The Shipwreck Cannibals

by Adam Nightingale

  Christopher Langman stood on the deck. He tried to assess what needed to be done. He was physically weak but the drama of the occasion seemed to give him energy and strength. Langman went to see John Deane in his cabin and rebuked him for demoralising the men. Deane told Langman that it was useless, all of them were going to die. John Deane, who under normal circumstances was either inept, corrupt, or else a despotic lunatic, was now completely neutered as a source of effective leadership. Langman elected to take charge.

  The Nottingham Galley was taking in water at a disturbing rate. Anyone on deck was in danger of being knocked into the sea by the breaking waves. Despite these hazards, and the added element that it was virtually impossible to stand upright on deck, Langman and three others began to chop down the fore-mast and the main-mast, hoping to form a bridge between the island and the ship.

  John Deane was still in his cabin. Christopher Langman paid him another visit. He implored Deane to think of his men and how he might save them. Deane was more preoccupied with retrieving anything of value before the ship went down. Langman left Deane alone and went back on deck.

  Langman was first onto the makeshift bridge. He crossed the bridge to the shore of the new island. He encouraged others to follow him. Three men took his lead. The rest of the crew remained behind. Langman and his compatriots seemed to disappear into the black as they crawled across the sundered mast. They could not be seen through the darkness of the evening or heard above the din of the ocean. The remaining crew could not tell if any of the four men had reached the shore or had been swept into the sea. They were divided in their minds as to whether to stay or cross over. John Deane wished to stay. The crew prayed. The decision was made for them. The cabin began to take in water. The men were forced onto the deck, obliged to crawl on their hands and knees. A couple of men braved the mast and bid the rest follow them. Having no choice all the remaining crew members of the Nottingham Galley crossed the bridge and reached Boon Island in relative safety.

  Every man was soaked. Their clothes were heavy and waterlogged. There was no shelter. They feared that the high tide would cover the island and drown them all. They expected to die that evening. They prayed. They thanked the Almighty. They confessed their sins to God. If they could survive the night then there was a degree of hope. The men expected the main bulk of the Nottingham Galley to be intact and reasonably accessible, in which case goods could be salvaged and their chances of survival improved. During the night a man was sent to look for the Nottingham Galley. He returned and reported that there was nothing there. The ship had disappeared. Morning came. The island had not been swamped by the tide as the men feared. All fourteen members of the crew were alive but the Nottingham Galley was gone. The only evidence that it had ever existed was bits of wreckage washed up on the shore.

  Among the wreckage was half a cheese caught up in a piece of the ship’s rope, some linen and some canvas. The cheese was distributed among the men. The linen and canvas was used to make a tent. Nicholas Mellin oversaw the tent’s construction. By the second day the tent was finished and habitable. Christopher Langman credited the tent with saving the crew from freezing to death but it couldn’t keep out the wet. The tent’s present location posed a danger. The tent had to be moved to higher ground to avoid the tides that covered that part of the rock. The tent provided some protection but little comfort. When the men slept they slept on stones. Despite the new shelter, keeping warm would be a problem. The jagged topography of Boon Island prohibited walking around as a means of improving the body’s circulation. The tent failed to save the ship’s cook who died of exposure. The crew grieved. Their mourning seemed to be an amalgam of genuine sadness for a fallen shipmate and a lament for themselves as they feared that they too would freeze to death before long. The crew removed the cook’s body from the tent and let the sea have him.

  The weather improved and the men drew some inkling of where they were. They were three or so leagues from the mainland. The sight of the New England shore gave them hope. If they were so close to civilisation then rescue was a realistic possibility. But the new knowledge brought its own set of frustrations. It was evident to Langman that the Nottingham Galley could have avoided hitting the island had they steered west by south. The storm would have blown them onto the shore of the mainland.

