Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley
Kenneth Roberts
* * *
title : Boon Island : Including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley
author : Roberts, Kenneth Lewis.; Bales, Jack.; Warner, Richard H.
publisher : University Press of New England
isbn10 | asin : 0874517443
print isbn13 : 9780874517446
ebook isbn13 : 9780585229515
language : English
subject Shipwrecks--Maine--Boon Island--History--18th century--Fiction, Survival after airplane accidents, shipwrecks, etc.--Fiction, Nottingham (Galley)--Fiction, Boon Island (Me.)--Fiction, Historical fiction, Sea stories.
publication date : 1996
lcc : PS3535.O176B66 1996eb
ddc : 813/.52
subject : Shipwrecks--Maine--Boon Island--History--18th century--Fiction, Survival after airplane accidents, shipwrecks, etc.--Fiction, Nottingham (Galley)--Fiction, Boon Island (Me.)--Fiction, Historical fiction, Sea stories.
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Boon Island
Including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley
Page ii
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Boon Island
Including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley
Kenneth Roberts
Edited by
Jack Bales and Richard Warner
University Press of New England
Hanover and London
Page iv
University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755
The novel, Boon Island: Copyright © (MCMLV), by
Kenneth Roberts and Anna M. Roberts
Richard Warner, Preface; Philip N. Cronenwett, "Going to the
Sources for Historical and Literary Explanation"; Richard
Warner, "Captain Deane and the Wreck of the Nottingham
Galley"; Jack Bales, "Kenneth Roberts and Boon Island:
A Study of Historical and Literary Perception"; and this
compilation © 1996 by University Press of New England
Published by arrangement with Doubleday, a division of
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
The novel, Boon Island, originally published by Doubleday &
Company, Inc., January 2, 1956
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America 5 4 3 2 1
CIP data appear at the end of the book
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CONTENTS
Preface
Richard Warner
vii
Going to the Sources for Historical and Literary Explanation
Philip N. Cronenwett
ix
Part I
The Wreck of the Nottingham Galley
Captain John Deane and the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley
Richard Warner
3
The Jasper Deane Account (1711)
22
The Langman Account (1711)
42
The John Deane Account (Revis'd) (1726)
66
Part II
Kenneth Roberts and Boon Island
Kenneth Roberts and Boon Island: A Study of Historical and Literary Perception
Jack Bales
93
Boon Island
Kenneth Roberts
103
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PREFACE
In 1710 the trading vessel Nottingham Galley set out from London bound for Boston on a perilous, late season voyage. Before making port, it encountered severe storms and struck Boon Island, a desolate rock off the Maine coast. All hands got ashore but the ship and cargo were lost. Devoid of food, shelter, and fire, the crew suffered terribly and was obliged to cannibalize a dead man before being rescued.
Captain John Deane, the master of the ill-starred ship, wrote his account of the disaster, which was rushed to publication by his brother, Jasper, to refute a conflicting account by the first mate, Christopher Langman. His reputation ruined, Captain Deane disappeared into Russian naval service for eleven years. He afterward returned to England, where he entered a new career as a spy and diplomat and cultivated his unavoidable celebrity with frequent reprints of his narrative.
The wreck of the Nottingham Galley thus became as well known in the first half of the eighteenth century as the mutiny on the Bounty did in the second half. Though its notoriety has since faded, modern readers still know the sea disaster as the subject of Boon Island, the gripping novel written by Kenneth Roberts in 1956.
In 1992, a colleague and I had a most curious scholarly intersection when, unbeknownst to each other, our research brought us both to Captain Deane's shipwreck at Boon Island. In the late
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summer, reference librarian Jack Bales was completing the final chapter of his biography of the novelist Kenneth Roberts, dealing with the author's last book, Boon Island. At the same time, I was searching archives in London and St. Petersburg to reconstruct the career of Captain John Deane, a British officer who served in the Russian fleet in the era of Peter the Great. Though I had found Deane's service records and materials about his later activities, I was perplexed about his early life until I discovered the Captain's account of his shipwreck at Boon Island, Maine, in 1710.
I had read Roberts's novel and knew Bales's work. In the fall I brought up the intersection of our research. We immediately realized the value of a collaboration and embarked upon the project that has resulted in the production of this unique collection of the original narratives, scholarly essays, and historical fiction.
