Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [0]
title : Boon Island : Including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley
author : Roberts, Kenneth Lewis.; Bales, Jack.; Warner, Richard H.
publisher : University Press of New England
isbn10 | asin : 0874517443
print isbn13 : 9780874517446
ebook isbn13 : 9780585229515
language : English
subject Shipwrecks--Maine--Boon Island--History--18th century--Fiction, Survival after airplane accidents, shipwrecks, etc.--Fiction, Nottingham (Galley)--Fiction, Boon Island (Me.)--Fiction, Historical fiction, Sea stories.
publication date : 1996
lcc : PS3535.O176B66 1996eb
ddc : 813/.52
subject : Shipwrecks--Maine--Boon Island--History--18th century--Fiction, Survival after airplane accidents, shipwrecks, etc.--Fiction, Nottingham (Galley)--Fiction, Boon Island (Me.)--Fiction, Historical fiction, Sea stories.
Page i
Boon Island
Including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley
Page ii
Page iii
Boon Island
Including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley
Kenneth Roberts
Edited by
Jack Bales and Richard Warner
University Press of New England
Hanover and London
Page iv
University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755
The novel, Boon Island: Copyright © (MCMLV), by
Kenneth Roberts and Anna M. Roberts
Richard Warner, Preface; Philip N. Cronenwett, "Going to the
Sources for Historical and Literary Explanation"; Richard
Warner, "Captain Deane and the Wreck of the Nottingham
Galley"; Jack Bales, "Kenneth Roberts and Boon Island:
A Study of Historical and Literary Perception"; and this
compilation © 1996 by University Press of New England
Published by arrangement with Doubleday, a division of
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
The novel, Boon Island, originally published by Doubleday &
Company, Inc., January 2, 1956
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America 5 4 3 2 1
CIP data appear at the end of the book
Page v
CONTENTS
Preface
Richard Warner
vii
Going to the Sources for Historical and Literary Explanation
Philip N. Cronenwett
ix
Part I
The Wreck of the Nottingham Galley
Captain John Deane and the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley
Richard Warner
3
The Jasper Deane Account (1711)
22
The Langman Account (1711)
42
The John Deane Account (Revis'd) (1726)
66
Part II
Kenneth Roberts and Boon Island
Kenneth Roberts and Boon Island: A Study of Historical and Literary Perception
Jack Bales
93
Boon Island
Kenneth Roberts
103
Page vii
PREFACE
In 1710 the trading vessel Nottingham Galley set out from London bound for Boston on a perilous, late season voyage. Before making port, it encountered severe storms and struck Boon Island, a desolate rock off the Maine coast. All hands got ashore but the ship and cargo were lost. Devoid of food, shelter, and fire, the crew suffered terribly and was obliged to cannibalize a dead man before being rescued.
Captain John Deane, the master of the ill-starred ship, wrote his account of the disaster, which was rushed to publication by his brother, Jasper, to refute a conflicting account by the first mate, Christopher Langman. His reputation ruined, Captain Deane disappeared into Russian naval service for eleven years. He afterward returned to England, where he entered a new career as a spy and diplomat and cultivated his unavoidable celebrity with frequent reprints of his narrative.
The wreck of the Nottingham Galley thus became as well known in the first half of the eighteenth century as the mutiny on the Bounty did in the second half. Though its notoriety has since faded, modern readers still know the sea disaster as the subject of Boon Island, the gripping novel written by Kenneth Roberts in 1956.
In 1992, a colleague and I had a most curious scholarly intersection when, unbeknownst to each other, our research brought us both to Captain Deane's shipwreck at Boon Island. In the late