Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad (born December 3, 1857, Berdichev, Ukraine, Russian Empire [now Berdychiv, Ukraine]—died August 3, 1924, Canterbury, Kent, England) was an English novelist and short-story writer of Polish descent whose works include the novels Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), and The Secret Agent (1907) and the novella Heart of Darkness (1902). During his lifetime, Conrad was admired for the richness of his prose and his renderings of dangerous life at sea and in exotic places. But his initial reputation as a masterful teller of colorful adventures of the sea masked his fascination with the individual when faced with nature’s invariable unconcern, humanity’s frequent malevolence, and inner battles with good and evil. To Conrad, the sea meant above all the tragedy of loneliness. A writer of complex skill and striking insight, but above all of an intensely personal vision, he has been increasingly regarded as one of the greatest English novelists.

Early years

Conrad was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski. His father, Apollo Nalęcz Korzeniowski, a poet and an ardent Polish patriot, was one of the organizers of the committee that went on to direct the 1863 Polish insurrection against Russian rule. He was arrested in late 1861 and was sent into exile at Vologda in northern Russia. His wife, Ewa Korzeniowski (née Bobrowska), and four-year-old son followed him there. Although the family was allowed to move temporarily to Chernikhov (now Chernihiv, Ukraine), where the climate was less extreme, the harsh climate and conditions of exile hastened Ewa’s death from tuberculosis in 1865.

In A Personal Record Conrad relates that his first introduction to the English language was at the age of eight, when his father was translating the works of William Shakespeare and Victor Hugo in order to support the household. In those solitary years with his father he read the works of Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray in Polish and French. Apollo was ill with tuberculosis and died in Kraków in 1869, leaving his son an orphan at age 11. Responsibility for the boy was assumed by his maternal uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, a lawyer, who provided his nephew with advice, admonition, financial help, and love. He sent Conrad to school at Kraków and then to Switzerland, but the boy was bored by school and yearned to go to sea. In 1874 Conrad left for Marseille with the intention of going to sea.

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Life at sea

Bobrowski made him an allowance of 2,000 francs a year and put him in touch with a merchant named Delestang, in whose ships Conrad sailed in the French merchant service. His first voyage, on the Mont-Blanc to Martinique, was as a passenger; on its next voyage he sailed as an apprentice. In July 1876 he again sailed to the West Indies, as a steward on the Saint-Antoine. On this voyage Conrad seems to have taken part in some unlawful enterprise, probably gunrunning, and to have sailed along the coast of Venezuela, memories of which were to find a place in the novel Nostromo. The first mate of the vessel, a Corsican named Dominic Cervoni, was the model for the hero of that book and was to play a picturesque role in Conrad’s life and work.

Conrad became heavily enmeshed in debt upon returning to Marseille and attempted suicide. As a sailor in the French merchant navy he was liable to conscription when he came of age, so after his recovery he signed on in April 1878 as a deckhand on a British freighter bound for Constantinople with a cargo of coal. After the return journey his ship landed him at Lowestoft, England, in June 1878. It was Conrad’s first English landfall, and he spoke only a few words of the language of which he was to become a recognized master. Conrad remained in England, and in the following October he shipped as an ordinary seaman aboard a wool clipper on the London–Sydney run.

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Conrad was to serve 16 years in the British merchant navy. In June 1880 he passed his examination as second mate, and in April 1881 he joined the Palestine, a bark of 425 tons. This move proved to be an important event in his life. It took him to the Far East for the first time, and it was also a continuously troubled voyage, which provided him with literary material that he would use later. Beset by gales, accidentally rammed by a steamer, and deserted by a sizable portion of its crew, the Palestine nevertheless had made it as far as the East Indies when its cargo of coal caught fire and the crew had to take to the lifeboats. Conrad’s initial landing, on an island off Sumatra, took place only after a 13 1/2-hour voyage in an open boat. In 1898 Conrad published his account of his experiences on the Palestine, with only slight alterations, as the short story “Youth,” a remarkable tale of a young officer’s first command.

He returned to London by passenger steamer, and in September 1883 he shipped as mate on the Riversdale, leaving it at Madras (Chennai) to join the Narcissus at Bombay (Mumbai). This voyage gave him material for his novel The Nigger of the “Narcissus”, the story of an egocentric Black sailor’s deterioration and death aboard ship. About this time Conrad began writing his earliest known letters in the English language. In between subsequent voyages Conrad studied for his first mate’s certificate, and in 1886 two notable events occurred: He became a British subject in August, and three months later he obtained his master mariner’s certificate.

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In February 1887 he sailed as first mate on the Highland Forest, bound for Semarang, Java (Indonesia). Its captain was John McWhirr, whom he later immortalized under the same name as the heroic, unimaginative captain of the steamer Nan Shan in the novella Typhoon. He then joined the Vidar, a locally owned steamship trading among the islands of the Southeast Asian archipelago. During the five or six voyages he made in four and a half months, Conrad was discovering and exploring the world he was to re-create in his first novels, Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, and Lord Jim, as well as several short stories.

After leaving the Vidar Conrad unexpectedly obtained his first command, on the Otago, sailing from Bangkok, an experience out of which he was to make his stories “The Shadow-Line” and “Falk.” He took over the Otago in unpropitious circumstances. The captain Conrad replaced had died at sea, and by the time the ship reached Singapore—a voyage of 800 miles (1,300 km) that took three weeks because of lack of wind—the whole ship’s company, except Conrad and the cook, was down with fever. Conrad then discovered to his dismay that his predecessor had sold almost all the ship’s supply of quinine.