The Shipwreck Cannibals

by Adam Nightingale

  Jasper Deane beat Christopher Langman to the punch. A Narrative of the Sufferings, Preservation and Deliverance of Capt. John Dean: in the Nottingham Galley of London, Cast Away on Boon-Island, near New England, December 11, 1710 was published in the summer of 1711. Jasper Deane’s account was drawn from an expanded narrative written by John Deane from which Jasper ‘omitted many lesser circumstances’ that would ‘swell this narrative beyond its design, and thereby exceed the bounds of common purchase’. Jasper Deane set down what the ‘design’ of his narrative was to be in the introduction to his account:

  A few months past. I little expected to appear in print (especially on such occasions) but the frequent enquires of many curious persons (as also the design of others to publish the account without us) seem to lay me under an absolute necessity, lest others acquainted, prejudice the truth with an imperfect relation. Therefore, finding myself obliged to expose this small treatise to public view and censure, I persuade myself that what’s here recorded will be entirely credited, by all candid, ingenious spirits; for those whose kind opinion I am really solicitous.

  Jasper Deane presumed that those who knew his brother would believe the account. He gently challenged those who were doubtful of John Deane’s integrity to seek out such Boon Island survivors that were presently in London and ask their opinion. Jasper Deane described the prose style he had adopted for his account as ‘smooth’ and ‘unaffected’ without ‘unnecessary enlargements … relating only matters of fact.’ He made reference to others who had read it, approved it and insisted that it be published. He praised the New Englanders that had nursed the crew of the Nottingham Galley back to health. He made mention of those who had already read his narrative, their verdict being that it was ‘novel and real’.

  Despite being known as Jasper Deane’s narrative, the story was told in the first person from John Deane’s point of view. The encounter with the French privateers off the coast of Ireland was not mentioned. The narrator relayed the details of the storm and the shipwreck. In these moments John Deane was presented to the reading public as a courageous and pragmatic man, overseeing the escape from the damaged vessel but having the foresight to retrieve from his cabin what might be useful on the island. Deane’s near fatal journey from ship to shore resulting in the loss of his fingernails, the first few days on Boon Island, the attempt to build a shelter and the onset of hunger and physical decay were all described. In the middle of the narrative John Deane stood astride the chaos, an unassuming and occasionally introspective leader who led by example. Christopher Langman and company were neither named nor criticised. The initial attempts to construct a boat were relayed in relatively forensic detail. The attempt to launch the raft offered the first explicit mention of Christopher Langman. Simply referred to by his rank, Langman was mentioned in the context of volunteering to be one of the first to sail in the boat. It was a tacit acknowledgement of a positive quality in Langman, his courage. The aftermath of the boat’s destruction portrayed John Deane interpreting the event in the context of God’s providential mercy. The captain’s piety was a recurring theme in the Jasper Deane account.

  The next few pages concerned themselves with the various attempts to fend off hunger and the construction of the raft. Again, Langman’s contribution was positive, hunting and killing the seagull that provided the crew of the Nottingham Galley with a much needed infusion of meat into their diet. The Swede took centre stage, supplanting both John Deane and Christopher Langman as the heroic core of the narrative as the raft was constructed. When the raft was ready, Langman’s contribution was to advise caution because of the lateness of the hour, a piece of advice that would prove correct when news of the Swede’s death reached the survivors after their rescue.

  The onset of starvation, John Deane’s search for mussels and the death of the carpenter were all relayed in the pages of Jasper Deane’s narrative. John Deane was the first to move the body. He was the chairman of the moral summit as to whether or not to eat the body. He was the one to skin the corpse when the crew refused. He was always leading by example even as his health deteriorated and his resolve was tested on a daily basis. In their initial refusal to eat human flesh, Christopher Langman and his two companions were portrayed in a more favourable moral light than even John or Jasper Deane.

  As the narrative neared its conclusion the effects of cannibalism took their toll on the crew who degenerated into a form of barbarism. But John Deane remained disciplined in his eating, his rationing of flesh and his piety. In the Jasper Deane account, eating human flesh did not seem to have the same effect on John Deane as it did on the rest of the crew.

