The Shipwreck Cannibals

by Adam Nightingale

  John Deane: Historic Adventures by Land and Sea by W.H.G. Kingston

  In the preface to his novel W.H.G. Kingston cites an anonymous friend from Nottingham whose history of Deane’s adventures provides the well from which he would draw material for his story. Kingston iterates that John Deane ‘was a real person’, implying that Deane’s memory may have fallen out of fashion in the year of the book’s publication. He provides a brief summation of Deane’s life, background and principle exploits:

  He was born at that town A.D. 1679. Though of gentle parentage, in his early days he followed the occupation of a drover. He then went to sea, and became a Captain in the Navy; after that he was a Merchant Adventurer. He next took service under Peter the Great, and commanded a Russian ship-of-war. On leaving Russia, he obtained the post of British Consul at Ostend, held by him for many years. Returning home, he was made a Burgess of his native town, and took up his abode at the neighbouring village of Wilford, where, in 1760, he died.

  All of the above is broadly true, although there is no mention of Boon Island. Having established a degree of historical credibility, Kingston immediately queers his own pitch by pointing readers to John Deane’s tombstone and then entirely inventing a couple of inscriptions on it: ‘His age, fourscore years and one,’ and, ‘After life’s fitful fever, he sleeps well.’ Kingston gets Deane’s wife’s name wrong, calling her Elizabeth. All of these errors could have been easily corrected by a quick look at the tombstone Kingston invokes. This mixture of fact and slip-shod inaccuracy establishes the tone for 415 pages of entertaining and outrageous nonsense.

  The novel begins in 1696 with Rupert Harwood and his daughter Althea riding through Nottinghamshire on their way to visit the Deane family. Father and daughter are Jacobites. They discuss the Deane family, in particular the two brothers. Jasper is described as ‘a quiet, proper-behaved young man’. John is described as ‘a broad-shouldered lad […] not ill-fitted to fight his way through life’.

  Father and daughter enter Nottingham where their passage is blocked by a mob baiting an ox. A lone man confronts the crowd. It is John Deane. The crowd nearly unhorse Althea. Rupert Harwood challenges the crowd, informing them that he is a justice of the peace. John Deane mitigates on the crowd’s behalf, suggesting that formal legal proceedings are unnecessary but that he would be more than happy to track down the ringleaders and thrash them.

  The Deanes live in the market place in the centre of Nottingham. The Harwoods and the Deanes dine and converse. They talk about John Deane’s future prospects. John reveals:

  I should like to see the world, but I have not a fancy for knocking men on the head, and could never understand the amusement some people find in it; but I have no objection to stand up and defend my own if I am attacked, or to draw my sword in the defence of a friend or a right cause.

  This is John Deane’s philosophy of adventure that will be played out over the course of the rest of the novel.

  We learn that Kingston’s Deane is comparatively uneducated but not stupid. He likes weapons. He loves fishing. He is enamoured of the Robin Hood stories and believes them wholesale. He virtually hero worships his monarch William of Orange. He is an expert storyteller. His favourite book is Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. At the beginning of the novel Kingston’s John Deane is a wild man tempered by a deep seam of decency and honour.

  John Deane very quickly falls in love with Althea.

  That evening Deane meets up with a gang of poachers that he runs with from time to time. Their plan is to steal fish. Deane’s feelings for Althea trouble his conscience and he announces to his gang that this will be his last poaching raid. The raid is interrupted by the presence of Mr Pearson, a mysterious gentleman from Yorkshire. Pearson convinces the gang to let him accompany them. Pearson claims to be a cattle dealer but displays greater skill at poaching than Deane and his compatriots. When the gang are discovered and are fired upon by game keepers it is Pearson who guides them to safety. Pearson reveals that he knows who John Deane is. He is impressed with Deane and offers him work as a soldier for an unspecified cause. Deane politely declines and goes on his way determined to be more law abiding in the future.

