Heart of Darkness and the Congo Diary

by Joseph Conrad

  6. an idol: Conrad devises for Marlow a partly ironic variation of one of the traditional poses of the Buddha, the ‘Enlightened One’ and founder of Buddhism: depicted sitting on a lotus, in a cross-legged position of meditation. The most sacred symbol in Buddhism, the lotus flower, variously signifies emergence into light from darkness, paradisiacal beauty, purity and spiritual grace.

  7. And at last…over a crowd of men: This description of the sun’s cooling and demise echoes the late-Victorian fascination with the spectacle of solar death and the wider prospect of fin du globe apocalypse. In the mid-nineteenth century, Lord Kelvin ‘defined the thermodynamic principle of the dissipation of “available” energy; and the popularisation of this principle had disseminated the idea that the sun, like a Victorian coal-fire in the sky, was steadily burning itself out’ (Watts 1977, p. 14).

  8. Sir Francis Drake: The famous admiral (1540?–96) is cited here as the first Englishman to circumnavigate the world in the Pelican (later renamed the Golden Hind) and as founder of the British naval tradition. Departing from Plymouth in 1577, he returned in 1580, and in the following year was knighted by Elizabeth I on the deck of his ship at Deptford.

  9. Sir John Franklin: The British naval explorer John Franklin (1786–1847; knighted 1825) took part in expeditions to Australia, the Arctic and northern Canada. In 1845, he left Green-hithe on an ill-fated voyage to look for the North-west Passage, he and his men all perishing in the Arctic wastes. The expedition had virtually found the Passage, but its ships–the Erebus and Terror–trapped in ice, were only discovered in 1859. In 1854, allegations that the last survivors had resorted to cannibalism created a public controversy, prompted Sir Leopold McClintock’s return to the scene of the disaster and inspired his Voyage of the ‘Fox’ in the Arctic Seas (1859), a volume Conrad read as a boy (see note 23).

  10. Deptford…Erith: Historical ports on the River Thames in London’s eastern suburbs. The docks at Deptford were established by King Henry VIII, while Greenwich was also the site of a royal palace.

  11. men on ’Change: Merchants, bankers and investors who transacted their business at such institutions as the Royal Exchange and the Stock Exchange.

  12. the dark ‘interlopers’…East India fleets: ‘Interlopers’ were traders who, engaged in smuggling, habitually trespassed on the monopoly rights and royal charters held by large trading companies such as the East India Company; the commissioned ‘generals’ of the East India Company were the commanders of its fleet.

  13. The Chapman lighthouse: Built in 1849 on a mudflat off Canvey Island in the River Thames, west of Southend.

  14. dark places of the earth: Cf. ‘Have respect unto the covenant: for the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty’ (Psalm 74:20). This biblical allusion has a long history in nineteenth-century abolitionist discourse in England and the United States and in religio-colonialist writing in general, as, for example, in the Reverend A. W. Pitzer’s plea to his fellow Americans: ‘The supreme duty of this nation is to realize her sublime providential mission, and bear the blessed light of the Gospel to all the dark places of the earth, to the habitations of men now filled with cruelty’ (Missionary Review, November 1890, pp. 825–6). On the connection between late-Victorian England and Africa as ‘dark places’, see William Booth’s provocative question, ‘As there is a darkest Africa is there not also a darkest England?’ (In Darkest England and the Way Out, London: Salvation Army, 1890, p. 11).

  15. when the Romans first came here: Comparisons between the Roman imperium and the British Empire were commonplace in late-Victorian debates about imperial policy. Conrad’s close friend R. B. Cunninghame Graham, who repeatedly used such comparisons for ironic effect, denounced British imperialism in ‘Bloody Niggers’, scathingly: ‘Material and bourgeois Rome, wolf-suckled…filling the office in the old world that now is occupied so worthily by God’s own Englishmen’ (The Social-Democrat: A Monthly Socialist Review 1 (1897), p. 107).

  16. the Gauls: Inhabitants of ancient Gaul, a region of Europe corresponding to modern France, Belgium, the southern Netherlands, south-west Germany and northern Italy. Julius Caesar’s forces completed the conquest of this region during the period 58–51 BC.

  17. what we read: Julius Caesar’s De bello gallico claims that 628 ships were built in one winter by Romans preparing to invade Britain (Watts 2002, p. 203).

  18. Imagine…river: Conrad’s vision does not quite tally with historical facts, since ‘the first Roman invaders, from Julius Caesar in 55 BC to Aulus Plautius in AD 43, did not enter what is now England through the Thames estuary, but landed on the shore of Kent’ (Zdzisław Najder, ed., The Mirror of the Sea and A Personal Record (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 145).

