One of the most important, if not significantly revealing omissions that occurred in Conrad’s story as opposed to the real-life events that took place on the S.S. Jeddah concerns the reactions of the Muslim passengers aboard the ship. In Lord Jim, the reader is struck by the calmness of the ship and relative secrecy of the abandonment process whereas in the true account, as stated in the official wreck report from the Jeddah, the mood on the ship was chaotic as all of the passengers worked to help bail out the water, proving there was a perfect recognition of the fact that the ship could sink. This knowledge caused the passengers on the Jeddah, upon seeing an escape attempt with the lifeboats of the white crew, to resort to what amounted to a riot with the throwing of boxes and other debris at the lifeboat and a murderous attempt on the life of a potential escapee. In fact, in Conrad’s story, the only person who dies in an attempt to flee the presumably doomed ship is a crewmember who suffers a heart attack; thus there is no violent action outside of that which takes place in the thoughts and psyche of the escaping members of the crew. Unlike in Conrad’s story, on the Jeddah, there was a violent reaction from the passengers, but only after they began to notice an abandonment effort on the part of the white crew. As the ship continued to take on water, the official wreck report states that “all hands and passengers were then working at the pumps and bailing” (Board of Trade 1880).

Instead of the passengers working to aid in the sinking boat, Conrad’s account is much different and places the blame squarely on the head of Jim, who left the sleeping passengers, knowing they would die. “He saw here and there a head lifted off a mat, a vague form uprise in sitting posture, listen sleepily for a moment, sink back down again into the billowy confusions of boxes…. He stood still looking at these recumbent bodies, a doomed man aware of his fate, surveying the silent company of the dead” (Conrad 86). Here in Conrad’s story there is no alternative and no excuse such as bad weather or saving a woman; he acted in a cowardly way and this decision, no matter how impulsive, is the thrust of the story, not necessarily the larger collection of events themselves.

Furthermore, according to the report, the passengers on board, upon noticing that the captain, his wife, and the chief engineer were attempting to leave on the lifeboat, began hurtling anything they could find at the boat and that they could find. Without explanation, the wreck report (1880) states that “third engineer had in the meantime got into the boat, and the first officer found himself in the water, and was then taken into it.” None of this happens in Conrad’s story; there is no violent uprising, no women to serve as the motivator for a reaction, and certainly none of the extraneous events take place that take the focus off of Jim. Other elements of this that were left out in Conrad’s story, such as the bad weather instead of eerily calm seas present in Lord Jim, eliminate many aspects of responsibility on the part of many people and, in the case of Conrad’s novel, Jim is the one who bears the brunt of the guilt and is the main focus of the story. While the actual wreck report from 1881 suggests intensely dangerous seas with hurricane force winds, shortly before the Patna begins taking on water, the narrator remarks poetically on the calm nature of the sea, stating that“The ship moved so smoothly that her onward motion was imperceptible to the senses of men, as though she had been a crowded planet speeding through the dark spaces of ether behind the swarm of subs, in the appalling and calm solitudes awaiting the breath of future creations” (Conrad 22). By emphasizing the disparity in the weather and taking all blame off it, the only decision factor that remains is that Jim made the snap decision to abandon the ship. Conrad has allowed no excuses such as bad and dangerous weather, revolting passengers, or damsels in distress. The novel then can focus on this non-heroic decision and the character who made it, not the events and reasons for such an action.

Given this comparison between the true account of the Jeddah and Lord Jim, it becomes clear that this novel is not about shedding light on the true events that may very well have inspired it but is more about exploring the depths of the psychological complexity of romantic notions about heroism versus the immediate gut reaction in the face of crisis—in those moments when true heroism is possible but, in the case of Jim for yet another time in his life, not enacted. The novel is in this sense, about the character development of Jim and his inability to escape his penchant for heroic ideals that never works out as anticipated, instead proving him to be a coward at his core. In short, in the true account’s reports, there were many complex factors, but in an attempt to create a story about a man, Conrad needed to remove these external causes and find a candidate who could directly speak to the psychological complexity of the events that went far beyond the facts that are deemed by Marlowe to be insignificant in the face of the personal and psychological complexity of the events. Marlowe’s frustration that court only wants facts that are washed clean from the psychology behind the incident are expressed repeatedly and, as one scholar suggests, “certainly the court’s sentence—the cancelling of Jim’s certificate, is an impersonal bureaucratic decision that scarcely throws much psychological light on the affair”

Related

Historical Summary of “Outpost of Progress” by Joseph Conrad

Modernism in Tolstoy & Conrad: Comparison of “Death of Ivan Ilych” and “Heart of Darkness”

Works Cited
Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim. New York: Penguin Classics, 2001.
Greany, Michael. Conrad, Language and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Trade, Board of. Board of Trade Wreck Report for the S.S. Jeddah. REPORT of a Court of Inquiry held at Aden into the cause of the abandonment of the steamship “JEDDAH”. Aden: SCC Libraries, 1881.
Watt, Ian. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. Irvine: University of California Press, 1981.