Lord Jim (56 page)

1.
tower of strength
: A commonplace: cf. ‘The King's name is a tower of strength', Shakespeare,
Richard III
, V.iii.12, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92), ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington', ‘O fall'n at length that tower of strength / Which stood four-square to all the winds that blow' (stanza iv).

2.
special authorisation
: Storing large quantities of explosives could allow for hostile action against Dutch rule.

3.
Haji Saman
: ‘Haji' is a title of respect and term of address for a Muslim who has completed the Hajj. The proper name is possibly borrowed from a Bornean chief of piratical tendencies whose defeat in 1846 by James Brooke is recounted in Mundy, vol. II.

4.
Levuka
: A port city on Ovalau Island, Fiji, in the South Pacific, and briefly (1874–82) its capital when the islands were annexed by Great Britain.

1.
Scourge of God
: An allusion to Attila the Hun (c.406–53), who earned this epithet for his despotism and ruthlessness.

2.
coon
: Given that the speaker is an American, a possible racist epithet for a person of colour, but Conrad's familiarity with American coarse slang is open to question and in British mid-and late nineteenth-century usage a ‘coon' was simply a sly or shrewd individual.

3.
scouted
: An obsolete form of ‘scooted'.

4.
Si
-
Lapa by name
:
Si
is a Malay term of courteous reference, not of address, indicating acquaintance with the person referred to. In some of the sources that Conrad drew on this could be construed as part of a name.

5.
a big drum
…
droning
: Cf. the following description of James Brooke's return to Sarawak in Keppel, vol. I, p. 18: ‘It had been the Rajah's intention to reach his capital without fuss; but… the whole population had been thrown into a state of the greatest excitement and not an individual would remain at home, who
could procure a conveyance down the river. The following morning presented, indeed, a lively and exciting scene; the whole Sarawak population appeared to be afloat; all the largest and finest boats had been put into requisition, and came with tomtoms beating, streamers and colours flying.'

1.
pipeclayed
: Whitened with kaolin, a clay used to make pipes.

1.
life for a life
: An echo of ‘Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth' (Matthew 5:38).

2.
from a dark source
: In the sense of being undiscovered, as was long the case, for example, of the source of the Nile.

3.
their welfare
…
mourning
: A possible echo of ‘thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried' (Ruth 1:16–17).

1.
Ramadan
: The ninth lunar month, observed by Muslims by fasting and sexual abstinence during daylight hours, and hence by a marked increase of nocturnal activity, in particular the preparation of food for the taking of a meal before sunrise.

2.
water-dust
: Fine droplets of water.

1.
consecrated formula
: A Gallicism from
la formule consacrée
.

2.
bullet in his forehead
: Cf. McNair's account of the murder of Doraman and his companions at the hands of pirates: ‘About six o'clock Doraman told us to bring the rice. When he was about to begin eating, shots were fired from both boats. Doraman fell to the shots… Three of our people jumped into the water and were stabbed, and all the others in my boat were killed and stabbed' (pp. 283–4).

1.
evoked ghost
: The image derives directly or indirectly from the famous episode in Homer's
Odyssey
, Book XI in which Odysseus, offering blood and libations of wine at the threshold of the underworld, calls up the ghosts of heroes and companions to question them.