A group of men are aboard an English ship that is sitting on the Thames.

The group includes a Lawyer, an Accountant, a Company Director/Captain, and a man without a specific profession who is named Marlow.

The narrator appears to be another unnamed guest on the ship.

While they are loitering about, waiting for the wind to pick up so that they might resume their voyage, Marlow begins to speak about London and Europe as some of the darkest places on earth.

The narrator and other guests do not seem to regard him with much respect.

Marlow is a stationary man, very unusual for a seaman.

The others do not understand him because he does not fit into a neat category in the same manner that the others do.

He mentions colonization and says that carving the earth into prizes or pieces is not something to examine too closely because it is an atrocity.

He then begins to narrate a personal experience in Africa, which led him to become a freshwater sailor and gave him a terrible glimpse of colonization.

With the exception of two or three small paragraphs, the perspective shifts to Marlow, who becomes the main narrator for the rest of the novel.