Best 1904 Adventures (8)

By: Joshua Glenn
February 12, 2019

One in a series of 10 posts identifying Josh Glenn’s favorite 1904 adventure novels. Happy 115th anniversary!

Joseph Conrad’s treasure-hunt adventure Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard.

Charles Gould owns an important silver-mining concession near the port of Sulaco, in the western province of Costaguana, a fictional South American country that Conrad seems to have modeled on Colombia. Fed up with Costaguana’s never-ending cycle of tyranny and revolution, Gould uses his wealth to support the military dictator Ribiera. When this leads to even more chaos, Gould orders his influential and incorruptible head longshoreman, the Italian expat Nostromo, to smuggle a shipload of silver out of the country — in order to keep it out of the hands of the revolutionaries’ General Montero. The silver ends up buried on a deserted island, guarded by a young journalist, Martin Decoud; Gould and everyone else, however, believe that the treasure has been lost. Nostromo heads back to Sulaco, where he daringly helps save the town’s powerful leaders from the revolutionaries. Afterwards, consumed by resentment — because he is not admitted into Sulaco’s elite circles, despite his exploits, Nostromo decides to recover the hidden silver… but what has become of Decoud? Will Nostromo ever attain his heart’s true desire? Or will forces beyond his control forever frustrate him?

Fun facts: Serialized in 1904, in the London magazine T.P.’s Weekly, Nostromo is now considered one of the best English-language novels of the 20th century. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “I’d rather have written Nostromo than any other novel.”

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Best 1904 Adventures (8)

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