Heart of Darkness and the Congo Diary

by Joseph Conrad

  57. common trader: Marlow’s animus here echoes Conrad’s intense dislike of Camille Delcommune: ‘The manager is a common ivory dealer with base instincts who considers himself a merchant although he is only a kind of African shop-keeper’ (to Marguerite Poradowska, 26 September 1890, Letters, vol. I, p. 62).

  58. Jack ashore: ‘Jack tar’ is a colloquial term for a sailor. The reference is to boisterous behaviour like that of a sailor on shore leave.

  59. assegais: Slender iron-tipped spears, usually made of wood from the assegai tree.

  60. straw maybe: The common adage ‘to make bricks without straw’ (that is, to be set an impossible task) originates from the form of punishment decreed by Pharaoh for the Israelites: ‘Ye shall no more give the people straw to make brick, as heretofore: let them go and gather straw for themselves’, Exodus 5:7.

  61. An act of special creation: A sarcastic allusion to those who, in the vigorous nineteenth-century debate about evolution, upheld the biblical account of God as the creator of all living things, with species of an obviously later date, according to geological evidence, requiring special divine intervention.

  62. backbiting: Cf. ‘The Congo Diary’: ‘Prominent characteristic of the social life here: People speaking ill of each other’ (99).

  63. one man to steal a horse…look at a halter: A wittily sarcastic variation of the old adage ‘One man may steal a horse, while another may not look over a hedge’–that is, one person may get away with any crime, while others are liable to punishment for trivialities.

  64. Then I noticed a small sketch…carrying a lighted torch: Astraea, Roman goddess of justice, is often depicted as blindfolded (signifying her impartiality) and Liberty as holding a lighted torch. The images in Kurtz’s painting are, however, rendered ambiguous by their links with more menacing colonial torch-bearers in the story. (A cancelled manuscript passage had also envisioned Kurtz as a ‘man possessed of moral ideals holding a torch in the heart of darkness’.)

  65. muffs: Bunglers, incompetents (slang).

  66. Mephistopheles: The demonic tempter of Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (probably first performed in 1588) and of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (1808 and 1832).

  67. Huntley & Palmers biscuit-tin: This famous biscuit-making firm at Reading advertised itself as being at the vanguard of imperial expansion. Their biscuits accompanied Captain Scott to the Antarctic and H. M. Stanley to Africa. Pointing out that some of their tins proclaimed that they were sold ‘By Appointment to the King of the Belgians’, Valentine Cunningham notes that the Reading Municipal Museum ‘holds a photograph taken by a Reverend R. D. Darby of a Conrad-style Belgian trading steamer on the Upper Congo river. A large Huntley & Palmers tin is clearly visible on the roof of the vessel. The photograph is captioned “Huntley & Palmers Biscuits foremost again’” (In the Reading Gaol: Post-modernity, Texts, and History, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994, p. 253).

  68. ichthyosaurus: An extinct marine reptile, resembling a dolphin, with streamlined body, toothed jaw, four flippers and a tail fin.

  69. Eldorado Exploring Expedition: The Katanga Expedition led by Alexandre Delcommune, older brother of Camille, arrived at Kinchasa in three instalments on 20 and 23 September and 5 October 1890. See Conrad’s essay ‘Geography and Some Explorers’, for comments on ‘pertinaceous searchers for El Dorado’–that is, for the imaginary country (Spanish el dorado = ‘the gilded [place]’) supposed to abound in gold sought by the Spaniards in South America (Last Essays, p. 5).

  70. confab: A shortened, colloquial form of ‘confabulation’, a chat or conversation.

  PART II

  1. Make rain and fine weather: This cryptic allusion seems to link Kurtz’s extraordinary influence to the legendary power of ancient kings who were held by their followers to be man-gods, with supernatural powers to make rain and control the sun. Later, the Jupiter-like Kurtz is described by The Harlequin as having approached neighbouring African tribes ‘with thunder and lightning…and they had never seen anything like it—and very terrible’ (70). James Frazer’s chapter on ‘The Magical Control of the Weather’ in The Golden Bough (1890–1915) gives numerous examples of such beliefs among African tribes.

