Marlow finds his steamer at the bottom of the river and a manager who seems to take it for granted that nothing will be done efficiently. How does Marlow react? How does he adjust? What does he mean when he says there are "no externnal checks?'

Marlow is discovering the corruption of things along the river. Marlow actually thinks the steamer was an act of sabotage, "Certainly the affair was too stupid – when I think of it – to be altogether natural." Marlow simply has to wait "some two months" before the repairs were made. No external checks meant that the company headquarters simply didn't know or really monitor what was going on. There was nobody really outside the company either to monitor how these projects were going. The whole enterprise, like the jungle, was wild and chaotic.