Heart of Darkness and the Congo Diary (22 page)

30.
The great man himself
: This figure was probably prompted by Conrad's memories of his interviews in Brussels with General Staff Major Albert Thys (1849–1915), aide-de-camp to Leopold II and managing director of the Société Anonyme du Haut-Congo. The ‘great man' also spent several months in the Congo between 1887 and 1893 overseeing the development of the railway from Matadi to Kinchasa.

31.
Ave!…Morituri te salutant
: ‘Hail [Caesar]!…Those who are about to die salute you', a traditional salutation to the Roman emperor by gladiators entering the arena.

32.
quoth…disciples
: A facetious attempt at banter rather than an authentic quotation.

33.
measure the crania
: An extension of the nineteenth-century interest in phrenology, the popular, if also controversial, pseudo-science of craniology involved measuring the shape and size of the human skull as indicators of brain capacity, in order to classify individuals according to racial type, intelligence and capacity for moral behaviour. Through his uncle, in 1881 Conrad received a request from Dr Izydor Kopernicki, a leading Polish anthropologist, to assist his studies by collecting native peoples' skulls during his travels, ‘writing on each one whose skull it is and the place of origin', and sending them to the Museum of Craniology in Cracow (
Conrad's Polish Background: Letters to and from Polish Friends
, ed. Zdzisław Najder (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 74).

34.
Famous
: A Gallicism, from
fameux
, ‘first-rate' or ‘splendid'.

35.
alienist
: The late-nineteenth-century term for a psychiatrist or mental pathologist.

36.
I was also one of the Workers, with a capital
: Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), historian and political philosopher, venerated the gospel of work and ‘Workers, with a capital [letter]'. Cf.
Past and Present
(1843): ‘But it is to you, ye Workers…that the whole world calls for a new work and nobleness. Subdue mutiny, discord, wide-spread despair, by manfulness, justice, mercy and wisdom…. It is work for a God. Sooty Hell of mutiny and savagery and despair can, by man's energy, be made a kind of Heaven' (Book 4, chapter 8). This passage was also used by H. M. Stanley in 1898 in his defence of Leopold II as God's instrument in redeeming the Congo from its condition as a ‘vast slave park' (quoted in Kimbrough, p. 79).

37.
such rot
: The populist rhetoric later attributed to Marlow's aunt most closely resembles H. M. Stanley's, who, echoing Luke 10:7, had written that in advanced nations ‘every honest labourer is worthy of his hire' and that ‘our principal aim is to open the interior [of the Congo] by weaning the tribes below and above from that savage and suspicious state which they are now in' (Stanley, vol. I, pp. xiv, 30). Leopold II's widely reported speech on ‘The Sacred Mission of Civilization' was an example of such propaganda (rpt. in Kimbrough, pp. 127–30).

38.
Gran' Bassam, Little Popo
: Grand Bassam is in the Ivory Coast and Grand Popo in Dahomey (present-day Benin). Little Popo (present-day Anecho) is in Togo, formerly Togoland. When Conrad made his voyage to Africa in May 1890 in the French steamer
Ville de Maceio
, the vessel called at these ports.

39.
It appears the French…wars
: Conrad observed: ‘If I say that the ship which bombarded the coast was French, it is quite simply because
it was
a French ship. I recall its name–the
Seignelay
. It was during the war (!) with Dahomey' (16 December 1903,
Letters
, vol. II, p. 94). The vessel mentioned by Conrad does not figure in numerous reports of the blockade in
The Times
, although the French navy then included a cruiser named
Seignelay
, built in 1874 and wrecked in 1892 (www.battleshipscruisers.co.uk). On 4 April 1890, the French began a blockade ‘with a view to prevent the importation of arms and munition of war into the Kingdom of Dahomey' (
The Times
, 12 April 1890, p. 12), which resulted in Dahomey's becoming a French protectorate.

40.
the seat of the government
: Corresponding to Boma, 50 miles (80 kilometres) upriver from the Congo estuary and then the Congo Free State's capital. Conrad stayed there for a night on arriving in Africa. In revising the typescript, Conrad deleted a manuscript passage describing Boma's hotel, tramway and government offices.

41.
Company's station
: Corresponding to the station at Matadi, about 30 miles (48 kilometres) upstream from Boma and the Lower Congo's terminal point of navigation.

