The Shipwreck Cannibals

by Adam Nightingale

  Deane received further news of Dr Consett’s harsh treatment at the hands of the Factory in St Petersburg. Deane believed that Consett was suffering because of him, that Consett’s support had earned the doctor his current persecutions. Deane had implored Townsend to help. He feared that without intervention Consett would be treated, ‘as they have done to me, and make him blacker to the eyes of the unseeing multitude than ever Ethiopian was’. Townsend referred the matter to Walpole who agreed to intercede on Consett’s behalf. But with relations between Britain and Russia so antagonistic, even Walpole’s intervention was limited in what it could accomplish and seemed to amount to very little. Dr Consett would leave Russia in 1727, effectively hounded out of the country. But Townsend had tried, and that carried weight with John Deane, further cementing his loyalty to the viscount.

  It was November and the final days of John Deane’s time with O’Connor were spent moving between Amsterdam and Rotterdam managing the Irishman and investigating rumours that Captain William Hay had been seen moving among the local Jacobite community. Descriptions of the man believed to be Hay had been sent to Townsend from an agent in Berlin. Townsend had passed the description on to Deane. As far as Deane was concerned, the man could not be Hay because the height was wrong and the Jacobite’s face had not been commented upon in the report. If the man was truly Hay then the Berliner could not have resisted mentioning his ‘long visage’ or ‘large teeth much exposed to view either in a laugh or a smile’. It could not be Hay because Hay had a black servant that the Berliner would also have commented upon. Also, the livery of the servant was green, a faux pas for anybody who spent as much time in Russia as Hay did. ‘It would not be well to give it green in Russia, neither can I believe he would do it abroad,’ Deane reported. The man believed to be Hay had spoken in an Irish accent. This appeared to have been interpreted as a ‘put on’ accent by the Berliner. Deane rubbished this idea. Hay was Scottish and too proud of being a Scot to ever pass himself off as Irish, even for the purpose of establishing cover. Deane did not believe Hay had been in the vicinity. Deane’s old enemy Golovkin was now in Stockholm. Hay and Golovkin were close friends who had served together in the armed forces. If Townsend really wanted to know where Hay was likely to be then he should look to Sweden and Golovkin.

  On one level, Deane’s report to Townsend was yet another example of the kind of shaggy dog episodes that typified his final moments in Amsterdam. But it was interesting in that it revealed Deane’s concise and astute powers of recall and observation, his ability to interpret a situation, his skill as an intelligence officer and ultimately his indispensability to Townsend.

  16

  Neither at Peace or at War

  Late November 1725 was quiet. Deane’s last letter to Townsend that month was a letter apologising for not having sent a letter recently because nothing had happened.

  In its early stages the O’Connor business promised to birth one of the great tales of the pioneering days of espionage, but in the end appeared to amount to very little. Yet it was deceptive to think of it like that. O’Connor’s recruitment and the information he had provided was vital. He had confirmed what Townsend had feared, that Jacobites were embedded across Europe. Townsend now knew that they were well-funded, organised and supported by many of Britain’s enemies. He realised that they were particularly entrenched in the Russian court and posed an authentic threat to Hanoverian stability. Thanks to Deane and O’Connor, Townsend knew the identities and character of much of the Jacobite high command. In O’Connor they still had a man on the inside if they could ever decide on how further to use him. From Townsend’s point of view, O’Connor’s role had been vital in confirming that the Jacobites had been talking about the utilisation of twelve Russian ships paid for by Spain and the papacy. Combined with existing intelligence and Deane’s first-hand knowledge of the three ships bound for Spain, Townsend was convinced an invasion was imminent. The fact that O’Connor was reporting a half-heard conversation and that Deane had decried the three ships as ‘good for nothing’ did not arrest Townsend’s determination to prepare for the worst. New intelligence that seemed to suggest that the Russian navy in Revel was preparing for war could only confirm Townsend’s deepest suspicions. Townsend was now fully convinced that a Russian/Spanish coalition supporting the Jacobites would invade Scotland and the west of England simultaneously. Townsend believed the invasion was six months away. Townsend lobbied for certain Russian ships to be seized and searched. He wanted an increased show of naval strength in the West Indies where it was believed money was being sent to fund the Jacobite rebels. Walpole intervened.

