One person who saw Leopold’s project for what it was was a young Polish mariner named Konrad Korzeniowski, who in 1890 took a job piloting a steamboat on the Congo River. Later, under the pen name Joseph Conrad, he would fictionalize his experience—“a little (and only very little)”—in Heart of Darkness. “To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire,” the novel’s disillusioned protagonist says, “with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.”
