The cultural struggle that is the undercurrent in Conrad's fiction

Conrad's Victory is becoming a novel as much about the hotelier Shomberg (?) as about the nomadic Swedish merchant Heyst - Heyst - after a series of business failures settled into a hermit's life on a tiny South Pacific island, and in one of his trips to the the port city he stayed at Shomberg's hotel and rescued a 20-something Englishwoman who was performing at the hotel in an all-female band - this rescue infuriated Shomberg who claimed this type of incident could ruin the reputation of his hotel, but we soon learn, if we hadn't guessed already, that Sh had been trying to hit on the young woman, so there's a great deal of sexual rivalry and competition going on here as well. To this point - 100+ pages in - we see nothing at all about Heyst's life on the island, either before or after he brings the Englishwoman to live with him in seclusion - but our focus shifts to Sh., who has taken two shady characters into his lodging and they put the squeeze on him (one amusingly gives his name simply as "just plain Jones") to let them use one of his outbuildings as an unlicensed casino. Sh is scared and wary - there goes the reputation of his hotel! - but despite his constant bluster and bullying (esp of women, including his wife), he's afraid to stand up to these two toughs and evidently he doesn't care all that much about the reputation of his hotel, anyway. The strands will have to come together in some way, but I'm a little puzzled about how little we see of Heyst's life on the island; as noted in a previous post, Conrad consistently talks about his isolation and his life as a near-hermit, but there have to be native settlements on the island and Heyst must be dealing with them for supplies, at the very least - so he's not the only man on the island, he's the only white man on the island - a big difference. Has he "gone native" or been changed in any way by his interactions with or even proximity to another culture? The clash of cultures is obviously an undercurrent of much of Conrad's South Seas and African fiction (Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, e.g.), the West superimposing its values, the 3rd world with its own power and allure - an uneven battle perhaps, the outcome of which we pretty much know from our 21st-century vantage, but in Conrad's day the two cultures were much farther apart and the West was confident in its powers and naive about its virtues.