Heart of Darkness opens on a boat called "Nellie." Marlow and his shipmates, including the .
narrator whose descriptions of the scene fill the few breaks in Marlow's stories, loll on the .
deck waiting for the tides of the Thames River to change. To entertain his compatriots, Marlow .
begins to talk about his philosophies on colonization, his personal history, and his voyage up .
the Congo River into the heart of Africa. Like many storytellers, Marlow speaks in a stream of .
consciousness, skipping forward and backward in time without warning. The reader is left to .
infer from symbolism the specifics of Marlow's narrative. Marlow abhors colonization. He .
believes that when Europeans colonize other countries to exploit rather than to civilize, white .
men commit robbery and murder on "a great scale." His urgent feelings regarding colonization .
trigger Marlow to remember his trip into Africa. However, before he begins that specific story .
he tells his audience about his fascination with maps and "empty spaces." Since he was a child, .
Marlow dreamed of venturing into the dark places on maps. He gets a great chance, he explains, .
when his aunt helps him secure a position working for a European-based ivory company as a .
steamboat captain. Marlow's journey from London to the mouth of the Congo River quickly begins .
and as the steamboat chugs down the impenetrable coastline, briefly stopping at French stations .
to load and unload soldiers, docking with a French battleship upon which sailors died at a rate .
of three per day. Marlow's disillusion and fascination grows as he approaches the first ivory .
station. Rusted machinery, ill workers, and cluttered unkept grounds greet Marlow at the first .
station. The native workers are horribly treated while the white characters suffer from disease, biting insects, and staggering heat. Marlow finally leaves the station to begin a two hundred mile inland trek to the second station.
