The objective, as laid out by his employer, is to pick up and return with the ivory harvests collected by each trading outpost along the way. The tale tells the story of Charles Marlow, a seaman just hired as a ferry captain for a Belgian trading company in the Congo, after the last one was killed by the natives over a petty dispute. This serves as a Framing Device for the tale of woe. It all started when he was just starting out as a seaman.
He goes on to explain how he got to know this darkness, along with its effect on people, so incredibly well. how the island of Great Britain was once savage, untamed, and incredibly inhospitable to outsiders. As they fill the time with pleasant conversation, one of them suddenly speaks of how the very river they are on was once 'one of the dark places of the earth,' i.e.
The book starts in the 19th century with five close friends on a boat in the Thames river just outside London, waiting for the tide to go out. Heart of Darkness is a novella by Joseph Conrad, originally published as a three-part series in Blackwood's Magazine in 1899.
