Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [3]
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I
THE WRECK OF THE NOTTINGHAM GALLEY
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Captain John Deane and the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley
Richard Warner
In late August 1731 the Duke of Lorraine briefly visited the port of Ostend, one of many cities on his tour of the Austrian Netherlands. 1 It was an official affair, the first time that the future husband of Maria Theresa had met with local dignitaries. They must have been disturbed when, during a banquet in his honor, the duke engaged the British consul, Captain John Deane, in a lengthy personal conversation that had nothing to do with commercial relations or any other serious matter of state. Indeed, the captain later reported, "the Duke knew ... of my having been shipwrecked [and] he desired me to give him one of my printed narratives, which I accordingly did the next day."2 As a commercial representative, Deane hardly merited the attention of the future emperor, but he had become something of a celebrity himself, for his shipwreck was as notorious in the first half of the eighteenth century as the mutiny on the Bounty was in the second half.3 Like so many others who read about the ill-starred voyage, the duke undoubtedly was fascinated by the chilling account of the disaster and by the crew's decision to cannibalize one of their members. Though the notoriety of the wreck of the Nottingham Galley has faded, it has earned a place in the literature
This essay appeared in The New England Quarterly 48, no. 1 (March 1995).
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and lore of seafaring, most prominently in Boon Island, the last novel written by Kenneth Roberts. 4 Still, little is known about the mysterious Captain Deane and how he used his account of the wreck to enhance his reputation in his own time and for posterity.5
In 1710 the Nottingham Galley, laden with cordage, set out from London bound for Boston. After taking on an additional cargo of butter and cheese at Killybegs, Ireland, it set sail again for its Atlantic crossing. Arriving off the Newfoundland coast dangerously late in the season, the small vessel encountered severe storms. Just before making port, the Nottingham struck Boon Island, a barren and desolate rock off Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Miraculously, all hands got ashore, but the ship and its entire cargo were lost. There was no food and little left with which the men could build a shelter from the bitter cold. They suffered terribly. The cook died in the first days and was buried at sea; two seamen were lost in a heroic but futile attempt to escape the island on a raft; and the fourth, the carpenter, died and then was cannibalized to sustain the fourteen crew members, who were eventually rescued twenty-four days after losing their ship.
Just a few days before their deliverance, the crew reached the necessary but dreadful decision. The captain later wrote, "We were now reduced to the most deplorable and melancholy circumstances imaginable ... no fire, and the weather extreme cold, our small, stock of cheese spent, and nothing to support our feeble bodies ... [with] the prospect of starving, without any appearance of relief." They had reached what he described as "the last extremity ... to eat the dead for support." After discussing "the lawfulness and sinfulness of their situation," the captain recalled, "[we] were obliged to submit to the more prevailing arguments of our craving appetites." In his memoir Deane was candid about the moral dilemma, and he graphically
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described how he himself dressed the body, disposing of those parts which distinguished it as human and renaming the rest beef. The enterprise was made the more unpleasant because the survivors had no means of making a fire and were obliged to eat the flesh raw. 6
Before returning to England, the mate, Christopher Langman, made deposition before a justice of the peace in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, arguing that "this Depondent believeth that the said John Dean, according to