"'Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, 'When I grow up I will go there.' The North Pole was one of these places, I remember. Well, I haven't been there yet, and shall not try now. The glamour's off. Other places were scattered about the Equator, and in every sort of latitude all over the two hemispheres. I have been in some of them, and... well, we won't talk about that. But there was one yet—the biggest, the most blank, so to speak—that I had a hankering after.

"'True, by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery—a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness. But there was in it one river especially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land." (Chapter 1)

At this point in Heart of Darkness, a ship waits for a flood to recede so it can land in England. In the meantime, Marlow  starts telling a story about his trip into "the heart of darkness," and that story takes the rest of the novella to tell. But first he has to explain why he was traveling in the first place.

The Widening Empire

It's not just that Marlow wants to see the world. He wants to travel somewhere unknown, to the "blank" spots on his childhood maps. He wants an adventure. But, as Marlow notes, those blank spots keep getting filled in.

It might look like progress. The map is getting filled in with names and borders, and expanding our knowledge of the world. But this also aligns with how powerful countries keep getting, well, more powerful. In the 19th century, Britain was expanding and claiming territories and colonies left and right. And the British Empire was big business, from the East India Company to the British South Africa Company. Trade and profits drove people to fill in those maps.

And that, folks, seems to be a scary thing. At the basis of all this progress and industrialization and hope for the future is a very ugly heart of darkness.

So Marlow's memory is more than some sweet, nostalgic childhood dream—it also taps into the whole history of imperialism. (And you thought you were just reading a quick novella.) If the map symbolizes the British Empire, then what are we supposed to do with this snake-river? (Also, if this passage didn't seem ominous before, just wait till you get to the "immense snake uncoiled" stretching from the sea into the "depths of the land"—right where Marlow travels.) These comparisons seem to jump up and down and install neon lights on themselves. Guess where we're following Marlow? Right into the depths.