Miles Whitworth befriends Neal Butler. He meets Butler’s father Moses who goes by the nickname ‘Swede’ on account of his striking blond facial hair. Swede is a crippled sailor currently employed as an actor manager. Swede wishes to see Miles Whitworth’s father on a matter of business. Whitworth senior is a lawyer. At the Whitworth’s home Neal and Swede Butler encounter Captain John Deane, who has gone to the Whitworths to insure cargo prior to a merchant voyage to America. As the men talk, Christopher Langman becomes the topic of conversation. Langman is John Deane’s first mate. Deane dislikes Langman, whom he sees as a disreputable schemer. Unfortunately Deane is stuck with Langman. Langman owned a galley, which he claimed he had captured when he was a privateer. Langman had no money to pay his crew and was forced to sell the galley to cover their wages. He sold the captured vessel to John Deane on the condition that he be kept on as first mate. Deane is about to set sail. Langman has failed to retain all but two of his original crew. Deane sets about recruiting sailors for his upcoming voyage.
Over the next few days Miles Whitworth and John Deane spend time together. They attend plays. They watch Neal Butler perform on stage. They encounter Butler after an evening performance. He appears traumatised. Butler has been attacked by an amorous fop named Tintoretto. Although Roberts never openly states it, it is heavily implied that the motive for the assault is homosexual rape. Butler has killed Tintoretto in self defence but has left the body in a place where it can be discovered. John Deane removes the body and dumps it in a park. He takes Miles Whitworth with him. Miles is spotted by a theatre company member. Deane remains invisible. Deane fears that once the body is discovered it will not take long for people to connect the two young men to the death of Tintoretto. If they stay in London Miles Whitworth and Neal Butler run the risk of arrest and trial. Charles Whitworth, despite being a lawyer, has no confidence that the English legal system is capable of giving the boys a fair hearing. Convinced of their innocence, Deane recruits them both as members of his crew in order to get them out of the country. Swede Butler signs on to look after his son.
As the Nottingham Galley sets sail Langman and his two lackeys Mellon and White complain about the state of the ship. They begin to spread rumours that John Deane has overinsured the cargo to the tune of £250. There are fears that Langman’s design is to mutiny and seize back his old ship.
From this point on the narrative dutifully ticks off every significant moment from Jasper Deane, Christopher Langman and John Deane’s original accounts of the shipwreck, always favouring Deane, always damning Langman. And if any indication were needed that John Deane had utterly defeated Christopher Langman in the propaganda war for his own reputation, the rest of Kenneth Roberts’ novel is it. Roberts scrupulously favours Deane’s version of events, acknowledging Langman’s accusations but always framing them in the context of a conniving, plotting and unscrupulous mind. Langman spots what he believes to be privateers but is proved wrong. Langman organises a mutiny, which is only averted when John Deane beats him with a wig stand. Ultimately the sinking of the Nottingham Galley is Langman’s fault. The ship strikes rock when Langman abandons his post and disappears below deck to get a drink of water.
The destruction of the Nottingham Galley is described in mainly sonic terms, Roberts once again exercising his impressive ability to invoke maritime sound for dramatic effect.
Once on the island, Roberts cleaves conscientiously to the original narratives for incident. The pace slows down and each chapter takes the form of a single day on Boon Island. Roberts excels at writing of physical attrition and environmental hazard. Roberts understands the cold. He writes brilliantly about the terrible and beautiful conjoined and kinetic properties of winter and the ocean. He knows how to communicate physical suffering. His immaculate research fills in the gaps left by the Deane brothers and Christopher Langman. He tells the reader how a cutlass could be converted into a saw. He speculates on how the survivors might have made a cap out of a seagull’s skin. He communicates the details of building a boat and a raft better than the men that observed it firsthand had managed to do. Roberts had done an enormous amount of research. He visited Boon Island itself in order to verify certain details that seemed far-fetched in the original accounts. Yet the narrative teeters constantly on the brink of Roberts the researcher breaking into his own story in order to tell the reader how much he knows about the period and the conditions he is writing about. Roberts’ research is seldom wielded lightly and constantly wars for the reader’s attention with the rhythms and the static and dynamic tensions of good storytelling. At times Boon Island reads more like a survival manual than an actual novel.
Yet, despite the premium he places on research, Roberts makes some strange changes to the known facts. He invents an extra brother for John Deane as a crew member and gives him epilepsy. He removes Jasper Deane from the shipwreck altogether. He substitutes the younger Whitworth for the elder Whitworth. Roberts seems unaware that John Deane originally hailed from Nottingham, citing his place of origin as Twickenham instead. He gives the Nottingham Galley oars, seemingly mistaking it for a more traditional galleon.
People seem to elude Kenneth Roberts. His characters are ciphers. Christopher Langman is a pathetic, lazy, self-serving ingrate. Once marooned on Boon Island, Langman’s threat is neutered and his narrative function is to contradict Deane as loudly and erroneously as possible. But Kenneth Roberts does something to Langman that even John and Jasper Deane refrained from doing. Roberts removes Langman’s one impressive piece of moral high ground, his initial refusal to eat human flesh. Langman’s abstinence is dismissed as religious primitivism. Langman believes the soul still resides in the flesh. He won’t eat anything with a soul in it. Deane’s religious faith is more enlightened and pragmatic. The man is dead. The soul is gone. The flesh is meat. If the men don’t eat the meat then they will die. Deane is barely conflicted about the decision. The central dramatic act in Langman and Deane’s story was the decision to revert to cannibalism. Kenneth Roberts botches his ace by refusing to allow his protagonists any ambiguity about what, in reality, must have been the most grievous decision either man ever had to make.
