“Don Juan Bardh had superintendent of … the Anglo Costa Rican Economical Mining Company. It had been in business these three years without losing anything, which was considered doing so well that it had increased its capital …the most prominent objects in these repositories of wealth were naked workmen with pickaxes, bending and sweating under heavy sacks of stones.”
That passage is not, as some might imagine, an out-take from Nostromo, but in fact was written more than fifty years prior, by a young American, a native of New York City. “Light holiday literature” is a term of disparagement, but young Korzeniowski, so we are told, devoured the stuff. While tracing his footsteps through that particular jungle is a job for scholars, not amateurs, the many astonishing similarities between the Latin America of Costaguana and the Central America of John L. Stephens’ best-selling book, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, initially published as two volumes in 1841, can’t help but give thoughtful readers a bad case of the what-if’s.
What distinguishes the actual and historical Stephens from Conrad’s fictions is that he was an American, a product of the antebellum nineteenth century, to whom empire was not a burden fraught with physical and moral dangers but an aspirational goal which, if reached, would reflect dazzlingly on American hustle and resourcefulness.