During the early months of World War I, a British naval auxiliary vessel - a former luxury recreational boat converted to serve in coastal waters - is on patrol.
The object has a barrel-like shape suggesting it may be a container used by neutral war profiteers to resupply German submarines with petrol.
She is a “coaster”, a small cargo vessel bearing genuine Scandinavian registration, carrying merchandise to an English port.
He points out that no evidence has been produced to indicate his activities are suspect: he reminds the British officer that he is legally providing goods to England during wartime.
Several miles from shore, the Scandinavian vessel strikes a hazardous rock shoal, tearing open its hull and sinking the ship.
The narrator reflects: “I don’t know whether I have done stern retribution - or murder…I shall never know.”[2][3] “The Tale” is the story of a British naval officer during WWI who acts on a visceral impulse to test the assumed perfidy of a suspected war profiteer.
[4] Biographer Jocelyn Baines describes the theme of “The Tale” as “exceptionally ambiguous” raising the question: During war-time, that a naval officer is warranted in acting extrajudicially when a neutral merchant is suspected of trading with the enemy.
Baines quotes from the story concerning this “particularly despicable form of commerce”[5] involving: …the murderous stealthiness of methods and the atrocious callousness of complexities that seemed to taint the very source of men’s deep emotions and noblest activities…the air of the chart-room [on suspected ship] was thick with guilt and falsehood braving the discovery, defying simple right, common decency, all humanity of feeling, every scruple of conduct…[6]Finding the presumed deceit of the merchant captain intolerable, the British commander permits the vessel to depart, but poisons it by offering a false escape route that leads directly onto dangerous shoals.
[7][8] Literary critic Laurence Graver notes Conrad's “impoverished technique” in handling his theme: As he moves into the story itself, the narrator…emphasizes his hatred for duplicity, his nostalgia for a world in which loyalties are more serviceable, and his inability to probe the consequences of his final action…the narrator, so obsessed with the enfeebling power of treachery, drains all force from an occasional homily on the need for Frankness, Sincerity and Passion.”[9]Graver adds that Conrad, “through narrative sophistication and insistent symbolism, makes more claims for greater suggestiveness than the story [can] actually embody.”[10]