Heart of Darkness and the Congo Diary (21 page)

Topics adequately covered in a standard desk dictionary are not glossed here. The accompanying map identifies geographical places; where contextual or historical information might be useful it is added here. The Glossary deals with nautical terms. The Riverside Shakespeare (2nd edition, 1997) is used for quotations from Shakespeare's plays and biblical quotations are from the King James Bible.

Conrad drew on, and borrowed from, a large number of sources; the notes indicate the most important of these and do not attempt to catalogue all the source materials that he might have used.

All references to Conrad's works are to
Dent's Collected Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad
, 22 vols. (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1946–55).

The notes are numbered for each part; cross-references, unless otherwise indicated, are to the same part.

Abbreviations

HEART OF DARKNESS

PART I

1.
Nellie
: The name of a small yacht owned by Conrad's friend George Fountaine Weare Hope (né Hopps, 1854–1930), an ex-seaman and company director, with whom Conrad made several excursions along the Thames estuary. Hope owned the
Nellie
from 1889 to 1892 (
Lloyd's Register
, 1889–93), and, given Conrad's absences from England, these outings took place in 1891.

2.
Gravesend
: A town and port on the south bank of the Thames opposite Tilbury Docks, approximately 20 miles (32 kilometres) east of London.

3.
We four
: Here and at the opening of ‘Youth' Conrad recalls convivial excursions on the Thames in 1891 with his friends Hope (see note 1), Edward Gardner Mears (1857–1936), a meat salesman, and William Brock Keen (1861–1941), an accountant. Aside from Keen, all were ex-seamen and at different times in the 1870s had sailed in the
Duke of Sutherland
.

4.
said somewhere
: In the second paragraph of ‘Youth': ‘We all began life in the merchant service. Between the five of us there was the strong bond of the sea, and also the fellowship of the craft, which no amount of enthusiasm for yachting, cruising and so on can give, since one is only the amusement of life and the other is life itself.'

5.
bones
: A familiar term for dominoes, at the time often made of white ivory with black spots.

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
Aeneid
(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.