  Deane makes the decision to confess to his father his part in the poaching raid but a fire on a neighbouring property arrests his intentions. Deane risks his life and fights the fire. He becomes a local hero. The owner of the property offers to give Deane a start in business as a reward. It transpires that for a while John Deane has wanted to become a drover of cattle in order to see more of Britain. Deane is set up as drover’s apprentice. As Deane is sent away on his first droving expedition he is advised by his cousin to trust in God, the first of many such endorsements by good, trustworthy Protestants throughout the novel.

  Pearson and Rupert Harwood know one another. Both men are part of a plot to restore James II to the throne of England. It is Pearson and Harwood’s intention to tempt John Deane over to their cause.

  John Deane’s adventures as a drover involve a trip to Stourbridge Fair, a dramatic run in with cattle thieves and an encounter with a Huguenot exile, expelled from France and separated from her husband and daughter. Deane experiences a string of encounters with Pearson, who criss-crosses his path. Deane is manipulated by Pearson into thinking that he is a wanted man for the poaching incident. Pearson convinces Deane that the safest place for him is either at Pearson’s side or among Pearson’s friends. Pearson sends Deane on numerous errands around the country. Deane hides out in the Fens and goes to London. He meets Elizabeth, Pearson’s stepdaughter, an attractive Protestant who begins to challenge Althea Harwood for Deane’s affections.

  Without Deane fully realising it, Pearson gradually embroils and implicates him in a Jacobite plot to assassinate William of Orange. As the plot trundles on, Deane meets more prominent Jacobite conspirators and becomes more and more mired in the conspiracy. Just as the full horror of what Deane has become involved in dawns on him, the conspiracy is exposed and a retaliatory cull begins. Pearson slips away taking his wife and Elizabeth with him. Others are arrested and some are executed. John Deane manages to escape untainted but is burdened by guilt and feels the need to make amends. He enlists in the navy to prove his worth in military service and erase the shame of accidental treason.

  It is about halfway through the novel. Up until this point W.H.G. Kingston has proved a fine storyteller. There are faults. The plot is stopped here and there for a history lesson better employed as a footnote. There are long-winded speeches. There are moments when normally shrewd villains are conveniently indiscreet whenever John Deane needs to overhear a crucial piece of information. But Kingston’s faults are kept in check by his precision and vivid economy of description, his fast-moving and wry action sequences and an occasional gift for dialogue, whether it is a terse exchange in the middle of a fight: ‘sheathe your blade, if you have not a fancy for having your brains blown out!’, or John Deane’s description of his own and his mount’s mutual exhaustion after a long journey: ‘I’m afraid if I were to ride on through the night with my tired steed, that we both of us should roll in the mud before day dawns.’ Kingston’s England is a wild, rambunctious, colourful and exciting place. Kingston’s John Deane is complicated, changeable, honourable and corruptible. Even the villains are human. Pearson is likeable and displays a fondness for Deane even as he is attempting to pollute him. Deane feels a similar ambivalence about Pearson and despite his outrage can never fully bring himself to completely hate or denounce him. Pearson and Deane’s relationship is reminiscent (perhaps to the point of plagiarism) of the reluctant friendship between the ideologically polarised fugitives Davey Balfour and Alan Breck Stuart in Robert Louis Stevenson’s superior novel Kidnapped. Yet, once Deane joins the navy, the story begins to drown in its own sanctimonious ridiculousness.

  The rot doesn’t set in straight away. John Deane’s first few naval engagements against the French are described brilliantly. There is grotesque detail, grim incident and black comedy. A man st
anding next to Deane is blown apart. Deane is covered in blood. He examines the dead man, unsure how much of the blood is his and how much belongs to the atomised shipmate. A sailor reassures him: ‘See, that’s his blood which has turned you into a red Indian.’ It is a human moment laced with gallows humour. Deane is a cog in the machine. He is not yet a hero, merely an anonymous soldier playing his part in a glorious and awful event, observing the ways in which the seasoned and experienced deal with the appalling consequences of human behaviour. It is an incident worthy of the real John Deane. It is an anomaly in the writing of W.H.G. Kingston. From that point on the pace of the narrative accelerates. Deane goes from naval action to naval action. He rises through the ranks. He serves under some of the great admirals of the age. He wins their attention by being the first to volunteer for action. He boards a French galley and frees their slaves. He boards a privateer. He is given his first command. He dives into the ocean and rescues a drowning quartermaster who is about to be eaten by sharks. Deane’s courage and modesty wins the devotion of his crew.