  There was enough wreckage to build a boat. Cold and hunger had drained the men of much of their strength but they worked at their new task regardless. The boat was 12ft long and 4ft wide. It could hold six men. Canvas was used to waterproof it. It had no sail. It was a crude construction but as ready to make its maiden voyage as it would ever be. The question remained as to who would man the boat? Many of the crew pleaded to be the first to go. The matter was discussed. The carpenter had built the vessel and had earned the right to go. In spite of his previous conduct it was adjudged that John Deane also had the right to go. Nicholas Mellin was chosen because he could speak the language of the native Indians. The rest were Jasper Deane, Charles Whitworth, George White and Christopher Langman, one man more than the prescribed six the boat was thought capable of holding.

  The plan was simple. The boat was to reach the shore and those onboard were to get help. The carpenter would take his tools with him in case they needed to build a better vessel when on the mainland. The boat was launched. The keel turned upwards and the seven men were pitched into the sea. They swam back to the island with difficulty. Some nearly drowned. Nicholas Mellin had hold of the boat by a rope. The ship’s gunner grabbed the rope. The two men hung on to the rope for an hour. They hoped to keep hold of the boat until the sea settled and then they would retrieve it. As the two men held on to the rope the ocean slammed the boat into the rocks again and again until nothing remained but splintered wood. The carpenter’s tools sank to the bottom of the ocean. The destruction of the boat was hard on the men’s morale but they prayed anyway and thanked God for the safe delivery of the seven men who had tried to row to the mainland.

  Snow fell on Boon Island. The wind grew fierce. The clothes of the men that had survived the destruction of the boat began to freeze about their weakened bodies.

  The following day the weather improved. The shore could be seen with greater clarity than at any time since the shipwreck. Houses were visible. Boats could be observed rowing from one place to another. The crew were jubilant. They prayed that they might be spotted and rescued. They stood at what they perceived to be the key points on Boon Island where they would be most visible to the people on shore. They shouted to get their attention. They were too far away to be heard.

  The men were hungry. They subsisted on small rations of cheese. There were four or five bits of beef to share as well as a calf’s tongue. The food supply was finite. More food needed to be found. George White discovered a part of the island where raw mussels could be harvested when the tide was low. He collected two or three days’ worth, which amounted to six or seven per day for each man. The crew thanked God for the new source of food. But it was often difficult to sustain the supply because of the high tides and the cold weather. The flow of fresh mussels was arrested almost as soon as it had begun. John Deane had something to say about it. He continued his rolling Jeremiad, advising the crew to ‘shift for our selves, there being nothing now for us to trust to but the mercies of God’. The crew ate seaweed. A piece of cow’s hide was found. It was cut into small pieces and the men chewed on it.

  The morale of the crew started to lift. Even John Deane was making prudent suggestions about how he could contribute to the men’s wellbeing, should they ever be rescued. He said that he would sell any of the cannons, cables and anchors of the Nottingham Galley that had washed up on shore and would use the money from the sale to pay for his own and the crew’s care and upkeep.

  Morale was given a further lift when Christopher Langman discovered a seagull sitting in a hole in a rock. He killed the seagull with the handle of a saucepan. The seagull was divided and distributed among the crew who ate the bird flesh, like eve
rything else they had consumed on the island, raw.

  A grim realisation fell upon the crew. Help was not going to come from the mainland. They had to effect their own deliverance. A ‘stout Dutchman’ proposed the notion of building a raft from the remaining wreckage. He even volunteered to be the first to man the raft if no one else wanted to risk the journey.

  The raft was made from the remains of the fore yard of the Nottingham Galley. All of the work was carried out by a weak crew with virtually no tools. They stripped the rigging. They split the yard in two to make the sides of the raft. A plank constituted the raft’s middle. A sail was improvised from two hammocks.

  The Dutchman would be first to man the raft on its maiden voyage but there was room for a second person. George White elected to accompany the Dutchman. Their task was get to the mainland, find help and light a fire as a signal to the men on Boon Island that they had arrived safely. The launch was a failure. The raft was overset. The Dutchman and George White were tipped into the sea. They managed to get back to the island but nearly drowned in the attempt. The raft was retrieved. The Dutchman was undeterred and wanted to go again but the sea had knocked all defiance out of George White. A nameless volunteer, a Swedish man, put himself forward and the raft was relaunched. The crew watched the raft until sunset. It appeared to be on course, near enough to the shore to give the men hope.