  The rescue unfolded with John Deane concealing cannibalism from his deliverers. After a few false dawns the men were finally transported to New England, their last meal on Boon Island being broiled human flesh. The crew of the Nottingham Galley convalesced under the care of the New Englanders. Once they were well the survivors went their separate ways. John Deane, Christopher Langman ‘and two or three more’ returned to England.

  Jasper Deane presented his version of the events with a vivid clarity. He had portrayed his brother as a heroic figure, privately vulnerable; a man who secretly agonised over difficult decisions but carried them out regardless, framing everything he did in the context of God’s grace and sovereignty.

  During the length of the narrative, Jasper Deane had been conspicuous in his restraint with regard to Christopher Langman, making no mention of the first mate’s grievances. Jasper Deane was saving all his venom for the postscript. At the conclusion of the document Jasper Deane finally addressed the charges made against him, his brother and Charles Whitworth. Jasper Deane admitted that he had considered not dignifying Langman’s accusations with a response but felt compelled to for the sake of ‘truth and reputation’. Jasper Deane began his formal defence by tackling the privateer incident. He claimed that John Deane did not know about the insurance. He attested that John Deane would sooner empty his ship of crew and valuables, run her aground and then set her on fire than lose her to the French. Jasper Deane turned his attention to Langman’s accusations that his brother deliberately shipwrecked the Nottingham Galley for insurance purposes: ‘One would wonder malice itself could invent or suggest anything so ridiculous … that considers the extreme hazards and difficulties suffered by the commander himself, as well as his men, where ‘twas more than ten thousand to one, but every man had perished … .’

  Jasper Deane stated that the insurance gained on such a venture would amount to £226 7s. Deliberately wrecking a ship and risking the death of everyone involved would not be worth the risk. Christopher Langman’s accusations made no sense. If there was any substance to the accusations of fraud, Jasper Deane demanded that his enemies prove it.

  Christopher Langman’s account of the Boon Island disaster was published toward the close of 1711. It was entitled: A true account of the voyage of the Nottingham-Galley of London, John Deane Commander, from the River Thames to New-England.

  There was no circumspection in Langman’s account. He began as he meant to go on with a sustained, angry assault on John Deane’s character. In his brief introduction he set out his stall. He stated that the reason the Nottingham Galley had been wrecked was the ‘captain’s obstinacy’. He accused John Deane of trying to betray the vessel to the French. Langman stated that the agenda of his version of events was to expose ‘the falsehoods in the captain’s narrative’.

  In the preface to Langman’s account, the first mate’s verdict on his former captain was that John Deane had treated his crew ‘barbarously both by land and sea’. He accused John and Jasper Deane of rushing back to London to get their erroneous version of events into print before the truth could out. Langman made reference to Jasper Deane quoting those in England and New England that would attest to the veracity of the captain’s version. Langman reminded Deane and informed the public that he had been ill and held to ransom in New England, that he was obliged to confirm John Deane’s version o
f events for fear of being tipped out into the streets. Langman claimed that any dissenters to Deane’s version of events were ‘confined from appearing in public during our sickness,’ and ‘compelled to sign what our illness made us uncapable of understanding’. As soon as Langman and his companions were well they ‘made out affidavits here subjoined before Mr Penhallow, a Justice of the Peace, and a member of council at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, New England’. This was done in the presence of John Deane, ‘who had not the face to deny it, his character appeared in a new light, and he was covered with shame and confusion’.

  Christopher Langman addressed John and Jasper Deane’s defence against the accusations of insurance fraud he had brought against them. Langman stated: ‘we know nothing further of this matter than what we heard on board … That there were great sums insured upon the ship, the truth of which is more proper for the inquiry of others than us who are only sailors.’ Langman pointed to the fact that he and two others had signed affidavits against Deane and company. Langman had done this under oath. He invoked the sanctity of that oath in the closing paragraph of his introduction:

  And since what we deliver is upon oath, we hope it will obtain credit sooner than the bare word of Captain Deane, his brother and Mr Whitworth, who were all three interested persons, and but one of them, acquainted with all the matter of fact, which for his own reputation and safety he has been obliged to set in false colours. Besides, Mr Whitworth is since dead, so that the captain has no vouchers but himself and his brother; and how little credit they deserve, will sufficiently appear by what follows.

