OUR MAN IN COSTAGUANA: AN ESSAY ON CONRADIAN DUPLICITY

I started Conrad's Nostromo a few days ago. Besides the predictably beautiful prose (e.g. first page: "Utterly waterless, for the rainfall runs off at once on all sides into the sea, it has not soil enough—it is said—to grow a single blade of grass, as if it were blighted by a curse."), the text is chock full of linguistic curiosities. 

The title, for instance, is an Italian term for boatswain, but it's also a corruption of "nostro uomo," i.e. "our man."

Other proper names I've run across so far (roughly 50 pages in) share a similar trans-, inter- and intra- linguistic ambiguity. Two of the more obvious are Costaguana (guana refers to a palm tree, palmera, but also strongly suggests guano), and Viola. There's also the obvious Gould=gold connection and the San Tomé mine (tomb).