Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [46]
For instance, in an interview Roberts commented on the rather undescriptive narratives of Captain Dean and first mate Langman, giving as an example the rather cursory comment in Dean's reminiscences that the men were able to make a saw out of the blade of a cutlass. In the margin opposite this sentence in Dean's account Roberts scrawled "How! Account for it."9
This attention to minuscule facts was not unusual for the author, for as he said in his literary autobiography, a historical novelistunlike a historian who is usually concerned only with
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factsmust account for even the smallest detail "to the complete satisfaction of the reader. Otherwise his story doesn't, as the saying goes, hold water." 10 Thus, Roberts wrote in Boon Island:
The captain and Swede brought sharp-edged rocks into the tent. While Swede held the blade of the cutlass at an angle against the sharp edge of a rock as a man holds the blade of a razor at an angle against his cheek, the captain would smash at the blade with a similar rock. Thus a V-shaped nick would be broken out of the cutlass blade.
They started with a nick at the hilt end, a nick at the point and a nick halfway between each of the three nicks. Then they subdivided each space between the nicks until the blade became a series of jagged saw teeth.
Then Swede took one of those chisel-like rocks and Chips took another, and they rubbed and rubbed at each nick until both sides had beveled edges and the teeth were sharp.
When they started I didn't believe they could do it. Since Boon Island, I believe the right sort of man can do anything. (22728)
Roberts neatly fit his elaborations into his good vs. evil theme. After the men laboriously build and launch their boat, only to have it capsize, they lose more than their boat, they lose their ax and hammer as well. As Roberts wrote in the margin of the 1726 Dean account that noted the loss of the tools, "Why take ax and hammer?" Langman explained in his report that when the men carried the boat to the shore for launching, they put aboard "such of the Carpenter's Tools as we had sav'd from the Wreck, in order to build a better when we came on Shore."11 Roberts expertly weaves this fact into a diatribe against Langman's idiocy and selfishness:
I think the loss of the boat had shocked all of us: first into a state of horrified resignation, then into desperate activity.... Certainly there was rancor in the mind of everyone able to thinkeven in the minds of Langman's cronies, White and Mellen. In all their faces I saw sullen fury at Langman's folly in putting the axe and the hammer in the boat, and at his insolent insistence that he did so to let us build a better boat when we got to land.
We knew that wasn't so: knew that his seizure of the tools was un-
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reasoning hoggishness on Langman's part, and there was hot resentment against Langman, and an irritation against everything. (25556)
Another example of Roberts's incorporation of history into literature, surrounded by his black and white paradigms of moral virtues and vices, is the men's decision to eat the body of Chips Bullock, the carpenter. Although most of the men favor the idea, Langman and his friends refuse, (1) simply because the Captain approves the plan, and (2) so they could laterif they were rescuedtestify that eating him was the Captain's suggestion. Dean writes in his revised account: "The Mate, and the two other Opposers, refus'd to partake of the Flesh that Night, but were the first next Morning