  19. Falernian wine: A famous ancient wine from the Falernus Ager district, inland from present-day Naples, mentioned reverentially by nearly every poet from Catullus to Propertius.

  20. Ravenna: A city in north-east Italy, in AD 401 established as the capital of the Western Roman Empire; its port, Classis, was the largest Roman naval base on the Adriatic.

  21. prefect: A senior Roman magistrate or military commander.

  22. green…white flames: The ‘flames’ are the reflections of the ship’s three differently coloured lights: a green light on the starboard (or right-hand side), a red one on the port (left) side and a white one on or in front of the foremast.

  23. a passion for maps: In the account of his boyhood reading in ‘Geography and Some Explorers’, Conrad records how his attraction for Sir Leopold McClintock’s Voyage of the ‘Fox’ in the Arctic Seas (1859) produced in him ‘the taste for poring over maps’ and a fascination with the ‘exciting spaces of white paper’ on maps of Africa (Last Essays, p. 17). Elsewhere, he observes: ‘It was in 1868, when nine years old or thereabouts, that while looking at a map of Africa of the time and putting my finger on the blank space then representing the unsolved mystery of that continent, I said to myself with absolute assurance and an amazing audacity which are no longer in my character now: “When I grow up I shall go there’” (A Personal Record, p. 13). Boyhood fascination with the map of Africa is a common motif in travellers’ accounts of the period.

  24. a Company: One of several interlinked companies founded by Albert Thys (see note 30), the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo (the Belgian Limited Company for Trade in the Upper Congo) was established in late 1888 to exploit the Congo’s natural resources.

  25. Fresleven: Johannes Freiesleben (1861?–90), a Danish ship captain in command of the Floride, was killed by tribesmen on 29 January 1890 at Tchumbiri. His remains were discovered almost two months later by a punitive expedition led by a Captain Duhst who found ‘grass growing through the bones of the skeleton which lay where it had fallen’ (Otto Lütken, ‘Joseph Conrad in the Congo’, London Mercury, 22 May 1930, p. 43). When Conrad’s African posting was confirmed in late April 1890, he understood that he would be taking the deceased Freiesleben’s place (Sherry, pp. 15–22, 375).

  26. show…employers: In November 1889 and February 1890, Conrad was interviewed at the Société Anonyme du Haut-Congo’s headquarters in Brussels with a view to a captaincy in one of the company’s ships on the River Congo. He received confirmation of his appointment in April 1890 and left for Africa in May.

  27. city…whited sepulchre: This description of (unnamed) Brussels echoes: ‘Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness’, Matthew 23:27. A cancelled typescript passage elaborates on Brussels: ‘Its quiet streets empty decorum of its boulevards, all those big houses so intensely respectable to look at and so extremely tight closed suggest the reserve of discreet turpitudes.’

  28. Two women…black wool: Resembling the Fates of Greek legend, Clotho and Lachesis, who, respectively, spin and measure out the thread of each life before Atropos cuts it. In Virgil’s Aen
eid (Book VI), the wise Cumaean Sibyl guards the door to the Underworld into which Aeneas will venture.

  29. a large shining map…all the colours of a rainbow: An allusion to the colour-coding of territories on nineteenth-century world maps: British (red), French (blue), Portuguese (orange), Italian (green), German (purple) and Belgian (yellow). Marlow’s journey into the ‘yellow’ takes him to the Congo Free State, officially created in 1885. The Berlin Conference of 1884–5 brought together the European powers along with the United States to consider rival claims to some 2,400,000 square miles of African territory, including a plan to internationalize the Congo region under the African Association of Leopold II, King of the Belgians. The Conference recognized the Congo Free State as Leopold’s personal property and confirmed him as its sovereign in return for guarantees of neutrality, free trade and opposition to slavery. Under the pretence of bringing Christian philanthropy and progress, Leopold’s rule inaugurated ‘the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration’ (Conrad, Last Essays, p. 17). In 1908, the Belgian state annexed the Congo region with the express purpose of righting the wrongs perpetrated by a regime that had brought Leopold an estimated fortune of $20 million.

  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 railway: 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:

  The mitako, or brass rod, is the currency amongst the natives at Leopoldville and most of the regions of the Upper Congo. It is in general imported to the Congo by the State in large rolls or coils of 60 lbs. in weight. After its arrival at Leopoldville it is cut up into the regulation lengths (about 2 feet)…The value of each of these pieces…is reckoned at 1½d.

  (With Stanley’s Rear Column (London: Chapman & Hall, 1890), pp. 103–4)

  48. a truckl
e-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.