  Although initially cynical about the levels of Jacobite organisation, the prime minister soon changed his mind. Walpole seemed to have a better understanding than his foreign secretary of the military resources available to Britain and the need to tread carefully with other nations. To send the British navy to the West Indies was too provocative. It would also spread the navy out too thinly when they would be better employed near their own coast in strength. Walpole split the navy into two fleets. One fleet would patrol the British coast. The other would patrol the Baltic. It was a pre-emptive exercise in muscle flexing designed to avoid a war if at all possible. All the while Townsend was free to hunt for weapons in Scotland and try to get to the bottom of what the three Russian ships were doing in Spain.

  Deane and O’Connor’s time together was at an end. They went their separate ways. O’Connor received his pardon and a £100 reward for services to the Crown. Deane wrote up his account of his time in Russia in an official document entitled An Account of Affairs in Russia, June–July 1725. He also wrote an intelligence report entitled The Present State of the Maritime Power of Russia. Townsend made good on his promise and secured Deane a position. With the increase of British warships in the Baltic, Captain John Deane had been ordered to accompany Sir Charles Wagner’s squadron as both a political adviser and an interpreter. At least those were his official orders. In reality, Townsend had sent Deane on another spying mission. Deane was to scour the coast, seeking out sympathetic acquaintances and old friends whose friendly conversation he might convert into intelligence and information that shed further light on Russia’s intentions and Jacobite movements.

  John Deane spent the spring and summer of 1726 stationed on board the Torbay, a 540-man, 80-gun warship, making forays into the coastal ports as and when opportunity dictated.

  Writing in April to Townsend from Copenhagen, John Deane mentioned that he had dined with a Russian named Mr Beltashoff. The dinner was ostensibly friendly but Deane knew that he was being gleaned for information about the strength and destination of the British squadron and how long they were likely to remain in the area. Deane was sociable. He gave nothing away but sought to extract his own information from Beltashoff who appeared to have news regarding a trio of Russian ships. Some time previously, three Russian ships had passed by that way from Spain. According to Beltashoff the ships’ cargo had been, ‘oil and wine, and some fruit that they had taken in at Cadiz’. The ships had been forced to winter in Spain. The perishable part of their cargo had rotted. Beltashoff informed Deane that the presence of the three ships in Cadiz was a mercantile statement of intent from Russia. Their presence in Cadiz was intended to show that Russian ships were now fit to engage in trade in the East Indies and Madagascar, although the Russians had not yet secured any trade treaties in those provinces.

  Beltashoff was disturbed at the presence of so many British warships so far north when he believed ‘we and all the powers this way were at peace’. In reply, Deane invoked his conversation with Count Tostoi. He informed Beltashoff that relations between Russia and England existed in a strange martial limbo where both nations were ‘neither at peace or at war’. Deane wanted to know about recent Russian demonstrations of naval strength. Beltashoff said that any show of strength was a false display of power. The Russians were keen to appear more ‘formidable than they really are’. Beltashoff estimated the pre
sent strength of the Russian navy to have been little more than ‘twelve ships of the line and two or three frigates’ that were fit to sail.

  In May, John Deane went to Stockholm and spoke with a baron whom he had served in Russia. The baron had information ‘related to the Russians’ preparations’. Walpole’s strategy appeared to be effective. The Russians had not expected the British fleet to appear on their doorstep. The good news was tempered with bad. The baron relayed information regarding old friends and enemies. Apraxin was ‘rather desirous of retiring than commanding at sea’. As far as his replacement was concerned it seemed unlikely that Deane’s ally Sievers would be given command of the fleet as he did not have the confidence of the Russian court. Deane’s old foe Thomas Gordon was most likely to succeed Apraxin, should he retire.

  In late May the British squadron arrived at Revel. The Russians were thrown into a state of panic, believing that they were about to be attacked.