  There was a hard wind that evening. During the night the carpenter died.

  In the morning, members of the crew dragged the body of the carpenter out of the tent. John Deane and Christopher Langman had gone foraging for food. They returned empty-handed. John Deane was first to propose the notion of eating the carpenter. Deane reasoned that God had permitted the carpenter to die. The men had not been complicit in his death therefore it was not a sin to eat the corpse. Deane volunteered to butcher the carpenter but needed assistance. He asked Nicholas Mellin if he would help but the boatswain was too feeble. A crew member named Charles Grey assisted Deane. Between them Deane and Grey removed the carpenter’s head and hands. They skinned him. They put the head, the hands and the skin somewhere close by. They butchered the carcass and brought the first helpings of the new meat ration back to the men. With the exception of Christopher Langman, Nicholas Mellin and George White, the crew ate the carpenter’s raw flesh. The three abstainers lasted until morning and then, caving in to hunger, accepted their ration.

  John Deane dismembered and butchered the corpse of the Nottingham Galley’s carpenter. Eating the dead carpenter’s flesh kept the surviving members of the crew alive while they waited to be rescued. Illustration by Stephen Dennis

  For the most part the men’s response to consuming human flesh was measured. The majority refrained from eating too much as they were unsure how it would affect their health. John Deane did not appear to have the same concerns and ate more flesh than any other member of the crew. As he did so, he grew more abusive and argumentative, as did Jasper Deane and Charles Whitworth. John Deane’s piety diminished in proportion to the amount of flesh he ate. He stopped praying with the rest of the crew and cursed and blasphemed to such a degree that Christopher Langman felt compelled to upbraid him for ‘profane swearing’.

  The thoughts of the crew turned back to the Dutchman when smoke was spotted rising from the mainland. They believed that he had been successful. They reasoned that rescue was imminent.

  On the evening of the twenty-first day on Boon Island, Christopher Langman dreamt that a sloop would come for them. The dream was so vivid that Langman took it to be prophecy. In the morning he sent the ship’s gunner to look and see if the dream had any substance. The gunner saw a sloop sailing toward Boon Island. The crew were ecstatic. They offered up prayers of thanks to God.

  The sloop weighed anchor as near to Boon Island’s shore as was safe. It was too dangerous to attempt a landing. The survivors of the Nottingham Galley shouted to the sloop and asked if those on board might help them start a fire. The sloop dispatched a solitary man in a canoe. He brought with him the means to make a fire but that was all. There were no other provisions. When the rescuer saw the survivors at close proximity he was afraid of them, such was their ragged and ghoulish appearance. The crew surrounded him and in unison began to vocalise their joy at finally being discovered. Through the rescuer the crew learned the fate of the Dutchman and his companion. The raft had been found on the shore of the mainland. A single frozen body had been discovered nearby under a tree. The rescuer reasoned that the man in the raft had come ashore during the night and had died because he was ignorant of the area and did not know where to go to find assistance and shelter. The body of the second crew member had not been found and was presumed lost to the sea.

  John Deane was supposed to return to the sloop but the canoe overset and Deane fell into the water. It was shallow this time and he was able to wade back to shore. The crew of the Nottingham Galley picked up the canoe and carried it across the island to find a better place for it to return to the sloop. The solitary rescuer stayed with the survivors for three hours. When he left them it was with a promise to return better equipped and get them off the island.

  A storm blew up. The sloop struggled to get back to the mainland. The sloop sank. The crew of the sloop made shore by the skin of their teeth. The captain of the sloop sent a communiqué calling for assistance for the men still stranded on Boon Island. For the crew of the Nottingham Galley the force of the storm was leavened by the presence of fire. After almost a month of murderous cold, the heat of the fire must have felt glorious. The carpenter’s flesh certainly tasted better now that it could be broiled.

