Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard

Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard Summary

Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard by Joseph Conrad, published in 1904, is a profound narrative set in the fictional South American republic of Costaguana. The novel delves into themes of political upheaval, imperialism, and the moral complexities of wealth and power, centered around the coveted San Tomé silver mine and its impact on various characters, including the eponymous Nostromo, an Italian expatriate esteemed for his reliability and valor.

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Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard Excerpt

Short Summary: In the turbulent republic of Costaguana, the discovery of a rich silver mine brings fortune and conflict. The trusted Nostromo is tasked with safeguarding the mine's wealth amidst political unrest, leading to a gripping tale of ambition, betrayal, and the human condition.

Excerpt:

In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco—the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity—had never been commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo. The clumsy deep-sea galleons of the conquerors that, needing a brisk gale to move at all, would lie becalmed, where your modern ship built on clipper lines forges ahead by the mere flapping of her sails, had been barred out of Sulaco by the prevailing calms of its vast gulf. Some harbours of the earth are made difficult of access by the treachery of sunken rocks and the tempests of their shores. Sulaco had found an inviolable sanctuary from the temptations of a trading world in the solemn hush of the deep Golfo Placido as if within an enormous semi-circular and unroofed temple open to the ocean, with its walls of lofty mountains hung with the mourning draperies of cloud.

On one side of this broad curve in the straight seaboard of the Republic of Costaguana, the last spur of the coast range forms an insignificant cape whose name is Punta Mala. From the middle of the gulf the point of the land itself is not visible at all; but the shoulder of a steep hill at the back can be made out faintly like a shadow on the sky.

On the other side, what seems to be an isolated patch of blue mist floats lightly on the glare of the horizon. This is the peninsula of Azuera, a wild chaos of sharp rocks and stony levels cut about by vertical ravines. It lies far out to sea like a rough head of stone stretched from a green-clad coast at the end of a slender neck of sand covered with thickets of thorny scrub. Utterly waterless, for the rainfall runs off at once on all sides into the sea, it has not soil enough—it is said—to grow a single blade of grass, as if it were blighted by a curse. The poor, associating by an obscure instinct of consolation the ideas of evil and wealth, will tell you that it is deadly because of its forbidden treasures. The common folk of the neighbourhood, peons of the estancias, vaqueros of the seaboard plains, tame Indians coming miles to market with a bundle of sugar-cane or a basket of maize worth about threepence, are well aware that heaps of shining gold lie in the gloom of the deep precipices cleaving the stony levels of Azuera. Tradition has it that many adventurers of olden time had perished in the search. The story goes also that within men's memory two wandering sailors—Americanos, perhaps, but gringos of some sort for certain—talked over a gambling, good-for-nothing mozo, and the three stole a donkey to carry for them a bundle of dry sticks, a water-skin, and provisions enough to last a few days. Thus accompanied, and with revolvers at their belts, they had started to chop their way with machetes through the thorny scrub on the neck of the peninsula.

On the second evening an upright spiral of smoke (it could only have been from their camp-fire) was seen for the first time within memory of man standing up faintly upon the sky above a razor-backed ridge on the stony head. The crew of a coasting schooner, lying becalmed three miles off the shore, stared at it with amazement till dark. A negro fisherman, living in a lonely hut in a little bay near by, had seen the start and was on the lookout for some sign. He called to his wife just as the sun was about to set. They had watched the strange portent with envy, incredulity, and awe.

The impious adventurers gave no other sign. The sailors, the Indian, and the stolen burro were never seen again. As to the mozo, a Sulaco man—his wife paid for some masses, and the poor forsaken woman, with her red shawl falling about her face, kneeling at the rail of the sanctuary, heard the candlestick's sizzle of the holy water sprinkled over her bowed head, mingled with the tinkling of the little bell swung vigorously by the acolyte. She rose from her knees and walked out of the church. In the hot sunshine of the plaza, the bright colours of her shawl, her reboso, the artificial flowers stuck in her thick black hair made her look like a gay, barbaric idol of a devastated shrine. She glided across, casting haughty looks on each side, her arms swaying slightly, and her black eyes staring rigidly from under the straight fringe of her hair. She entered her house. A few months later, early one morning, she placed on her head a small brown jar of milk, and went out to sell it at the north gate of the town. It was her start in life again; and she throve. She now owns three donkeys. The common folk accept this instance of a woman's natural aptitude for doing well after being left a widow as a kind of proof of male inferiority. As to the whereabouts of the treasure, it is supposed to be guarded by mysterious sentinels. Those who have tried to approach it have been driven back, some by fierce yells echoing in the gorges, others by a spectral figure brandishing a rusty cutlass, and there is a circumstantial account of a wandering jaguar-like beast, seen at night as far inland as Rincon, lapping water out of a tank with a horrible relish."

This passage from *Nostromo* establishes the lore of Azuera and sets the stage for the larger narrative about power, greed, and human ambition in Conrad's timeless classic.