In Eastern Seas
SIR,—I have returned from Singapore to learn of Miss Allen's letter to the SPECTATOR of August 5, 1966. Because of the implications of her letter, I should like to make known some facts about my re- search into Conrad's sources which appeared in my book Conrad's Eastern World.
Miss Allen states that the first time A. P. Williams was identified as the original of Lord Jim was in
her book, published in America on October 1, 1965. In fact, my identification of Lord Jim appeared in an article in Modern Language Review. October 1964, one year before her book's appearance. As to the identification of the settlement on the river Berau in Borneo as Conrad's Eastern river, the credit for this must surely go to 1. D. Gordan, who visited the area in 1939 and whose book Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist was published in 1940.
I can confirm Miss Allen's statement that some of the newspapers in the Straits Times library are extremely fragile. I obtained permission to use these files and studied the papers from 1844 to 1916, most of my material on Lingard. A. P. Williams and Conrad's own activities, information about Berau itself, about Singapore and the men who lived in the area, in particular Captain Ellis, who gave Conrad his first command, being found there. Miss Allen refers to 'a page-by-page examination of sev- eral hundred newspapers' carried out on her behalf. May I add that I examined, page by page, on my own behalf, some twenty-two thousand newspapers. This is only part of the history of my research, which began in 1955.
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