  In the hunt for information, John Deane lost a contact and gained a contact. Gustaf Armfelt, a Swedish general Deane had arranged to speak to effectively stood him up. Instead Deane sought out a prominent person he described as a ‘good king’s man’ who supported Hanoverian interests. Deane spent a night and a morning with his new associate trying to convince him to offer up any information that might be useful to British interests in the area. Deane’s prospective informer was ‘not unwilling but shy on the hazard should it be known’. Still, the intelligence gleaned was encouraging. The king’s man told Deane of ‘two couriers’ who had passed by recently and a ‘Russian count’ who ‘was in great consternation’ of the British presence in the Baltic. The count endeavoured ‘to put everything in a posture of defence at Kronslot’, having received ‘intelligence from England’ that the British intended to assault the port.

  The king’s man was in weekly correspondence with an aristocrat in St Petersburg from whom he obtained useful information. Relaying intelligence would prove awkward. The king’s man was willing to pass information on to Deane but did not want to commit anything to writing. He would only tell Deane what he had discovered face to face, so that Deane had to contrive a reason to leave his official duties and be ferried, on a weekly basis, to see his new informer personally.

  In June 1726 Deane learned that overdue prize money for ships captured by the Russian navy between 1718 and 1719 in the Great Northern War was being paid out. Some of that money belonged to Deane. He was incensed. Despite the futility of his suite, Deane wanted his money. He wrote to Admiral Apraxin asking for his assistance in ensuring that any wages he had earned were somehow forwarded to him. Deane also wrote to Townsend imploring the viscount to intervene in the matter on his behalf.

  Aboard the Torbay, moored in the waters of Revel, as the summer drew to a close John Deane came into close proximity with a truly despised old enemy.

  Deane was highly valued by Admiral Wagner and was a welcome guest at his dinner table. He enjoyed dining with the admiral. For John Deane, dinner was a form of sanctuary from the intensity and sometime madness of his duties. He described the custom in intimate terms as a place where, ‘we live here in tranquillity, not forgetting our friends in a glass after dinner’. The serpent in Eden was Thomas Saunders. The Jacobite admiral had been invited to dinner. As Russia and Britain were neither at peace nor war, diplomacy occasionally demanded that old enemies became temporary dinner guests. When Saunders came to dinner, the atmosphere appeared as one of strained politeness. One of Saunders favourite weapons was mockery. At the dinner table he sought to undermine John Deane with an observation. Deane recalled how Thomas Saunders compared ‘me to mercury, by my quick removal from England to St Petersburg, Stockholm, Hanover, The Hague, England and now again in Revel’.

  Having eaten on board Wagner’s ship, Saunders was obliged to return the compliment. But that courtesy did not extend to John Deane, who was not invited to eat aboard Saunders’ vessel. Yet Deane was the topic of conversation. Saunders talked for an hour about John Deane. He praised Townsend who he believed was ‘a man of sense’ but was incredulous that the viscount should put any kind of stock in John Deane’s abilities. Saunders sent a personal message back to the Torbay for John Deane to contemplate. Deane had enjoyed a surprising degree of movement on the Russian mainland that summer. He had been ashore to Revel at least three times that season. Saunders issued a barely concealed threat. As far as he was concerned, Deane’s liberty was now at an end. Saunders let it be known that ‘it was not safe’ for Deane ‘to come any more on land’.

  17

  Revisions

  John Deane returned to England. His duties in the Baltic almost at an end, Deane was once again facing the prospect of unemployment. Resident in London, having let it lie dormant for a decade and a half, Deane revisited his old Boon Island narrative. In autumn 1726 he published a revised account of the wreck of the Nottingham Galley entitled A Narrative of the Nottingham Galley, &c, Published in 1711. Revis’d and re-printed with Additions in 1726, by John Deane, Commander.

