Essay on The Secret Sharer Erika Yoshida

The Secret Sharer is the story about two men in the Gulf of Siam. The main characters are a captain of a ship and a man whose name is Leggatt. The captain has no name; neither does his ship in the story. Because Leggatt has killed a man there, he runs away from a ship, “Sephora,” which is two miles away from the captain’s ship. The captain tries to shelter Leggatt in his cabin because he feels some sympathy with Leggatt. Leggatt has been captain’s “secret sharer” for a few days, and Leggatt leaves the ship to escape to Koh-ring, an island headland where will be close enough to swim across the sea from the ship. At the very last of the story, the book says the captain and Leggatt “strike out for a new destiny.” What did the author want to say by this? The answers are in the story.

The captain feels that he is a stranger on the ship because he has been in command only a fortnight and also because he is the youngest on the ship except a second mate. He doesn’t think that other members of the ship accept him as a captain, so he has never made an actual order. One day, he takes a turn of work at night to give his crew a rest. During midnight, while the crew are sleeping, he notices that the ship’ s rope ladder still hangs over the side. When he tries to pull it up, he finds a naked man who clings it. His name is Leggatt. He escapes from Sehpora because he has murdered a man several weeks ago and suffers confinement. He swims two miles from Sehpora to the captain’ s ship. Since the captain and him looked like a same as twins, a strong bond of unity is established between the two of them. The captain decides to shelter this murderer in his cabin. On the next day, Sehpora’s skipper comes to this ship to find Leggatt, but the captain protects him. Leggat is hiding in bathroom during daytime. At night, the captain and he wear in the same gray sleeping suits, and talk, actually whisper about their lives. Their friendship becomes deeper and deeper, although their characters are completely opposite. The captain takes his sharer as a reflection of him “in the depths of a somber and immense mirror.”

One day, Leggatt is about to be found by the steward. The captain is so afraid and so tires to protect the secret of having a murderer as a sharer, he says that he can not keep Leggat on his ship anymore and promises that he will move his ship as close as possible to the Koh-ring, an island headland. He thinks it will be close enough for such a good swimmer to swim across to the shore from the ship.

When the captain makes his very first order “to set vessel on a tack that will bring her right in among the island,” members of crew think that their captain is out of mind. After he makes sure that Leggatt leaves the ship, he faces the problem with his ship as it is about to crush into the island. Despite what he used to be, he commands his crews and controls the ship very well. He is able to avoid the collision.

To conclude, the captain and Leggatt learned a lot of things from each other. The captain used to hesitate to command his crew and he was not a good captain. On the other hand, Leggatt was a wild man with no guilty from his murder. This is just my imagination, but I think the gray sleeping suits that both of them were wearing at night, were the symbol of their exchange of the character. The captain’s white weakness and Leggatt’s black wildness mix during their talking, and the gray sleeping suits represent the mixture. We can say that the captain represents the light part of people’s souls and Leggatt represents the dark part of them. The captain and Leggatt are the duality of people’ s mind. Anyway, from the experience of living with reflection of each other, the captain could be finally a true reliable captain, and Leggatt was able to be free from his punishment. Their new destinies that they started to strike out for might be to become a good captain or a free man, but I would rather say that “the new destinies” were the life as the perfect person with both a light and dark side of soul.