t care for that. Now and then I go away quietly and lift a bar of silver. I must get rich slowly—you understand.”
There was also another curious point about the man. Once in the course of some quarrel the sailor threatened him: “What’s to prevent me reporting ener what you have told me about that silver?”
AUTHOR’S NOTE ix
The cynical ruffian was not alarmed in the least. He actually laughed. “‘ You fool, if you dare talk like that on shore about me you will get a knife stuck in your back. Every man, woman, and child in that port is my friend. And who’s to prove, the lighter wasn’t sunk? I didn’t show you where the silver is hidden. DidI? Soyouknownothing. AndsupposeI lied? Eh?”
Ultimately the sailor, disgusted with the sordid mean- ness of that impenitent thief, deserted from the schooner. The whole episode takes about three pages of his autobiography. Nothing to speak of; but as I looked them over, the curious confirmation of the few casual words heard in my early youth evoked the memories of that distant time when everything was so fresh, so surprising, so venturesome, so interesting; bits of strange coasts under the stars, shadows of hills in the sunshine, men’s passions in the dusk, gossip half-forgotten, faces grown dim. . . . Perhaps, perhaps, there still was’ in the world something to write about. Yet I did not see anything at first in the mere story. A rascal steals a large parcel of a valuable commodity—so people say. It’s either true or untrue; and in any case it has no value in itself. To invent a circumstantial account of the robbery did not appeal to me, because my talents not running that way I did not think that the game was worth the candle. It was only when it dawned upon me that the purloiner of the treasure need not neces- sarily be a confirmed rogue, that he could be even a man of character, an actor and possibly a victim in the changing scenes of a revolution, it was only then that I had the first vision of a twilight country which was to become the province of Sulaco, with its high shadowy Sierra and its misty Campo for mute witnesses of events flowing from the passions of men short-sighted in good
and evil.,
x AUTHOR’S NOTE
Such are in very truth the obscure origins of “Nos- tromo”—the book. From that moment, I suppose, it had to be. Yet even then I hesitated, as if warned by the instinct of self-preservation from venturing on a distant and toilsome journey into a land full of intrigues and revolutions. But it had to be done.
It took the best part of the years 1903-4 to do; with many intervals of renewed hesitation, lest I should lose myself in the ever-enlarging vistas opening before me as I progressed deeper in my knowledge of the country. Often, also, when I had thought myself to a standstill over the tangled-up affairs of the Republic, I would, figuratively speaking, pack my bag, rush away from Sulaco for a change of air and write a few pages of the “Mirror of the Sea.” But generally, as I’ve said be- fore, my sojourn on the Continent of Latin America, famed for its hospitality, lasted for about two. years. On my return I found (speaking somewhat in the style of Captain Gulliver) my family all well, my wife heartily glad to learn that the fuss was all over, and our small boy considerably grown during my absence. ;
My principal authority for the history of Costaguana is, of course, my venerated friend, the late Don José Avellanos, Minister to the Courts of England and Spain, etc., etc., in his impartial and eloquent “‘ History of Fifty Years of Misrule.” That work was never published— the reader will discover why—and I am in fact the only person in the world possessed of its contents. I have mastered them in not a few hours of earnest meditation, and I hope that my accuracy will be trusted. In justice to myself, and to allay the fears of prospective readers, I beg to point out that the few historical allusions are never dragged in for the sake of parading my unique erudition, but that each of them is closely related to actuality; either throwing a light on the nature of cur-
ore ites hal
a ee
‘AUTHOR’S NOTE xi
rent events or affecting directly the fortunes of the people of whom I speak.
As to their own histories I have tried to set them down, Aristocracy and People, men and women, Latin and Anglo-Saxon, bandit and politician, with as cool a hand as was possible in the heat and clash of my own conflicting emotions. And after all this is also the story of their conflicts. It is for the reader to say how far they are deserving of interest in their actions and in the secret purposes of their hearts revealed in the bitter necessities of the time. I confess that, for me, that time is the time of firm friendships and unforgotten hospitalities. And in my gratitude I must mention here Mrs. Gould, “the first lady of Sulaco,” whom we may safely leave to the secret devotion of Dr. Mony- gham, and Charles Gould, the Idealist-creator of Ma- terial Interests whom we must leave to his Mine— from which there is no escape in this world.
About Nostromo, the second of the two racially and socially contrasted men, both captured by the silver of the San Tomé Mine, I feel bound to say something more.
I did not hesitate to make that central figure an Ital- ian. First of all the thing is perfectly credible: Italians were swarming into the Occidental Province at the time, as anybody who will read further can see; and secondly, there was no one who could stand so well by the side of Giorgio Viola the Garibaldino, the Idealist of the old, humanitarian revolutions. For myself I needed there a Man of the People as free as possible from his class-conventions and all settled modes of thinking. This is not a side snarl at conventions. My reasons were not moral but artistic. Had he been an Anglo-Saxon he would have tried to get into local poli- tics. But Nostromo does not aspire to be a leader in a
xii AUTHOR’S NOTE
personal game. He does not want to raise himself above the mass. He is content to feel himself a power —within the People.
But mainly Nostromo is what he is because I re- ceived the inspiration for him in my early days from a Mediterranean sailor. Those who have read certain pages of mine will see at once what i mean when I say that Dominic, the padrone of the Tremolino, might under given circumstances have been a Nostromo. At any rate Dominic would have understood the younger man perfectly—if scornfully. He and I were engaged to- gether in a rather absurd adventure, but the absurdity does not matter. It is a real satisfaction to think that in my very young days there must, after all, have been something in me worthy to command that man’s half- bitter fidelity, his half-ironic devotion. Many of Nos- tromo’s speeches I have heard first in Dominic’s voice. His hand on the tiller and his fearless eyes roaming the horizon from within the monkish hood shadowing his face, he would utter the usual exordium of his remorse- less wisdom: “Vous autres gentilhommes!”’ in a caus- tic tone that hangs on my ear yet. Like Nostromo! “You hombres finos!”? Very much like Nostromo. But Dominic the Corsican nursed a certain pride of ancestry from which my Nostromo is free; for Nos- tromo’s lineage had to be more ancient still. He is a man with the weight of countless generations behind him and no parentage to boast of. . . . Like the People.
