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By Root 474 0

summarized. During a storm on the evening of December 11, 1710, the British ship Nottingham Galley, enroute from Greenwich, England, to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, runs aground and is wrecked on Boon Island, a small uninhabited island off the coast of Maine. Although the crew of fourteen manages to scramble safely onto the island, little more than a barren pile of rocks, they have few tools, little food, and no shelter except for a makeshift tent that helps keep out snow and freezing rain. The ship's cook soon dies, and the men set his body adrift in hope that it will wash ashore and draw the attention of would-be rescuers. With their crude tools, they laboriously build a boat, which capsizes soon after they launch it. They then manage to construct a raft, on which two men set out for shore. One of them dies, while the other reaches the mainland but is found frozen to death by two men, who come to Boon Island to investigate. They rescue the remaining ten of the castaways, who have managed to survive for twenty-four days.

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As Roberts mentioned during an interview shortly before the book's publication, he had long been familiar with both the island and the famous shipwreck:

I've thought about that story for a long, long timethirty years, say. As a boy I used to go fishing out there, so probably it dates back even more. But fooling around with the idea, thirty years.

You'll find the story of Boon Island in footnotes in all Maine histories. They'll keep telling you that you couldn't live twenty-four days on a rock in a Maine winter. These people did. Then I've always wanted to put together a group who had nothing, and see what they'd do. 5

When Roberts researched his story, the only primary account of the episode he could find was one by Nottingham Galley Captain John Dean, which he felt was "a jumbled, garbled, incoherent mass of generalities in which practically no one was named."6 Seeking corroboration of the details, as well as some sort of focus and "lead" to the story, he asked his cousin in Greenwich, England, the city from which the vessel had sailed, to comb through eighteenth-century records for him. His relative found a narrative written by the ship's mate and two of its sailors that claimed Dean deliberately sank the ship so that he could collect the insurance money on it. This gave Roberts the angle he was looking for:

Then, by great good fortune, I found a journal of Dean's first mate. The mate was a liar and a coward. He hated Dean with an abysmal hatred; accused Dean of all sorts of impossible things; but both of these two men, hating each other, agreed in their essential details, so that I knew the Nottingham had been wrecked on Boon Island on a certain date, and that the crew had lived under impossible conditions for 24 days.7

Roberts, then, wrote Boon Island as a morality story of how the essence of a man's character is first tested and then laid bare by the circumstances that befall him. As the men each day cope with isolation, suffering, and hardships, these unremitting conflicts increasingly reveal either each man's inner strengths or his

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basic character flaws. At one extreme is Captain Dean, who while marooned on Boon Island "had washed our ulcerated legs and feet with urine ... [and] almost paralyzed his hands to dredge up mussels for us." At the other is first mate Christopher Langman, who accuses Dean of sinking the ship so he can collect the insurance, and who Roberts describes as "malice personified" and "a whoreson, beetle-headed, flapear'd knave'' (Boon Island, 290, 145, 254).

As one reviewer of the book indicated, a trademark of Roberts's novels is that "his heroes, as a rule, are thorough heroes; and his villains are unmitigated villains." 8 Benedict Arnold, for example, is portrayed in Arundel and Rabble in Arms as not the despicable character of legend, but a fearless military leader and brilliant tactician shamefully victimized by incompetent generals and a small-minded Continental Congress. Thus, Dean's and Langman's narratives,