The Secret Sharer takes place at sea, near the Gulf of Siam, told from the perspective of a young nameless Captain. The captain is unfamiliar with both his ship and his crew, having only joined their company a fortnight earlier. The Captain is furthermore unsure of himself, questioning his ability to fulfil the role of such an authoritative figure.
While on look-out duty one night, the captain encounters a naked swimmer holding onto the side ladder of the ship. He helps the mysterious swimmer onto the boat and hides him in his cabin without the rest of the crew's knowledge. He then learns of the mysterious swimmer's past. His name is Leggatt, and he swam away from a nearby ship, called the Sephora, where, as chief mate, he killed another crew member for insolence during a storm.
The captain keeps Leggatt hidden in his quarters, away from the suspicious crew members and a visit from the skipper of the Sephora. Eventually the Captain allows Leggatt to escape by bringing the ship perilously close to land for Leggatt to swim away safely, though this risky sailing manoeuvre nearly sends the ship into the rocks, testing the Captain's seamanship. He succeeds and leads the ship away.
The Secret Sharer was published in 1910 based in part on a true story: In the 1880s, a mate aboard the Cutty Sark killed an insubordinate sailor during an altercation.
"The Secret Sharer" seems to be an old-fashioned tale of adventure on the sea. The story features a captain, his crew, a mysterious event, a murder, a near-disaster, and the saving of a ship. While "The Secret Sharer" is an adventure yarn, it also stands as a profound and often disquieting examination of every person's dual nature and how each person must resolve this duality in order to grow. Conrad's use of the doppelganger theme allows him to explore the dual nature of his protagonist, a young yet unsure captain assuming his first command.
About the Author: Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski; 11-12 3 December 1857 - 3 August 1924) was a Polish author who wrote in English after settling in England. Although granted British nationality he always considered himself a Pole. Conrad is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English, though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties (and always with a marked accent). He wrote stories and novels, often with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an indifferent universe. He was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English literature. While some of his works have a strain of romanticism, his works are viewed as modernist literature. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many authors, including D. H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and many others. Films have been adapted from, or inspired by, Conrad's Almayer's Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, The Duel, Victory, The Shadow Line, and The Rover. Writing in the heyday of the British Empire, Conrad drew on his native Poland's national experiences and on his personal experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world, while plumbing the depths of the human soul. Appreciated early on by literary cognoscenti, his fiction and nonfiction have gained an almost prophetic cachet in the light of subsequent national and international disasters of the 20th and 21st centuries.