RICHARD WARNER
FREDERICKSBURG, VIRGINIA
SEPTEMBER 1995
Page ix
GOING TO THE SOURCES FOR HISTORICAL AND LITERARY EXPLANATION
Philip N. Cronenwett
The line between historical events, historical fact, and historical fiction never has been clear. Often it has been seen as a Maginot Linean impregnable wall that clearly defines and separates truth from fancy. As we all know, the Maginot Line was not impermeable. Defining historical fiction and setting it off from "history" presents some interesting problems. Charles T. Wood, in a provocative essay on the beginnings of historical fiction, has suggested that "neither historians nor literary critics have ever precisely defined the boundary separating history from historical fiction." 1 He further suggests that, from the seventeenth century to the present, the genre of historical fiction grew to uphold larger historical truths, that the lessons and the nature of the human condition remain the province of writers of fiction.2 Finally, Wood suggests that new critical theories, borrowed from literary studies, are offering new interpretive tools. "If such theories prevail, the distinction between history and historical fiction will again become one less of kind than of degree."3
Definition is paramount. One recent student of the genre has used the terms nonfiction novel, factual fiction, documentary novel, pseudofactual novel, and historical novel4 to attempt to define, or perhaps confine, the novel that uses fact as a basis for
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its plot, characterization, and background. The question is not a new one. Henry James, W. D. Howells, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Theodore Dreiser, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, and John Dos Passos, novelists firmly rooted in the canon of American literature, all wrote historical fiction. But, are they considered historical novelists?
What makes an historical novel? What mak
es it valuable? Is it believable? Do we accept the story as true? Or do we accept it simply as fiction? Thinking back to Herodotus and Thucydides, both blurred the lines between fact and fiction simply to make the story more complete and more readable. And, writers of historical fiction often provide great insight into historical events. Both James Fenimore Cooper and William Gilmore Simms understood the importance of the frontier and wrote about it at length long before Frederick Jackson Turner enunciated his thesis. Thus, the fiction presaged the theory.
There are, I think, two kinds of historical fiction in the broadest sense. The first takes a generalized event or a series of events and places characters and stories within them. C. S. Forester's "Hornblower" series, a vastly popular set of novels, has taught a generation more about the naval history of the Napoleonic era and the psychology of command than we, as historians, could ever hope to do.
The second kind of historical fiction is that practiced by Kenneth Roberts. A very specific event, with known characters, plot, and outcome, is fictionalized, often with a reason. In Boon Island Roberts wanted to write an allegory of good and evil, with Americanism triumphant in the end. On the title page of his own copy of the novel, Roberts wrote: "the result of six years of contemplation, two years of struggle, and the most agonized summer I ever spent." It is interesting to note that, for the first time in his career, Roberts felt it necessary to use what is now a standard disclaimer on the verso of a title page: "With the exception
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of actual historical personages identified as such, the characters and incidents are entirely the product of the author's imagination and have no relation to any person or event in real life.''
Roberts is one of the few historical novelists, if not the only one, who published revised editions of his novels, not to smooth out text, but to correct factual information. For this alone, he ought to be recognized. His research was as exacting as that of most historians. In his papers at Dartmouth, there are, for example, heavily marked charts of Greenwich, the Thames, and the Maine and New Hampshire coastline, all used to ensure accuracy. In a note in his copy of Jasper Deane's account of the Nottingham Galley, Roberts questioned the source of drinking water on Boon Island and, typically, wrote to the lighthouse keeper at Boon Island and received a reply. The result is a completely accurate picture of the need for fresh water in the novel.
Roberts received a special Pulitzer Prize citation for his historical novels in 1957. Although Boon Island is certainly not the best of his historical fiction, it is one of the more exciting adventures, with a shipwreck, great deprivation, and interesting menus. It did not receive the critical acclaim of his other novels. There were a number of reviews of the book, in such venues as the Times Literary Supplement, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times Book Review. Of these, only Carlos Baker's review in the latter is uniformly positive. Baker greeted the nine-year lapse in publication with great pleasure. After a series of comments about the historicity of the book, he concluded that "the truth makes better reading than trumped-up romance." 5
Faced with three variant eighteenth-century narratives of a single event, Kenneth Roberts carefully studied them, reworked them, added more historical detail, and then supplied a fictive veneer. His account of the wreck of the Nottingham Galley may be, in the end, more accurate than any of the narratives pub-
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lished by the participants in the event. Thus a question that must always be asked of an historical novelDoes it help the reader to better understand the historical event without distorting the truth?is answered in Boon Island, most assuredly.