  2. ‘get him hanged!…’: The intended victim of The Manager’s threat seems to be The Harlequin, since Marlow later tells him: ‘The manager thinks you ought to be hanged’ (78). The reason for The Manager’s animus becomes clear when it is revealed that The Harlequin is connected with a rival Dutch trading company and has been competing for ivory. The issue of punitive hanging in the Congo was a repeated item in the British press of the late 1890s, when relations between the British government and the Congo Free State were strained by the summary hanging in 1895 of Charles Henry Stokes, an Irish missionary turned trader, on the charge that he had supplied ammunition to the Arabs. The Congo government admitted that the execution was illegal and paid compensation, but the Belgian officer responsible, Captain Hubert Lothaire, was not punished.

  3. ‘I did my possible’: This Gallicism from J’ai fait mon possible and the neighbouring ‘Conceive you—that ass!’ indicate that the conversation takes place in French.

  4. I watched for sunken stones: At the corresponding point of his own journey from Kinchasa to Stanley Falls in the Roi des Belges, Conrad began to make navigational notes and rough sketch-maps in a notebook labelled his ‘Up-river book’ in preparation for a time when he might take command of a company boat.

  5. twenty cannibals: Probably members of the Bangala tribe who worked in Upper Congo steamers (Sherry, pp. 59–60).

  6. I had the manager…pilgrims: On his journey upriver from Kinchasa to Stanley Falls in the Roi des Belges, Conrad was accompanied by six Europeans: Camille Delcommune, Captain Ludwig Rasmus Koch, three agents–Alphonse Keyaerts, E. F. L. Rollin and Van der Heyden–and a mechanic named Gossens (Sherry, p. 56). Conrad recalls Keyaerts by name in ‘An Outpost of Progress’ as Kayerts.

  7. The mind…anything: Cf. the conclusion of Guy de Maupassant’s short story ‘La Chevelure’ (1884): ‘L’esprit de l’homme est capable de tout’ (‘The mind of man is capable of everything’).

  8. Principles won’t do…pretty rags: A similar sentiment is expressed in Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1834), with civilized opinions and beliefs being likened to disposable clothing. The narrator declares that ‘the solemnities and paraphernalia of civilised Life, which we make so much of, [are] nothing but so many Cloth-rags’ (Book 1, chapter 10).

  9. white-lead: A type of putty made by mixing lead carbonate and boiled linseed oil.

  10. terrible vengeance: The African fireman’s response here has been aptly compared with Azuma-zi’s awed devotion to the ‘Dynamo Deity’ in H. G. Wells’s tale ‘The Lord of the Dynamos’ (1894) (Watts 1995, p. 110).

  11. Towson: Possibly derived from Nicholas Tinmouth’s An Inquiry Relative to Various Important Points of Seamanship, Considered as a Branch of Practical Science (1845), which has several similarities to the Inquiry mentioned by Marlow, including a first chapter concerned with the relative strengths of various ‘chains and tackle’. Tinmouth was not, however, a ‘Master in his Majesty’s Navy’ but Master-Attendant at Her Majesty’s Dockyard at Woolwich.

  12. Winchesters: Breech-loading repeater rifles named after their American manufacturer, Oliver F. Winchester (1810–80).

  13. like half-cooked cold dough: That is, cassava steeped and boiled to form a stiff dough, and known as kwanga. H. M. Stanley explains that ‘the cassava or manioc, sweet and bitter kinds, furnishes the main farinaceous food of the people along the main river’ (Stanley, vol. II, p. 357).

  14. Martini-Henry: The British Army service rifle between 1871 and 1891, the Martini-Henry was a breech-action rifle, the breech-mechanism designed by Friedrich von Martini and the barrel by Alexander Henry.

  15. squirts: Repeating rifles (slang).

  16. I threw…whizz: This awkwardly constructed sentence appears to call for a verb such as ‘t
o avoid’ (‘to avoid the glinting whizz’), but there is no textual authority for such emendation.

  17. lounged: According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the verb ‘lounge’ as a variant spelling of ‘lunge’ (to make a thrust with a foil or rapier) was apparently current in Britain up to the 1890s.

  18. steam-whistle: Glave describes the Europeans’ practice of using a ship’s whistle to alarm African tribesmen: ‘We had a harmony whistle on board which alarmed them a great deal…The poor natives of Nkolé, superstitious, as all savages are, thought it was some angry spirit who was kept by me to terrify people…The natives on the beach beat a hasty retreat at this unusual sound, and those in canoes lost all presence of mind’ (p. 236).

  19. They say the hair…growing: That is, on a corpse. Marlow has just referred to the living Kurtz’s ‘disinterred body’.

  20. half-English…half-French: Conrad later noted: ‘I took great care to give Kurtz a cosmopolitan origin’ (16 December 1903, Letters, vol. II, p. 94).