  What followed was a narrative that gave full attention to the incident at Killybegs, overheard conversations about fraud and Deane’s brutal treatment of his crew, culminating in the attempted murder of Christopher Langman hours before the Nottingham Galley was smashed to pieces on the rocks of Boon Island. The Captain John Deane of Langman’s narrative was entirely without any redeeming features. When in control of the Nottingham Galley he was a violent tyrant. When catastrophe struck he was a gibbering coward. Langman’s Deane was a lazy incompetent whose judgment was constantly being called into question by the more capable first mate. At any and every point during Christopher Langman’s narrative John Deane’s faults were highlighted, as were the points in the Jasper Deane narrative where the brothers had lied to make themselves look better. As Langman relayed the early stages of the sinking of the Nottingham Galley, he felt compelled to point out that John Deane had not rallied the crew to pray, nor had he ordered a terrified crew back on deck or ordered the cutting down of the mast. Langman praised the crew stating that they had not wilted ‘under racks of conscience’ as the Deane account had said they did. Deane had lied when he said that he had organised the advance party of swimmers to go ashore. He had lied about nearly drowning and losing his finger nails. Nobody swam ashore. The water had only been waist deep.

  Once on Boon Island the broad facts of Langman’s narrative largely aligned with those of the Jasper Deane account, punctuated with digs at John Deane. The men made a tent. The cook froze to death but John Deane did not ‘show compassion’ to the cook. The crew grew cold and hungry. The crew built a boat. The boat was smashed to pieces. Deane claimed the boat had a sail. Langman insisted there was no sail. The crew searched for food. John Deane stated that he wished he could have sold the cables and anchors and cannons of the Nottingham Galley for the men’s subsistence, one the few human qualities attributed to John Deane by Christopher Langman. Langman killed his seagull. The raft was built. And although there seemed to be confusion over whether the heroic architect of the raft was Dutch or Swedish, it seemed to be a rare point of disagreement between Deane and Langman where there was no animosity. The carpenter died. John Deane rationalised that the cannibalisation of the carpenter was right and proper, with the implication that God had killed the carpenter so it was perfectly fine to eat him. Deane wanted to butcher the carpenter. Langman, George White and the boatswain abstained from cannibalism but gave in to their hunger the following day.

  There was a break in the narrative for another inventory of accusations against John Deane. The captain was not welcome in the raft. John Deane did not look for provisions on his own. The dead carpenter’s severed head and hands were not put in the ocean but left on the island. John Deane ate more human flesh than anybody else. The crew did not become animalistic after they had eaten human flesh. John Deane, Jasper Deane and Charles Whitworth did.

  The crew were rescued.

  Christopher Langman listed the survivors. Survival was credited to God’s providence. In concluding his account, Langman launched a final salvo at his hated enemy. John Deane was a liar when he said that he spotted the sloop that facilitated their rescue. Deane exaggerated the danger he was in when he fell out of the canoe. When in New England John Deane’s friend evicted him from his lodging when the captain terrorised his daughter. John Deane hogged the best of the relief for himself and had his own shipmates ‘turned out of lodgings’ before they were fully recovered.

  Langman attested to the truth of his account. He ascribed that his motive for writing was, ‘to testify our thankfulness to God for his great deliverance, and to give others warning not to trust their lives or estates in the hands of so wicked and brutish a man’. Finally Langman included copies of the three affidavits in his narrative to support his claim.

