In 1881, a small British merchant ship, the Palestine, set out to carry a cargo of coal to Bangkok. Driven back repeatedly by storms, and then needing repairs for leaks, the ship did not make its final departure from British waters for a full year after she first set out. Moreover, the Palestine never did reach its destination. In the Indian Ocean its cargo of coal, too frequently handled and thus broken into combustable smaller chunks, caught fire. The crew had to abandon ship, finally reaching Borneo in the vessel's boats (Allen 153ff).
The second mate on this harrowing voyage was a young man named Joseph Conrad, and his recollection of the events formed the basis of his short story, "Youth." In one sense, then, "Youth" occupies a curious debatable ground between fiction and autobiography. Some features of the story which we might take to be deliberate artistic choices--such as the name of the fictional ship, Judea, with its Biblical overtones--turn out to be closely modeled upon fact. (It should be noted that the name "Palestine" was then purely geographical, and did not have its modern political connotation.) Even the names and approximate ages of the captain and first mate in the story are borrowed from those of their actual counterparts.
Yet in a more fundamental sense, the story of "Youth" is as much Conrad's literary creation as if he had invented the ship, its crew, and its ill-fated voyage entirely out of his imagination. The characters of Captain Beard and his crew may have had some similarity to their real namesakes, but it was Conrad's own choice to draw from those characters the significance he drew from them, to cast his young self on that voyage in the role of his recurrent narrator, Marlow, and to find the meaning in that voyage that we find in "Youth." The real Palestine already had a Biblical name, but it was Conrad's choice to invest "Youth" with allusions to Ecclesiastes and Job (Purdy 34-35; ...