  21. International Society…Savage Customs: During the period 1870 to 1900, Leopold II devised a number of similarly high-sounding organizations to maintain the fiction that Belgium’s interest in the Congo was philanthropic or scientific. The ‘International African Association’ (1876) gave way to the ‘Committee for the Study of the Upper Congo’ (1878) and then to the ‘International Association of the Congo’ (1883), the latter flatteringly described by a Belgian correspondent in The Times as a sort of ‘Society of the Red Cross…formed with the noble aim of rendering lasting and disinterested services to the cause of progress’ (28 March 1883, p. 3). In 1896, there followed the ‘Commission for the Protection of the Natives’.

  22. ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’: Cf. ‘An Outpost of Progress’, Tales of Unrest, p. 108: ‘Carlier…talked about the necessity of exterminating all the niggers before the country could be made habitable.’ The terms used by Carlier and Kurtz echo the mid-nineteenth-century evolutionary debate about the possible extinction or ‘extermination’ of supposedly lesser equipped, non-European peoples summarized by Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man (1871), chapter 6: ‘At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.’ Earlier, W. Winwood Reade had speculated on the ‘amiable task’ of bringing European rule to Africa as one in which ‘they [Africans] may possibly become exterminated’: ‘We must learn to look at this result with composure. It illustrates the beneficent law of Nature, that the weak must be devoured by the strong’ (Savage Africa, London: Smith, Elder, 1863, p. 587).

  23. ‘The station!’: Corresponding to the Inner Station at Stanley Falls.

  24. a harlequin: Originally the leader of a nocturnal band of demon horsemen in French folk literature, this figure evolved into Arlecchino, the clown-like servant who played a leading role in the harlequinade of the Italian commedia dell’arte. In later English pantomimes he is a mute, acrobatic buffoon wearing a mask and multi-coloured costume, who is supposed to be invisible to the clown and other comic characters.

  25. brown holland: An unbleached form of linen fabric.

  26. Tambov: A city in south central Russia, capital of a province of the same name.

  27. Dutch trading-house: According to H. M. Stanley (vol. I, pp. 72–3), the principal ‘Dutch House’ in the Congo of the 1880s was the Nieuwe Afrikaansche Handels Vennootschap (Dutch African Trading Company), based at Banana Point at the mouth of the River Congo and managed by A. de Bloeme.

  28. Van Shuyten: ‘Schuyten’ is the more likely spelling for a Dutch name. A Belgian trading agent named Schouten worked in the Congo in the early 1890s (Sherry, p. 117).

  PART III

  1. those heads on the stakes: In ‘Cruelty in the Congo Free State’, E. J. Glave, who had worked in the Congo, described the aftermath of a punitive military expedition against some African rebels in Stanley Falls in 1895: ‘Many women and children were taken, and twenty-one heads were brought to the falls, and have been used by Captain Rom as a decoration round a flower-bed in front of his house’ (Century Illustrated Magazine 54 (1897), p. 706). Edited details of Rom’s ‘decoration’ were printed in Britain in the Saturday Review (17 December 1898), when Conrad was about to begin his African story. Léon Rom was a Belgian soldier and administrator in the Congo at the same time as Conrad. He went on to become district commissioner at Matadi and station manager at Stanley Falls.

  2. the thunderbolts of that pitiful Jupiter: Chief Roman god and associated with thunderbolts and lightning as emblems of divine power, Jupiter also figured in the nickname Jupiter tonans given to the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, (W. Wallace, Life of Arthur Schopenhauer, London and Newcastle: Walter Scott Publishing, 1890, p. 89). For a succinct account of Schopenhauer’s direct and indirect influence on Heart of Darkness, see Owen Knowles and Gene M. Moore, Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 326–7.

  3. leggins: A still-current variant spelling of ‘leggings’ (a protective cover for the lower leg).

  4. buttoned up…ulster: A man’s heavy, double-breasted overcoat with a belt at the back (so called because it was first produced in Northern Ireland).

  5. He desired to have kings…railway-stations: Echoing the climax of H. M. Stanley’s regal procession from Africa to Europe in January 1878, when he was formally received and lionized by envoys of Leopold II at Marseilles railway station. On the occasion of an anti-slavery conference in Brussels in late 1889, Stanley was accommodated ‘in the gilt and scarlet rooms at the Royal Palace normally reserved for visiting royalty’ (Hochschild, p. 94).