  By the end of 1711 the two accounts of the shipwreck were in circulation and at war with one another. But other less credible versions were about to muddy the waters. A third account of the shipwreck was published by a J. Dutton. It appeared to be an unsolicited account drawing heavily on the Jasper Deane version. It contained a completely spurious reference to the crew of the Nottingham Galley eating ‘bodies’ as opposed to the singular carcass they actually consumed. There were mentions of the crew drawing lots to determine who would sacrifice themselves once the store of dead meat had been exhausted. In New England, a more credible version of the narrative was in circulation. The New England edition was in essence a truncated version of the Jasper Deane narrative. It was notable for the addition of a sermon about the Boon Island adventure by the Puritan preacher and pamphleteer Cotton Mather.

  History would ultimately favour John and Jasper Deane’s version of events. There were two obvious reasons for this. Christopher Langman died soon after the publication of his account and the vitality of his account died with him. In the absence of effective opposition John Deane was free to shape his own Boon Island narrative unopposed and as he saw fit. Throughout his life, John Deane would revisit the narrative and in a series of revisions and amendments offer back to the reading public the Boon Island story the way he wanted it to be remembered. But even if Langman had survived and dogged John Deane throughout his life with his own contrary versions of the Boon Island adventure, it was unlikely the public would have sided with him. John Deane’s subsequent adventures would disprove many of Christopher Langman’s accusations regarding his competence and character. But there were sections of his own narrative where Langman let himself down. Langman wanted to have it both ways. He was happy to accuse Deane and company of fraud and risk ruining the captain’s reputation. He was perfectly articulate when making his case against the captain. But when the logic of Langman’s accusations were called into question, specifically with respect to the practical illogic of John Deane’s attempts at fraud, then Langman fell back on his own apparent lack of education, ‘the truth of which is more proper for the inquiry of others than us who are only sailors’. According to Langman, such complicated notions were too lofty for a lowly sailor to contemplate. Langman had done his duty in reporting the accusation. The rest was for others to decode and decipher. But the worst blunder Langman made was overstating his case with regard to John Deane’s villainy. John and Jasper Deane, whether by shrewd design or integrity, had been fair to Langman when they believed he merited it. They had attributed courage, industry and integrity to their former first mate, especially in regard to being am
ong the last of the crew to give in to their hunger and eat human flesh. By contrast, Langman presented John Deane as such a drooling maniac as to push his version of the captain towards parody. In awarding little or no concession to John Deane’s humanity, Langman was in danger of protesting too much and far too loudly.

  In Langman’s favour there was one great unanswered question. If John Deane was the injured party and there was no fraud or assault, then why did at least three members of his crew hate him so much that they sought to destroy his life by obliterating his reputation? No satisfactory answer survives. But history proved one thing about John Deane. He had a talent for making enemies; impassioned adversaries who despised him with deep and renewable reserves of hatred that Christopher Langman would have recognised and approved of.

  The purpose of the original narratives had been to refute or prosecute accusations of fraud. But the efforts proved counterproductive. Whatever the public thought about Deane’s innocence, the unifying image in their mind of the captain of the Nottingham Galley was that of an emaciated castaway who had eaten human flesh. England had become a place of poison and torment for John Deane. He felt the pressing need to leave his homeland and resculpt himself on some foreign shore and unfamiliar landscape.

  5

  Peter Alekseevich

  In 1697 an unusually tall Russian gentleman was employed at the Royal Dockyards in Greenwich as a carpenter. The tall man was an avaricious student, soaking up and ingesting any and every piece of knowledge he could acquire about ship construction. The Russian was clearly an aristocrat affecting a position below his station for some unannounced purpose, spending time among the rough and the skilful of Deptford, absorbing their trade. The Russian was a strange and contradictory figure. He had come to London with something of an entourage but had stayed in a tiny house overlooking the Thames. He seemed to want to be treated with a level of informality but often acted with a bizarre degree of entitlement. His adventures became the talk of London. He slept with a famous actress. He had his portrait painted by Godfrey Kneller. He claimed to some that he was a merchant seaman or else a Russian officer but sought and received an audience with the Archbishop of Canterbury. He went by the name of Peter Mikhailov. He was in fact Peter Alekseevich, Peter the Great, the tsar of Russia, travelling incognito throughout Western Europe studying its culture and maritime knowledge. It was the worst kept secret on the continent.