Patusan

In Conrad's novel, the country is a remote backwater in the South Seas, forgotten by the rest of the world and essentially without contact with outside civilization.

Conrad makes clear that the country, though officially ruled by the petty, melodramatic Rajah Tunku Allang, was effectively dominated by several groups of people prior to the arrival of Jim.

While Conrad, a well-traveled individual who had led an adventurous seafaring life, intended the country to be a fictional place, the essential character of Patusan certainly has some basis in reality and in European perceptions of the East Indies around the turn of the 20th century.

A theory exists that in Conrad's mind, Patusan was essentially Berau, the Indonesian part of Borneo, which is a place he visited.

[1] In Chapter 38 of Lord Jim, "Brown related to [the narrator] in detail their passage down the Straits of Macassar", then "shot the schooner across the Java Sea", and finally "after clearing the Sunda Straits" anchored off the mouth of the river running through Patusan - seemingly pointing to a location in Sumatra.