Youth, a Narrative

Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness, tells a group of friends over a bottle of wine about his first voyage to the East, at twenty, as second mate of the Judea, an old barque carrying coal to Bangkok under the motto 'Do or Die'. Everything goes wrong: storms, leaks, a collision, and finally the coal catches fire and the ship burns at sea, leaving young Marlow to command a small boat on the way to Java. Yet he remembers it all with joy, because he was young.

Joseph Conrad based the story, published in 1898, on his own voyage in the Palestine between 1881 and 1883, and it was the first story told by Marlow. Read Heart of Darkness, and see Conrad's life.

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) was born Józef Korzeniowski to Polish parents in today's Ukraine. His father was exiled for patriotic activities, and Conrad was orphaned at eleven. At sixteen he went to sea from Marseille, and he spent twenty years as a sailor, rising to captain in the British merchant navy.

A voyage up the Congo in 1890 marked him for life and led to Heart of Darkness. He began writing in English, his third language, and became one of its great novelists with Lord Jim and Nostromo. His books ask what people do when no one is watching.