Teodor Jozef Konrad Korzeniowski was born in Brdyczow in what is now the Ukraine but was in 1857 an area of Poland under Tsarist Russian rule. He was the son of an aristocrat and writer Count Apollo Korzeniowski who due to his nationalist activities was exiled with his family to a bleak gulag three hundred miles north of Moscow, where both Conrad’s parents contracted the tuberculosis that would leave him an orphan at seven.

Having been raised by an uncle, the young Teodor decided to follow his yearnings to see the “dark continent” of Africa and joined the merchant navy. He initially took service under Belgian command but later when he was forced to resign his post due to excessive gambling debts, gunrunning, political conspiracy and a failed suicide attempt, he joined the English merchant navy. Conrad taught himself the English language over the next few years, mostly via Shakespeare’s plays and issues of The London Times.
It was while captain of a Congo steamboat that he experienced the atrocities that would result in his most famous work Heart of Darkness.