  6. secular: A Gallicism from séculaire; literally ‘centuries old’ but, more generally, ‘of great age’.

  7. ‘Live rightly, die, die…’: The manuscript gives the maxim in its complete form, ‘Live rightly, die nobly’.

  8. ‘The horror! The horror!’: A possible allusion to Psalm 55:4–5: ‘My heart is sore pained within me: and the terrors of death are fallen upon me. Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me, and horror hath overwhelmed me’ (Watts 2002, p. 215). Kurtz’s formulation is probably influenced by French, where the definite article would be required.

  9. No, they did not bury me: Marlow’s disillusioned response to Brussels in this paragraph, reminiscent of the returning Gulliver’s distaste for humankind, also bears a close resemblance to the narrators’ final reflections on London in H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and The War of the Worlds (1898).

  10. some other feeling: Conrad wrote that his African story offered a ‘mere shadow of love interest just in the last pages’ (2 January 1899, Letters, vol. II, pp. 145–6).

  11. sarcophagus: A stone coffin, usually adorned with sculpture or inscription.

  12. never, never, never!: Possibly recalling King Lear’s response to the death of Cordelia in Shakespeare’s King Lear: ‘Thou’lt come no more, / Never, never, never, never, never!’ (V.iii.309–10).

  13. familiar Shade: Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid describes the Shades of the Underworld as stretching out their arms in longing to the boatman Charon as they stand on the shores of the Styx, river of darkness; they yearn for the boatman’s help in order to cross the Styx and enter Elysium, the abode of the blessed.

  14. I felt…chest: An awkwardly constructed sentence, perhaps influenced by French or Polish usage; ‘felt something like’ would be better English.

  15. The heavens…such a trifle: An echo of the Latin maxim ‘Fiat justitia, ruat caelum’ (‘Let justice be done, though the heavens fall’).

  THE CONGO DIARY

  1. Matadi: An important centre for trade about 30 miles (48 kilometres) upstream from Boma at the mouth of the Congo, where Conrad had arrived from Europe in the Ville de Maceio the previous day, 12 June.

  2. Gosse: Joseph-Louis-Herbert Gosse had recently been made manager of the Matadi Station of the Société Anonyme du Haut-Congo.

 
3. Casement: Roger Casement (1864–1916; knighted 1911) was at this time working for the Compagnie du Chemin de fer du Congo as a supervisor of the railway that was planned to connect Matadi with Kinchasa. Conrad later elaborated: ‘For some three weeks he lived in the same room in the Matadi Station…He knew the coast languages well. I went with him several times on short expeditions to hold “palavers” with neighbouring village-chiefs. The object of them was procuring porters for the Company’s caravans from Matadi to Leopoldville’ (24 May 1916, Letters, vol. V, pp. 596–7). In 1898, Casement became British Consul for the Congo Free State and in 1903 prepared a widely publicized report on atrocities committed by Belgian colonists. After a distinguished diplomatic career, his involvement with the Irish National Volunteers and collusion with Germany during the First World War led to his arrest and execution for treason in 1916.

  4. Hatton & Cookson: A Liverpool-based trading company, operating in the Lower Congo area.

  5. Simpson: James H. Simpson of the Australian shipping firm Henry Simpson & Sons. Conrad had captained one of its ships, the Otago, from January 1888 to March 1889.

  6. Gov. B.: Tadeusz Bobrowski (1824–94), Conrad’s maternal uncle and guardian.

  7. Purd.: Richard Curle identified this person as ‘Captain Purdy, an acquaintance of Conrad’ (Last Essays, p. 161).

  8. Hope: See Heart of Darkness, Part I, note 1.

  9. Cap Froud: Albert George Froud (1831–1901), the secretary of the London Shipmaster’s Society, whose Fenchurch Street office Conrad had often visited in the later 1880s. A Somerset man by birth, he retired to Bristol. Conrad recalls him in A Personal Record.

  10. Mar.: Marguerite Blanche-Marie Poradowska (née Gachet de la Fournière, 1848–1937), widow of Aleksander Poradowski, a distant relative of Conrad, was the ‘aunt’ who had used her influence in Brussels in 1890 to help him obtain his post in the Congo. Conrad wrote to her from Matadi on 18 June (Letters, vol. I, pp. 56–7), but if he wrote again on 24 June, this letter, like the others mentioned here, has not survived.