  The novel begins to pile enough coincidence upon coincidence as to make even Charles Dickens embarrassed by the contrivance of it all. Deane liberates a slave who happens to be his beloved Elizabeth’s father. The Huguenot he had met previously happens to be Elizabeth’s mother. Deane and his crew are captured by pirates. The pirate captain happens to be Pearson who happens to have Elizabeth stashed away on an island in the West Indies. Deane and Elizabeth are reunited and fall in love. The island is liberated by the British navy. Pearson gets away. The captain responsible for the rescue turns out to be Elizabeth’s uncle. Elizabeth and Deane are parted once again.

  Deane serves under Admiral Rooke. Once again he distinguishes himself in combat and earns further promotion. By this point in the novel, the battles begin to resemble history lessons as Kingston the pedant battles and triumphs over Kingston the storyteller. He seems to forget he is writing a novel about a man called John Deane and only tells the reader Deane’s part in the battle as an afterthought rather than relaying the battle through Deane’s eyes as he had done earlier in the story. And when Kingston allows John Deane centre stage in a military engagement, the result is ridiculous. The apex of Deane’s military career is his part in Rooke’s assault on Gibraltar. During the attack Deane volunteers to lead an attack on a fortress by climbing, ‘a part of the cliff which the Spaniards had never thought it possible any human beings could climb’. But Deane manages it, taking prisoners and sparing Catholic women. Deane is promoted to captain. The flawed hero of the first half of the novel is now a martial saint, faultlessly courageous, perfectly honourable in combat and utterly boring.

  All the while Deane longs for a respite in his adventures so that he can return to England and marry Elizabeth. When he finally gets the chance he discovers that Elizabeth is not in England. Elizabeth and her mother have been shipwrecked off the coast of New England. Deane wants to go to New England and find her. His need to see Elizabeth coincides with plans among his friends and relatives in Nottingham to trade in America. Deane agrees to captain a ship to New England. The ship is named the Nottingham Galley.

  After thirty-four chapters W.H.G. Kingston finally tackles the incident that made John Deane famous. He devotes a little over a chapter to the Boon Island episode and seems to go out of his way to get every single detail wrong. The Nottingham Galley is manned by forty sailors and protected by twenty guns. The voyage is ‘prosperous’ with no intimation of any encounters with French privateers or discord among the crew. The Nottingham Galley is bound for Delaware. When it is just 50 leagues from the American coast a gale blows up. The Nottingham Galley is driven onto the rocks of an island. Most of the crew are drowned or die when they are ‘dashed furiously against the rocks’. John Deane is swept overboard. He is set on a beach. Apart from Deane there are five other survivors. Deane and company discover an abandoned shelter built from wreckage complete with a door, a table, a shuttered window and silk, evidence of the presence of ladies. Deane discovers a Bible that belongs to Elizabeth. The Nottingham Galley is lost but one of its boats has washed ashore. The boat is intact but will let in water if the survivors try to use it. Casks of food have been salvaged. Drinking water is a problem but not for long. Deane discovers a tree on the island that yields moisture seeping from its roots. Days pass and the food begins to run out. A carpenter’s chest is discovered between the rocks. It contains everything the castaways need to repair the boat. A ship is spotted. Deane and company sail to meet it. It is a pirate ship manned by none other than Pearson. After a tense exchange Pearson agrees to set Deane ashore for old times’ sake. Deane finds Elizabeth and is married. The Boon Island episode is done and dusted without a single mention or insinuation of cannibalism.

  The novel is not quite finished. Kingston saves his most anomalous detail for last. Deane returns home war rich from prize money but having lost the investors their cash from the Boon Island adventure. It is not Deane’s fault but a contingent in Nottingham blames him all the same. Jasper Deane is among them. Tensions between the two brothers result in the argument that causes Jasper’s death. John Deane is legally exonerated but nevertheless held responsible by many in Nottingham. The scandal is too much for Deane to bear. He accepts an offer to travel to Russia with his wife in answer to a call for naval talent by Peter the Great.

