Conrad set his novel in the town of Sulaco, a port in the western region of the imaginary country Costaguana.
In his "Author's Note" to later editions of Nostromo, Joseph Conrad provides a detailed explanation of the inspirational origins of his novel. There he relates how, as a young man of about seventeen, while serving aboard a ship in the Gulf of Mexico, he heard the story of a man who had stolen, single-handedly, "a whole lighter-full of silver". As Conrad goes on to relate, he forgot about the story until some twenty-five years later when he came across a travelogue in a used-book shop in which the author related how he worked for years aboard a schooner whose master claimed to be that very thief who had stolen the silver.[2]
