Something about Conrad inspires the autobiographical instinct

Conrad's stories, novellas, and even novels are part of the age of the great raconteurs - in so many the narrator is not some omniscient figure or authorial stand-in but an ancient mariner spinning out a tale on a long evening, or night - often, if my memory serves, on shipboard: e.g., Youth, Heart of Darkness. Victory doesn't quite fall into that category, it's more of a conventional omniscient narrator - though the narrator seems to be a person living in and of the times described - maybe mid to late 19th-century on the Indonesian archipelago - and familiar with the characters and legends he's recounting - though he has the powers of omniscience, able to recount in detail scenes he could not have witness and nobody could have told him of directly. About half-way through the novel one of the characters, surprisingly, shakes off his taciturnity and becomes a Conradian narrator: Riccardo, if in fact that's his real name, the card shark with with "plain Mr. Jones" runs an illegal casino on Schomberg's hotel, waylays Schomberg one evening and, for no evident reason (other than to fill us in), he tells him the story of his life - how he and Jones (not his real name, obviously) killed a captain and robbed a bunch of South American treasure hunters and took off with their ship - giving them, I guess, enough of a stake to travel through the South Pacific setting up quick, clandestine gambling operations. There's a strange old movie - can't remember the title, in which a western bandit holds a group of people hostage as their hideout is surrounded by rangers; one of the hostages, a Brit, I think, says: Something about this place inspires the autobiographical instinct. Something about Conrad's fiction - or maybe about the South Seas, does as well. (The grangster, Bogart?, asked his life story says something like: Whadda you think? I spent most of my life, since I was born, in jail. And it looks like I'll spend the rest of it dead.)