42.
They were building a railwa
y: H. M. Stanley had argued that the economic success of the Congo Free State depended on building a 270-mile (432-kilometre) railway between Matadi and Kinchasa in order to bypass river cataracts. In 1887, Albert Thys (see note 30) surveyed the route for the railway, and in that year a charter for construction was granted to Thys's newly formed Compagnie du Congo pour le Commerce et l'Industrie. Further negotiations resulted in the creation of the Compagnie du Chemin de fer du Congo in July 1889, with the first rails and sleepers being shipped in the
Ville de Maceio
(see note 38). During this same year, a decree by Leopold II allowed the railway company to establish a militia to press-gang workers from the surrounding area. Due to be completed in 1894, the railway was delayed by engineering difficulties, labour shortages and the high mortality rate of its workers. It was not finished until 1898.

43.
the gloomy circle of some Inferno
: A likely allusion to the topography of hell in
The Divine Comedy
by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), whose work depicts the several circles of eternal damnation, where souls suffer punishments appropriate to their sins.

44.
Brought from all the recesses of the coast…of time contracts
: In ‘A Report upon the Congo-State and Country to the President of the Republic of the United States of America' (1890), George Washington Williams explains that the majority of African employees in the Congo were recruited from the coastal regions and placed under contract: ‘The soldiers serve three years, the workmen one year' (quoted in Kimbrough, p. 95).

45.
clear silk necktie
: Conrad's usage is probably influenced by the Polish
jasny
or French
clair
, both translated into English as ‘clear' but connoting ‘brightness' or ‘lightness' of colour as English does not. Here, the manuscript version is preferred to ‘a clear necktie' (first English edition) and ‘a clean necktie' (a ‘correction' in some later editions).

46.
Caravans
: Groups of travelling traders with their pack-animals.

47.
a stream of manufactured goods…brass wire
: Forms of currency used to pay the African workers. J. Rose Troup explains:

48.
a truckle-bed
: A low bed on wheels that can be stored under a larger bed.

49.
Mr Kurtz
: In the manuscript, Conrad's first four named allusions were to a ‘Mr Klein', then cancelled and replaced by ‘Mr Kurtz'. The original name was that of a French company agent, Georges-Antoine Klein (1863–90), who accompanied Conrad on his voyage downstream from Stanley Falls in the
Roi des Belges
in September 1890. He died on the journey and was buried at Tchumbiri.
Klein
, German for ‘small', has an obvious link with the German
kurz
(‘short').

50.
ivory-country
: The high value and low bulk of ivory made it especially attractive to European traders in the Congo. In 1886, H. M. Stanley reported: ‘It may be presumed that there are about 200,000 elephants in about 15,000 herds in the Congo basin, each carrying, let us say, on an average 50 lbs. weight of ivory in his head, which would represent, when collected and sold in Europe, £5,000,000' (Stanley, vol. II, p. 354).

51.
lamentable
: A Gallicism nearer to the French meaning of the word, ‘pitiful'.

52.
Central Station
: Corresponding to the station at Kinchasa, where, at the time of Conrad's stay, Camille Delcommune (see note 57) was the company's acting manager.

53.
two-hundred-mile tramp
: Marlow's trek to the Central Station corresponds geographically to Conrad's thirty-six-day overland journey with a caravan of thirty-one men from Matadi to Kinchasa between late June and early August 1890. Like Marlow, he was accompanied by a European companion (Prosper Harou), who fell ill and had to be carried by hammock.

54.
Deal
: An English port and a popular resort on the Kent coast.

55.
Zanzibaris
: In the late nineteenth century, European expeditions in Africa regularly used natives from this East African island as porters, mercenaries and policemen.

56.
I fancy I see it now
: This cryptic piece of information about the wrecked ship may form part of a probable ‘covert plot' that has involved The Manager of the Central Station in arranging for the wreck to occur in order to delay the relief of the Inner Station until Kurtz, his main rival for promotion, has become mortally ill. After the steamer has been wrecked, The Manager obstructs the repairs for three months by intercepting Marlow's request for rivets. See Cedric Watts,
The Deceptive Text: An Introduction to Covert Plots
(Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984), pp. 119–20.

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).