Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [2]
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of actual historical personages identified as such, the characters and incidents are entirely the product of the author's imagination and have no relation to any person or event in real life.''
Roberts is one of the few historical novelists, if not the only one, who published revised editions of his novels, not to smooth out text, but to correct factual information. For this alone, he ought to be recognized. His research was as exacting as that of most historians. In his papers at Dartmouth, there are, for example, heavily marked charts of Greenwich, the Thames, and the Maine and New Hampshire coastline, all used to ensure accuracy. In a note in his copy of Jasper Deane's account of the Nottingham Galley, Roberts questioned the source of drinking water on Boon Island and, typically, wrote to the lighthouse keeper at Boon Island and received a reply. The result is a completely accurate picture of the need for fresh water in the novel.
Roberts received a special Pulitzer Prize citation for his historical novels in 1957. Although Boon Island is certainly not the best of his historical fiction, it is one of the more exciting adventures, with a shipwreck, great deprivation, and interesting menus. It did not receive the critical acclaim of his other novels. There were a number of reviews of the book, in such venues as the Times Literary Supplement, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times Book Review. Of these, only Carlos Baker's review in the latter is uniformly positive. Baker greeted the nine-year lapse in publication with great pleasure. After a series of comments about the historicity of the book, he concluded that "the truth makes better reading than trumped-up romance." 5
Faced with three variant eighteenth-century narratives of a single event, Kenneth Roberts carefully studied them, reworked them, added more historical detail, and then supplied a fictive veneer. His account of the wreck of the Nottingham Galley may be, in the end, more accurate than any of the narratives pub-
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lished by the participants in the event. Thus a question that must always be asked of an historical novelDoes it help the reader to better understand the historical event without distorting the truth?is answered in Boon Island, most assuredly.
In Part I of this volume, the reader is offered the unique opportunity of examining the original source materials Roberts used to create his story, introduced by an essay on John Deane, commander of the ill-fated ship. Part II includes a critical essay on Roberts and Boon Island and a reprint of the novel, which has been out of print for many years.
Daniel Aaron, in an issue of American Heritage devoted to the historical novel, claimed that "the charm of acquiring historical information painlessly can't be entirely discounted.... Good writers write the kind of history good historians can't or don't write. Historical fiction isn't history in the conventional sense and shouldn't be judged as such. The best historical novels are loyal to history, but it is a history absorbed and set to music." 6
Notes
1. Charles T. Wood, "Richard III and the Beginnings of Historical Fiction," The Historian 54:2 (Winter 1992): 305.
2. Ibid., 313.
3. Ibid., 314.
4. Barbara Foley, Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).
5. Carlos Baker, "To Courage Belonged the Victory," New York Times Book Review 61:1 (January 1, 1956): 3.
6. Daniel Aaron, "What Can You Learn From a Historical Novel?" American Heritage 43:6 (October 1992). The quotations are from pp. 57 and 62 respectively.