In his firm grip on the earth he inherits, in his im- providence and generosity, in his lavishness with his gifts, in his manly vanity, in the obscure sense of his greatness and in his faithful devotion with something despairing as well as desperate in its impulses, he is a Man of the People, their very own unenvious force.
AUTHOR’S NOTE xii
disdaining to lead but ruling from within. Years after- wards, grown older as the famous Captain Fidanza, with a stake in the country, going about his many affairs followed by respectful glances in the modernized streets of Sulaco, calling on the widow of the cargador, attend- ing the Lodge, listening in unmoved silence to anarchist speeches at the meeting, the enigmatical patron of the new revolutionary agitation, the trusted, the wealthy comrade Fidanza with the knowledge of his moral ruin locked up in his breast, he remains essentially a Man of the People. In his mingled love and scorn of life and in the bewildered conviction of having been betrayed, of dying betrayed he hardly knows by what or by whom, he is still of the People, their undoubted Great Man— with a private history of his own.
One more figure of those stirring times I would like to mention: and that is Antonia Avellanos—the “beautiful Antonia.” Whether she is a possible variation of Latin- American girlhood I wouldn’t dare to affirm. But, for me, she is. Always a little in the background by the side of her father (my venerated friend) I hope she has yet relief enough to make intelligible what I am going to say. Of all the people who had seen with me the birth of the Occidental Republic, she is the only one who has kept in my memory the aspect of continued life. Antonia the Aristocrat and Nostromo the Man of the People are the artisans of the New Era, the true creators of the New State; he by his legendary and dar- ing feat, she, like a woman, simply by the force of what she is: the only being capable of inspiring a sincere passion in the heart of a trifler.
If anything could induce me to revisit Sulaco (I should hate to see all these changes) it would be An- tonia. And the true reason for that—why not be frank about it?—the true reason is that I have modelled her
xiv AUTHOR’S NOTE
on my first love. How we, a band of tallish schoolboys, the chums of her two brothers, how we used to look up to that girl just out of the schoolroom herself, as the standard-bearer of a faith to which we all were born but which she alone knew how to hold aloft with an un- flinching hope! She had perhaps more glow and less serenity in her soul than Antonia, but she was an un- compromising Puritan of patriotism with no taint of the slightest worldliness in her thoughts. I was not the only one in love with her; but it was I who had to hear oftenest her scathing criticism of my levities—very much like poor Decoud—or stand the brunt of her aus- tere, unanswerable invective. She did not quite un- derstand—but never mind. That afternoon when I came in, a shrinking yet defiant sinner, to say the final good-bye I received a hand-squeeze that made my heart leap and saw a tear that took my breath away. She was softened at the last as though she had suddenly per- ceived (we were such children still!) that I was really going away for good, going very far away—even as far as Sulaco, lying unknown, hidden from our eyes in the darkness of the Placid Gulf. )
That’s why I long sometimes for another glimpse of the “beautiful Antonia” (or can it be the Other?) moving in the dimness of the great cathedral, saying a short prayer at the tomb of the first and last Cardinal-Archbishop of Sulaco, standing absorbed in filial devotion before the monument of Don José Avellanos, and, with a lingering, tender, faithful glance at the medallion-memorial to Martin Decoud, going out serenely into the sunshine of the Plaza with her upright carriage and her white head; a relic of the past disregarded by men awaiting im- patiently the Dawns of other New Eras, the coming of more Revolutions.
But this is the idlest of dreams; for I did understand
i - AUTHOR’S NOTE | xv
perfectly well at the time that the moment the breath left the body of the Magnificent Capataz, the Man of _ the People, freed at last from the toils of love and wealth, there was nothing more for me to do in Sulaco.
i ae GC October, 1917.
CONTENTS |
PART FIRST —
SmverortHe Mine. . . . . .
Ce PART SECOND © Bee er ABUT ei hr Gat Se hes yeh LBD
= oe , - ,
PART THIRD PEAGHTHOURE, 60 504, 0. ee cse », 807
7 ij i
“2
D;
” a =
Ve : _ bd 7 AT? atZzo ae fede, = ‘
" ee z TAME THAD © 2p 4 _ a 7
x aa. - 2°. g aM ant se ene
2 _
CVO 42 THAT
NOSTROMO
NOSTROMO
CHAPTER ONE
In THE time of Spanish rule,and for many years after- wards, the town of Sulaco—the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity—had never been commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo. The clumsy deep-sea galleons of the con- querors that, needing a brisk gale to move at all, would lie becalmed, where your modern ship built on clipper lines forges ahead by the mere flapping of her sails, had been barred out_of Sulaco by the prevailing calms of its vast gulf. Some harbours of the earth are made dif- ficult of access by the treachery of sunken rocks and the tempests of their shores. Sulaco had found an in- violable sanctuary from the temptations of a trading. world in the solemn hush of the deep Golfo Placido as if within 2n enormous semi-circular and unroofed temple open to the ocean, with its walls of lofty mountains hung with the mourning draperies of cloud.
On one side of this broad curve in the straight sea- board of the Republic of Costaguana, the last spur of the coast range forms an insignificant cape whose name is Punta Mala. From the middle of the gulf the point of the land itself is not visible at all; but the shoulder.of a steep hill at the back can be made out faintly like a shadow on the sky.