The life of Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski reads like an adventure story, an adventure story that could be written by somebody like Joseph Conrad.
The young Conrad dreamed of a life at sea, he eventually became a British merchant seaman and he spent fifteen years sailing on the classic three-masted, square-rigged sailing clippers before they were ultimately replaced by steamships. During this period he worked his way up from apprentice, to third mate, to second mate, to first mate and finally the captain of one of these beautiful ships.
Joseph Conrad once said that everything about his life can be found in his books. Because the material for his first books are mainly autobiographical then Ian Burnet has been able to use a mixture of his own words, together with those of Conrad, to tell this story of Joseph Conrad’s eastern voyages and his tales of Singapore and an East Borneo River.
Conrad loved the ‘mysterious East’ and his first books – Almayers Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, Lord Jim and The Rescue were all set in Borneo and based on the people and places he encountered in his own voyages as first mate on a trading vessel based out of Singapore.
In the latter part of this book Ian Burnet has taken the liberty to place the parts of these first novels into their proper narrative sequence and focus on the back-story of his characters, which will make it easier for readers to discover or rediscover Conrad’s genius.
The following is the first paragraph of the book:
For his first voyage to the Far East, Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski found an insignificant little barque covered in rust, dust and grime lying in a dark pool in one of the smaller London dockyards. The ‘Palestine’ needed a second mate and he appears on the ships articles as Konrad Korzeniowski, aged 24, of Gittomir, Poland. What Konrad was looking for was at least twelve months certified experience as a regular watch-keeping officer in a deep-sea vessel. The captain of the ‘Palestine’ was Elijah Beard, a gnarled old seaman of the old school who had spent his life sailing the rigours of the North Sea. A fine old man, he had been long overlooked as this was his first command and Konrad believed he was ‘sixty if a day’. The mate was an experienced Irish seaman of fifty years who had a Roman nose, a long snow-white beard, and his name was Mahon. Both were thoroughly good seaman and between these two grizzled old sailors Konrad felt like a young boy standing between two grandfathers.
The voyage would be life-changing for Konrad because it would bring him to the Far East, to Singapore, to the Malay Archipelago and to the Dutch East Indies, places which would become the background for his first books - ‘Almayer’s Folly’, ‘An Outcast of the Islands’, ‘Lord Jim’ and ‘The Rescue’.
