The fact that his first book, Almayer’s Folly, almost immediately met with extraordinary critical acclaim would have certainly started Joseph Conrad thinking about another book. Conrad’s imagination returned to East Borneo, the Berau River, and his meeting there with Carel de Veere, who became his Peter Willems and the main protagonist of An Outcast of the Islands.

The first time myself and Captain Craig dined with Almayer there was Carel de Veere sitting at the table with us in the manner of a skeleton at a feast, obviously shunned by everybody, never addressed by anybody, and for all recognition of his existence getting now and then from Almayer a venomous glance which I observed with great surprise … Didn’t that fellow bring the Arabs into the river!

Peter Willems obtained employment with a prominent shipping agent in Macassar and to his own surprise, found himself adept at business practices. During his 14 years of service with the Hudig Company he found himself handling Hudig’s most confidential business transactions – chests of opium which were silently transferred from one vessel to another, sensitive negotiations with ruling Sultans, the illegal shipments of arms and gunpowder to both sides of a local power struggle. These transactions required large sums of cash to exchange hands and some of it may have even stayed in Peter Willems hands. He was boastful of his own abilities and experienced that irresistible impulse to impart information that is inseparable from gross ignorance. As Conrad wrote:

There is always some one thing which the ignorant man knows, and that thing is the only thing worth knowing, it fills the ignorant man’s universe. Willems knew all about himself. On the day when, with many misgivings, he ran away from a Dutch East-Indiaman in Semarang Roads, he had commenced that study of himself, of his own ways, of his own abilities, of those fate-compelling qualities of his which led him toward that lucrative position which he now filled. Being of modest and diffident nature, his successes amazed, almost frightened him, and ended as he got over the succeeding shocks of surprise by making him ferociously conceited. He believed in his genius and his knowledge of the world. Others should know of it also; for their own good and his greater glory.

This is the beginning of a moral tale. Willems had departed from the straight and narrow and has made what he describes as a ‘little excursion’ into dishonesty for a cause that is not immediately explained, but as soon as this has achieved its desired effect, then, he is resolved to return to the straight and narrow path. But somehow, we know that this is not going to happen.

Willems dishonesty is discovered, he is fired from his job, and he retreats to the Berau River where he lives as an ‘Outcast of the Islands’.

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