This chapter analyzes the words and deeds of Hirsch, a cowardly character in Joseph Conrad’s novel Nostromo (1904). First presented as a man frightened by everybody and everything, Hirsch only grows more terrified when he finds himself entangled in a revolution. Verging on the heroic in saving himself from one dreadful ordeal, he immediately succumbs to another, as interrogated and tortured by a virulent anti-Semite perceiving his Jewishness as evidence of diabolical cunning. Hirsch again proves hero-adjacent when spitting in the face of his tormentor, who rashly responds by shooting him dead, thus ending his suffering but also erasing his value as a source of potentially crucial information.