In terms of vitality and relative human complexity, Boon Island’s main exception is Swede Butler. Swede is the most vibrant character in the novel. He is a force of nature. He is funny. He is likeably opinionated. He rebukes the crew for naivety. He argues with Langman. He even argues with Deane and in doing so succeeds in making Deane seem a bit more human.
John Deane is virtuous, pious and more than capable in a crisis. He is seldom wrong about anything. As a dramatist, Kenneth Roberts seems to miss the point of John Deane entirely. Deane’s paradoxes and contradictions make him interesting. In Boon Island there is never any question that there might even be the trace elements of something true in Christopher Langman’s complaints against Deane. In Boon Island, John Deane’s unquestioned virtuousness and virtuosity becomes boring after a while. Only towards the end of the novel, when Deane is wilting under the effects of the cold, exhaustion and starvation, does he exhibit any real form of vulnerability. Only in New England, while convalescing in Jethro Furber’s house, does John Deane finally become interesting. While observing Furber’s children during dinner time Deane catches himself wondering what it would be like to eat them. It proves to be the only real interior conflict Deane experiences in the entire novel and comes far too late in the narrative to be of any real dramatic use.
The epilogue is largely botched. Any drama that might have been gleaned from Langman’s visit to the magistrate is neutered by the fact that the whole of Portsmouth believes John Deane. Langman is virtually drummed out of New England. Miles Whitworth and Neal Butler are offered jobs by the locals. Deane is also offered employment but knows that Langman intends to make trouble for him back in London. Deane prepares to return to England and fight for his reputation.
The postscript informs the reader that John Deane defended his reputation so well that he was offered th
e position of consul for the port of Flanders and Ostend. There is no mention of his time in Russia or his work as a spy.
Plate Section
1 John Deane’s birthplace: Wilford village, on the banks of the River Trent. (Mark Nightingale)
2 The ill-fated crew of the Nottingham Galley began their journey to New England at Gravesend. (Mark Nightingale)
3 The Nottingham Galley accompanied a convoy to Whitby where they sheltered from bad weather. The Nottingham Galley broke away from the convoy and carried on to Ireland, alone and unprotected.
4 The Irish port of Killybegs, where John Deane picked up his cargo of butter and cheese. On the Irish coast the Nottingham Galley encountered French privateers. (Carol King)
5 The crew of the Nottingham Galley were marooned on Boon Island for twenty-four days. Four men died. One of them was eaten by the survivors. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)
6 The shipwreck survivors were fed, clothed and nursed to a semblance of health by the residents of Portsmouth, New England. In Portsmouth, Christopher Langman would formally accuse John Deane of fraud and attempted murder. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)
7 Peter the Great.
8 Cleve Severin’s statue of Peter the Great overlooks the River Thames at Greenwich, commemorating the Russian tsar’s time in London, gleaning maritime knowledge he would use to build the formidable but fractious navy in which John Deane would serve. (Adam Nightingale)
9 The Battle of Hango Head. The key naval victory in Peter the Great’s war against Sweden. The battle could not have been won without the help and expertise of foreign mercenaries.
10 Sir Robert Walpole. The British prime minister would rescue John Deane from further disgrace when he employed him as a spy following Deane’s court martial in Russia.
11 Pelham Street, Nottingham, where according to local myth John Deane killed his brother in an argument over money. (Mark Nightingale)
12 Hanoverian propaganda. An illustration showing George II victorious over the dragon of Jacobitism. The exiled supporters of the deposed James II would become John Deane’s enemies of choice as he worked as both consul and spy for the Walpole administration. (Image Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
13 Charles Stuart in Derby. In 1745, John Deane’s fears of a Jacobite invasion of England took substance when the heir to the Stuart throne arrived in the Midlands with an army of Highlanders. (Mark Nightingale)
14 The Battle of Culloden. The Jacobite threat was obliterated at Culloden in April 1746. John Deane’s money helped raise the troops of the Duke of Kingston’s 10th Light Horse. Kingston’s soldiers would commit terrible atrocities on the Scottish battlefield.
15 The Rock Cemetery in Nottingham (once the sight of Gallows Hill) where a Mr Miller, who perpetrated a violent robbery against the elderly John Deane, was publically hanged. (Mark Nightingale)
16 John Deane’s grave in St Wilfrid’s cemetery. (Mark Nightingale)
17 A series of illustrations from John Deane: Historic Adventures by Land and Sea by W.H.G. Kingston. The Victorian author perpetuated many myths about John Deane that are still believed today.
A. The young John Deane is shot at by gamekeepers while out poaching.
B. John Deane fights cattle thieves while working as a drover’s apprentice.
C. John Deane unwittingly visits the home of a mercenary embroiled in a Jacobite conspiracy to assassinate William of Orange.
D. John Deane is held prisoner by pirates.
Copyright
Cover: Shipwreck, Alexey Bogolyubov, 1850
Internal illustrations by Stephen Dennis and Jean Nightingale
Photographs by Mark Nightingale, Carol King and Adam Nightingale
First published in 2013
The History Press
The Mill, Brimscombe Port
Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG
www.thehistorypress.co.uk
This ebook edition first published in 2013
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© Adam Nightingale, 2013
The right of Adam Nightingale to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
ISBN 978 0 7509 5182 1
Original typesetting by The History Press
Ebook compilation by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
The Shipwreck Cannibals Page 21