  The death of Jasper Deane is such a throwaway piece of writing, one wonders why Kingston included it. The anecdote does have the faint ring of verisimilitude about it as it is so at odds with the pantomimic tone of the majority of what has preceded it. In reality, as his will attested, there were tensions between John Deane and his brother’s daughter. Jasper’s accidental death might have been the reason. More likely the story is a contrivance, devised as an alternate motive for John Deane to go to Russia so as to deflect attention from the historical reasons for his actual departure; accusations of fraud and stories of cannibalism.

  The rest of Deane’s career is given a jaunty spin by Kingston.

  His time in Russia:

  He rendered great assistance in organising the navy of that wonderful man Peter the Great, and after serving with much credit for a few years, he returned to England.

  His time in Ostend:

  Captain Deane had during this time found a number of friends, and by their means he was soon afterwards appointed English consul at Ostend, where he lived with his wife Elizabeth till they were both advanced in life.

  Kingston portrays Deane’s retirement in Wilford as a pastoral utopia:

  As an elderly couple they came back to Nottingham once more, and went to live in the sweet village of Wilford, on the opposite side of the silvery Trent. It was the peaceful green retreat that had beckoned him back to England from many a scene of foreign grandeur, and smiled across many a time of tumult and of battle.

  W.H.G. Kingston was a religious propagandist. His novels were written to simultaneously entertain and instruct Victorian boys in morality and patriotism. They were published by Christian organisations. As liberally interpreted by Kingston, John Deane’s life was the classic Prodigal Son story. So, having erred and repented, having been reborn as a knight errant, Kingston ends his novel with a blissful rendering of Deane’s final internment complete with the promise of heavenly reward:

  The tomb of John Deane, Captain R.N., and of Elizabeth his wife, is to be seen on a little green promontory above the sparkling Trent and near the chancel of the parish church, where sweet strains of music, accompanying the sound of human voices and the murmurs of the river, are wont to mingle in harmonious hymns of prayer and praise. A more fitting spot in which to await in readiness for the last hour of life than Wilford can scarcely be imagined, nor a sweeter place than its church-yard in which the mortal may lie down to rest from toil till summoned by the last trump to rise and put on immortality.

  Appendix 2

  John Deane in Fiction 2

  Boon Island by Kenneth Roberts

  Kenneth Roberts’ 1956 n
ovel is an entirely more factually accurate account of the shipwreck than W.H.G. Kingston’s panoramic fantasy. It draws scrupulously on the Jasper Deane, Christopher Langman and John Deane accounts for its details but is unashamedly partisan in favouring the Deanes’ cause over Langman’s. The majority of the story takes place during the ordeal on Boon Island. But Roberts allows himself a lengthy prologue in England, as bizarre in its own way as anything W.H.G. Kingston had written.

  Boon Island’s narrator is Miles Whitworth, an Oxford undergraduate with artistic aspirations. Whitworth hates being a student. He feels stifled by Oxford’s moribund and ossified teaching practices. He would rather be a professional playwright. Whitworth’s home is his beloved Greenwich by the River Thames.

  Kenneth Roberts writes particularly well about London crowds, be it the bustle, business, colour and exoticism of the river traffic or the sounds and colours of a nocturnal theatre crowd. Roberts’ descriptions of Deptford and Billingsgate are sensually rendered as he conveys the smells of the river and river industries.

  Whitworth returns home. He tries to buy some whitebait from a young man by the waterfront. The boy’s name is Neal Butler. He refuses to sell the whitebait to Whitworth because he has a pre-existing arrangement to trade his haul to a sailor named Christopher Langman. Butler and Whitworth talk. Whitworth learns that the majority of Butler’s earnings come from the theatre. Butler works for a theatrical company for which he plays the female parts. Whitworth discovers that Butler’s father is a semi-invalid sailor. After their conversation Whitworth observes Butler’s transaction with Langman. Whitworth takes an instant dislike to Langman and immediately marks him as a troublemaker.