  The revised edition told more or less the same story as his brother’s version. The most notable stylistic difference was that now the narrative was told in the third person. There was no introduction. Deane leapt straight into the account. He fleshed out the narrative with more detail than Jasper Deane or Christopher Langman had included. He omitted any mention of French privateers or the attempted murder of the first mate. He told the story (missing from the Jasper Deane account) of the attempted theft of the extra ration of human flesh. He provided a coda (also omitted from the Jasper Deane account) where he described his arrival in New England and his haggard black comic encounter in the home of his rescuer Jethro Furber. As the hero of his own narrative, John Deane presented himself as a man blessed by God, ‘in a greater share of health and strength of body, and likewise a proportionate vigour of mind’, for the purpose of instilling ‘into the hearts of the dispirited people a reliance on that almighty being, who is not confin’d to particular means, nor always acts to human probabilities’. In other words, Deane was the modest deliverer, appointed by his creator to lead his men to safety. Although no less dramatic in its storytelling, John Deane’s account was generally a more reflective narrative than those that had preceded it. The reader had greater access to Deane’s internal agonising over the impossible decisions he had been forced to make on a daily basis. Most importantly, it was a narrative stripped of the original agenda that had necessitated its predecessor. The crew, including Langman, were given their due in much the same way they had been in the Jasper Deane account. But gone was the sting in the tail, the defensive postscript fending off assaults on the Deane brothers’ reputations. The closing paragraphs of the new account were conciliatory and seasoned with a degree of grace for old enemies. John Deane wrote: ‘At the first publication of this narrative, the master, the mate and Mr Whitworth were all in England; but, in a course of fifteen years since, the master alone survives of all that he particularly knew.’ With the perspective of time and from the privileged vantage point of survival, Deane could afford to be magnanimous. In the closing paragraph of his account he announced his intention to make provision for an ‘annual commemoration of their wonderful deliverance’ to be held in New England for ‘those beneficent gentlemen, whose admir’d humanity on this occasion deserves applause and imitation throughout succeeding ages’, as well as ‘to prove of service to reclaim some of the unthinking part of his own fraternity’.

  It was a noble and undoubtedly sincere sentiment but not without a possible dash of self-interest. John Deane could have initiated a memorial without the public hoo-ha of a fresh pamphlet opening old wounds. The Boon Island incident and its subsequent pamphlet war was after all the reason that John Deane had spent over a decade in self-imposed exile. But as well as being a survivor, John Deane was also a pragmatist. He was out of work. There was the immediate need for money and further employment. Up until now, publicity had mostly been John Deane’s enemy. Now it could work in his favour. For
the first time John Deane took ownership of his legacy. He wouldn’t run from Boon Island anymore. He would take possession of it and make it work on his behalf. The pamphlet would bring in an immediate source of income. It sold well and was reprinted the following year. More importantly, it made Deane a public figure once again. It placed him back in the public’s awareness while he sought a new appointment. And there was a post that John Deane was specifically interested in: the commercial consul for the ports of Flanders and Ostend was up for grabs. Walpole, Townsend and Sir Charles Wagner were all keen for John Deane to have the post. The renewed celebrity the pamphlet provided could help secure the post. Deane’s strategy proved successful. He was offered the consulship.

  The pamphlet revealed a tragic detail in John Deane’s personal life. He wrote, ‘At the first publication of this narrative, the master, the mate and Mr Whitworth, were all in England; but, in a course of fifteen years since, the master alone survives of all that he particularly knew’. As far as he was aware, John Deane was now the only surviving veteran of Boon Island. Among those that had passed away since John Deane had left England for Russia was his brother. Jasper Deane had died on 23 October 1723, aged 70 years. He was buried in St Wilfrid’s church cemetery. His tombstone declared that he had been married four times and had fathered ‘several children’.

  Before John Deane was dispatched on his last great adventure, there was some unfinished business to attend to. Lord Townsend’s obsession throughout Deane’s tenure as interpreter and political adviser to Sir Charles Wagner had been the fear of an imminent Russian-funded Jacobite invasion of the British Isles. Townsend desperately wanted to get to the bottom of what the three Russian ships bound for Cadiz, the ships that Deane had originally spotted in Elsinore, had been up to. Townsend still believed that the purpose of the ships was to deliver weapons to the Irish and Scottish supporters of James III. Townsend’s spies were busy all around Europe trying to pull together the different strands of the alleged conspiracy, or else determine whether there indeed was a conspiracy. In the latter stages of the investigation John Deane was ordered to interview an Englishman who had sailed on one of the three vessels bound for Cadiz. The interview took place in London in November 1727. The name of the Englishman was Mr Young. It had been Mr Young that Deane had spoken to in Elsinore when he had first observed the Russian ships two years previously.