The Secret Sharer

The Secret Sharer is a short story by Joseph Conrad, first published in two parts in Harper's Magazine in 1910. It follows a captain confronting his double at the beginning of his first command.

Feeling isolated from his unfamiliar ship and crew, the unnamed young captain keeps the night watch alone. He discovers Leggatt swimming beside the vessel and secretly brings him aboard, creating a hidden guest in his cabin.

Leggatt has escaped from the Sephora after killing a man during a storm, and the captain identifies with his account more strongly than he trusts conventional judgment. Concealment during a search by the other ship makes authority answerable to secrecy.

To release Leggatt, the captain must take his vessel dangerously close to shore and finally act without the reassurance of his double. Conrad uses mirrored bodies, rooms, and choices to make self-command emerge through risk, leaving moral certainty less settled than professional confidence.

"On my right hand there were lines of fishing stakes resembling a mysterious system of half-submerged bamboo fences, incomprehensible in its division of the domain of tropical fishes, and crazy of aspect as if abandoned forever by some nomad tribe of fishermen now gone to the other end of the ocean; for there was no sign of human habitation as far as the eye could reach."