Joseph Conrad’s Eastern Voyages: Tales of Singapore and an East Borneo River

The life of Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski reads like an adventure story, an adventure story written by somebody like Joseph Conrad. The young Conrad dreamed of a life at sea and eventually became a British merchant seaman, working his way up from apprentice to captain on classic three-masted square-rigged barques. He would also become one of the most important novelists in the English language, and almost half of his life’s work is set in Southeast Asia. Conrad’s favorite destination was the vibrant, bustling port of Singapore as well as the remote ports of the Dutch East Indies, and his early works - Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, Lord Jim and The Rescue - are based on the people and places he encountered in his own voyages on the Vidar, a trading vessel that plied the waters of the Indonesian archipelago from its base in Singapore. In Joseph Conrad’s Eastern Voyages, Ian Burnet places Conrad’s Malay novels into their proper narrative sequence and explores the backstory of his characters helping the reader to visualize the cultural and historical context of Conrad’s time in late 19th-century Southeast Asia.

Author and historian Ian Burnet grew up in South Gippsland in Victoria, Australia, and has spent thirty years living, working and travelling in Indonesia and wider Southeast Asia. His fascination for the diverse history and culture of the Indonesian archipelago is reflected in his books Spice Islands, East Indies, Archipelago: A Journey Across Indonesia, Where Australia Collides with Asia, The Tasman Map and his latest work, Joseph Conrad’s Eastern Voyages.