One of 109 réimposé copies on Lafuma laid paper, this copy hors commerce (marked E).
Gaspar Ruiz first appeared in the Pall Mall Magazine from July to October 1906, then in 1908 in the collection A Set of Six, published by Methuen and Co in London. The stories that make up the collection had been written over the preceding three years. Gaspar Ruiz was completed in January 1905, at a time when Joseph Conrad’s mind was still steeped in the South American atmosphere in which he had lived during the two years he devoted to imagining and writing his novel Nostromo, completed in early September 1904, when he was still the sailor Jósef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski.
In a letter to his friend R. B. Cunninghame Graham dated 30 March 1923, later included in his author’s note, Conrad writes: “I found the idea of Gaspar Ruiz in a book by Captain Basil Hall, R.N., Journal of a Residence in Chile, a work you may have heard of. Hall was a friend of General San Martín. The original of Gaspar Ruiz was a man named Benavides, a guerrilla fighter on the southern frontier of Chile during the wars of independence. Hall devotes a page or two to him — based on hearsay. I had to invent his whole story, find reasons for his changes of allegiance, and construct the setting of the tale. And now the composition and writing of it all seem to me hardly more than the memory of a dream.”
In the summer of 1920, Joseph Conrad drew from this story a film scenario entitled Gaspar, the Strong Man, a project that was never realized.