Indonesian river trip retraces Joseph Conrad voyages that inspired Lord Jim, other novels
- One hundred years after Conrad’s death, the Post follows the Polish-British novelist’s journeys along a river in Indonesian Borneo
Our incredibly loud, incredibly slow, diesel-powered wooden boat grinds up the wide river. On either side, nipa palms rise 10 metres (33 feet) high, forming an unbroken wall of green. Far ahead, lightning flickers within a cloud as the afternoon light starts to fail.
We are a four-man crew. Well, technically, there are three crew members – ethnic Bajau men from islands off the coast – and me, hitching a ride. Our destination is the town of Berau – pronounced “Brow” – 60km (37 miles) up this river in Indonesian Borneo, where the boat is to be loaded with supplies to take back to its island home.
A speedboat would make the journey in less than an hour, yet there is a reason for this folly. I am retracing, in part, a voyage that the Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad made nearly 140 years ago.
Conrad – who died a century ago this summer – is best remembered as the author of Heart of Darkness (1899), the Congo-set novella that became the basis for the movie Apocalypse Now. Yet half of everything he wrote is set in the equatorial regions of Asia, including several novels inspired by this very river.
Before he was Conrad the writer, he was Konrad the sailor, a merchant seaman, not yet 30, who spoke English, his third language, with a thick accent. (Born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, he grew up in northern Ukraine as a subject of the Russian tsar.)
He would undertake this journey on four separate occasions in 1887 and 1888 as first mate of the SS Vidar – a trip that, from Singapore, took several months there and back. After 10 hours on this noisy, juddering work boat, in blazing sunlight and intense heat, I have a new-found respect for men of this profession.
