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sea level that every year it is flooded by the spring tides, and in the winter the entire surface is pounded by wind, snow, and freezing rain. The weather and the island's barren desolateness were just two of the conditions that 14 men faced when they were shipwrecked during a snowstorm on December 11, 1710. Ten of them managed to survive and were rescued after living for 24 days on the tiny island. One of the reasons they did manage to survive was that on December 28 they decided to eat the ship's carpenter, who had died the day before. The men's struggles, both moral and physical, are the subject of Boon Island, Kenneth Roberts's last historical novel, first published by Doubleday in 1956 and reissued in this volume. 1

Although it is his shortest work and probably the least critically acclaimed, Boon Island deserves study for two reasons. (1) As with only a few of his other works, a lack of primary sources on his subject required Roberts to draw from his own imagination many of the events and incidents portrayed, but always within the framework of the existing evidence, and (2) this

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is the only novel in which Roberts uses symbolism to convey his various themes and ideas.

From the late 1930s to his death in 1957, Kenneth Roberts was one of America's most popular historical novelists, writing such best-sellers as Northwest Passage, Oliver Wiswell, Arundel, and Rabble in Arms. A few months before he died, his collective body of work, spanning nearly three decades, earned him a special Pulitzer Prize ''for his historical novels which have long contributed to the creation of greater interest in our early American history."

Roberts's novels were not only enjoyable to read but they also had the reputation of being historically accurate. Admittedly, many historians and scholars differ over some of Roberts's conclusions. Arundel and Rabble in Arms cover the career of Benedict Arnold and his Northern Army, and Roberts steadfastly maintained all his life that Arnold was "the most brilliant soldier of the Revolution," and that all Arnold biographies and studies were "marred by gross unfairness, misplaced patriotism, inexcusable plagiarism, reliance on untrustworthy evidence, a narrow-minded and confused interpretation of facts, slovenly research, loose thinking, atrocious writing and other grave faults." 2

In August 1937 the headline of a Maine newspaper was emblazoned with the words "Roberts Shocks Portsmouth" after he fervently praised Benedict Arnold during a question-and-answer session, insisting that "you ought to be proud of a country that could produce a fellow like him."3 According to Roberts, Arnold's so-called treasonous motives stemmed from the commander's conviction that it was better to give the colonies back to England rather than let them, through an incompetent Continental Congress, fall into the hands of France.

Despite Roberts's differences with historians and academicians, however, his works were well researched, and he would spend months and often years poring over primary resource ma-

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terial. As he freely admitted, he did this not only to portray events accurately and realistically, but also because he had difficulties working out plot and characterization in his novels. Thus, in his research he was able to obtain story lines from historical events, and his characters from histories and genealogies. With the 1937 Northwest Passage, a chronicle of the Colonial Indian fighter Robert Rogers, Roberts succeeded in writing a novel that was an artistic as well as a commercial success, largely because he transcended his usual reliance on printed sources. As he wrote in his notes while planning the book, "I can't do it as straight history (even if I wanted to) because the material is too fragmentary." 4 Consequently, when he found the historical evidence lacking in details, he felt free to elaborate and invent the information he needed, but never in such a way as to contradict the implications of his source materials.

The plot of Boon Island can be easily