Joseph Conrad's “The Planter of Malata”: Timing, and the Forgotten Adventures of the Silk Plant “Arghan”

Abstract

Joseph Conrad's 1914 short story “The Planter of Malata,” set partly in Sydney and partly on the fictional island of “Malata,” is a tale of unrequited passion ending with suicide. The planter, Geoffrey Renouard, is at a crucial juncture in his enterprise on the Malata concession with something called silk plants. What are these plants that they should be the subject of scientific, mercantile, financial, and political interest? What is Renouard's fiber? Attention to the details of this fiction reveals that mulberry trees are not at all the most likely silk plant candidate.

Written in the last two months of 1913, the story connects with the contemporary great race to discover an industrially viable artificial silk, as well as new natural alternative fibers. And even more interesting is its prefiguring of a stock-market scam of the early 1920s. Given the dates, Conrad could not possibly have known about the events surrounding the Arghan Company, which collapsed in 1924 with the loss of its £100,000 capital. Yet, as in Conrad's 1913 story, the 1919–24 Arghan story involved a kind of silk plant, potentially a very marketable and valuable fiber, being grown under conditions of some secrecy on a concession of land granted by a colonial government.

Keywords:

• colonial botany
• Pacific transfers
• Joseph Conrad
• silk fiber