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the style of Captain Gulliver) my family all well, my wife heartily
glad to learn that the fuss was all over, and our small boy considerably
grown during my absence.

My principal authority for the history of Costaguana is, of course, my
venerated friend, the late Don Jose Avellanos, Minister to the Courts of
England and Spain, etc., etc., in his impartial and eloquent "History of
Fifty Years of Misrule." That work was never published--the reader will
discover why--and I am in fact the only person in the world possessed
of its contents. I have mastered them in not a few hours of earnest
meditation, and I hope that my accuracy will be trusted. In justice to
myself, and to allay the fears of prospective readers, I beg to point
out that the few historical allusions are never dragged in for the
sake of parading my unique erudition, but that each of them is closely
related to actuality; either throwing a light on the nature of current
events or affecting directly the fortunes of the people of whom I speak.

As to their own histories I have tried to set them down, Aristocracy
and People, men and women, Latin and Anglo-Saxon, bandit and politician,
with as cool a hand as was possible in the heat and clash of my own
conflicting emotions. And after all this is also the story of their
conflicts. It is for the reader to say how far they are deserving of
interest in their actions and in the secret purposes of their hearts
revealed in the bitter necessities of the time. I confess that, for me,
that time is the time of firm friendships and unforgotten hospitalities.
And in my gratitude I must mention here Mrs. Gould, "the first lady
of Sulaco," whom we may safely leave to the secret devotion of Dr.
Monygham, and Charles Gould, the Idealist-creator of Material Interests
whom we must leave to his Mine--from which there is no escape in this
world.

About Nostromo, the second of the two racially and socially contrasted
men, both captured by the silver of the San Tome Mine, I feel bound to
say something more.

I did not hesitate to make that central figure an Italian. First of
all the thing is perfectly credible: Italians were swarming into the
Occidental Province at the time, as anybody who will read further can
see; and secondly, there was no one who could stand so well by the side
of Giorgio Viola the Garibaldino, the Idealist of the old, humanitarian
revolutions. For myself I needed there a Man of the People as free as
possible from his class-conventions and all settled modes of thinking.
This is not a side snarl at conventions. My reasons were not moral but
artistic. Had he been an Anglo-Saxon he would have tried to get into
local politics. But Nostromo does not aspire to be a leader in a
personal game. He does not want to raise himself above the mass. He is
content to feel himself a power--within the People.

But mainly Nostromo is what he is because I received the inspiration for
him in my early days from a Mediterranean sailor.

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