In Part I of this volume, the reader is offered the unique opportunity of examining the original source materials Roberts used to create his story, introduced by an essay on John Deane, commander of the ill-fated ship. Part II includes a critical essay on Roberts and Boon Island and a reprint of the novel, which has been out of print for many years.
Daniel Aaron, in an issue of American Heritage devoted to the historical novel, claimed that "the charm of acquiring historical information painlessly can't be entirely discounted.... Good writers write the kind of history good historians can't or don't write. Historical fiction isn't history in the conventional sense and shouldn't be judged as such. The best historical novels are loyal to history, but it is a history absorbed and set to music." 6
Notes
1. Charles T. Wood, "Richard III and the Beginnings of Historical Fiction," The Historian 54:2 (Winter 1992): 305.
2. Ibid., 313.
3. Ibid., 314.
4. Barbara Foley, Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).
5. Carlos Baker, "To Courage Belonged the Victory," New York Times Book Review 61:1 (January 1, 1956): 3.
6. Daniel Aaron, "What Can You Learn From a Historical Novel?" American Heritage 43:6 (October 1992). The quotations are from pp. 57 and 62 respectively. The entire issue of this journal is subtitled "Truth and Fiction: The Power of the Historical Novel."
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I
THE WRECK OF THE NOTTINGHAM GALLEY
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Captain John Deane and the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley
Richard Warner
In late August 1731 the Duke of Lorraine briefly visited the port of Ostend, one of many cities on his tour of the Austrian Netherlands. 1 It was an official affair, the first time that the future husband of Maria Theresa had met with local dignitaries. They must have been disturbed when, during a banquet in his honor, the duke engaged the British consul, Captain John Deane, in a lengthy personal conversation that had nothing to do with commercial relations or any other serious matter of state. Indeed, the captain later reported, "the Duke knew ... of my having been shipwrecked [and] he desired me to give him one of my printed narratives, which I accordingly did the next day."2 As a commercial representative, Deane hardly merited the attention of the future emperor, but he had become something of a celebrity himself, for his shipwreck was as notorious in the first half of the eighteenth century as the mutiny on the Bounty was in the second half.3 Like so many others who read about the ill-starred voyage, the duke undoubtedly was fascinated by the chilling account of the disaster and by the crew's decision to cannibalize one of their members. Though the notoriety of the wreck of the Nottingham Galley has faded, it has earned a place in the literature
This essay appeared in The New England Quarterly 48, no. 1 (March 1995).
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and lore of seafaring, most prominently in Boon Island, the last novel written by Kenneth Roberts. 4 Still, little is known about the mysterious Captain Deane and how he used his account of the wreck to enhance his reputation in his own time and for posterity.5
In 1710 the Nottingham Galley, laden with cordage, set out from London bound for Boston. After taking on an additional cargo of butter and cheese at Killybegs, Ireland, it set sail again for its Atlantic crossing. Arriving off the Newfoundland coast dangerously late in the season, the small vessel encountered severe storms. Just before making port, the Nottingham struck Boon Island, a barren and desolate rock off Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Miraculously, all hands got ashore, but the ship and its entire cargo were lost. There was no food and little left with which the men could build a shelter from the bitter cold. They suffered terribly. The cook died in the first days and was buried at sea; two seamen were lost in a heroic but futile attempt to escape the island on a raft; and the fourth, the carpenter, died and then was cannibalized to sustain the fourteen crew members, who were eventually rescued twenty-four days after losing their ship.
Just a few days before their deliverance, the crew reached the necessary but dreadful decision. The captain later wrote, "We were now reduced to the most deplorable and melancholy circumstances imaginable ... no fire, and the weather extreme cold, our small, stock of cheese spent, and nothing to support our feeble bodies ... [with] the prospect of starving, without a
ny appearance of relief." They had reached what he described as "the last extremity ... to eat the dead for support." After discussing "the lawfulness and sinfulness of their situation," the captain recalled, "[we] were obliged to submit to the more prevailing arguments of our craving appetites." In his memoir Deane was candid about the moral dilemma, and he graphically