  The bad weather continued throughout the next day. There was no rescue party. That night the men decided to foreswear their ration of cooked flesh. They abstained for fear that if their rescuers came the next morning they might abandon them if it became obvious what the crew of the Nottingham Galley had done to survive. It was a shrewd decision. The following day the rescue party arrived. The survivors could finally go home.

  The evacuation from Boon Island was overseen by a Captain Long and a Captain Forbe. The men were transferred from Boon Island to the awaiting vessels. Many had to be carried as the freezing cold had wrought havoc on their limbs and they could not walk. Christopher Langman commended the care and attention shown to the survivors by Captain Forbe and Captain Long. The two captains ensured the survivors were fed but controlled their intake of food. The rescue party arrived at their destination at night. John Deane stayed in lodgings belonging to a Captain Purver. The crew were looked after by the locals. A doctor was assigned to the survivors. Christopher Langman and George White suffered from diarrhoea and fever. The frozen flesh of the cabin boy’s foot had mortified. Part of the foot had to be cut away to stop the gangrene spreading to the rest of the cabin boy’s body. In spite of their terrible afflictions the men were glad to be alive. Christopher Langman praised the care and attention of the locals. He attributed his own and his crewmates’ survival to the ‘goodness of God’.

  A few days into the survivors’ convalescence, John Deane wrote his protest. He brought the protest to Christopher Langman and George White to sign. Both men were sick and dependent on the care of the locals for their health and wellbeing. They were physically weak and vulnerable. They didn’t want to sign the protest but were afflicted by a renewed fear of Captain John Deane. Now that he was back on the mainland among his peers and friends, Deane was in a powerful position to exert his influence to Langman and White’s detriment if they refused to comply with his wishes. Both men believed that John Deane would have had them evicted from their lodgings if they failed to endorse his account of the loss of the Nottingham Galley. Langman and White signed the protest.

  John Deane’s behaviour on the mainland was cruel and irrational. Deane was the channel through which the relief of the townspeople passed. It was down to Deane to disseminate the relief to the rest of his men. He abused the trust placed in him. He hogged the best of the relief for himself and his brother J
asper. According to Langman, a Captain John Wentworth ‘gave several of our men good clothes,’ but ‘Captain Deane came and ordered them the worst that could be had’. To compound the vicious treatment of his ailing crew, John Deane had his men evicted from their lodgings before they were fully recovered.

  John Deane did not seem to be in complete control of his own vindictive moods. Prudence ought to have necessitated that Deane showed a more benevolent side to his friends and deliverers than he did to his crew, but Deane seemed incapable of concealing his cruel nature. He did not exhibit any obvious gratitude for his rescue and he mortally offended his host. While talking with Captain Purver’s children, Deane told them that ‘he would have made a frigasy of them, if he had ’em in Boon Island’. Captain Purver threw his guest out.

  Once Christopher Langman, George White and Nicholas Mellan were well enough, each man wrote an affidavit accusing John Deane of fraud and of having perpetrated a violent assault on Langman. On 9 February 1711, in front of their own captain, the three men swore to the veracity of their statements before a justice of the peace.

  4

  Eighteenth-Century Rashomon

  By 1711 the events of Boon Island had become a talking point in London. It was known that Christopher Langman intended to write an account of the shipwreck exposing John Deane, Jasper Deane and Charles Whitworth to public disgrace. As rumours began to circulate, before anything had yet appeared in print, John and Jasper Deane were already subject to hostile treatment. Charles Whitworth had died shortly after the Boon Island incident and was spared much of the humiliations meted out to his friends. Jasper Deane complained that he and his brother were subject to ‘daily ignominious scandals, and injurious mobbing to our faces’. Necessity demanded that Jasper begin work on his own account of the shipwreck. A race was on to see which of the two factions would get their version of events into print first.