and alien tone of the story, revealing his freshwater steamboat sailing job in the Belgian Congo, partly a result of a dream to satisfy his African wanderlust and partly because his predecessor had been slain by a tribal chieftain (Conrad 14-15). The point is that Marlow is "not typical" of most seamen, who lead a "sedentary life" (Conrad 7) by virtue of their being at home only aboard ship, wherever on earth the ship might take them. The fact that Marlow is as it were a fish out of water in the Congo makes him a displaced representative of seamen, even though his command of the riverboat also makes him a representative of the shipping company's institutional authority, which is subject to and cooperating with Belgian colonial authority.
Indeed, Marlow has enough alien sensibility to recalls with some irony his aunt's fatuous raptures in anticipation of his journey to Africa, in missionary terms: "something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle. There had been a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk just about that
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