Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley

by Kenneth Roberts

  A limited Diet and requisite Purges being Administred, in process of Time all recover'd, tho' every one, excepting the Master, lost the Use of Fingers or Toes, or some other part of his Body; and in particular, the Master's Boy suffer'd the Loss of a Foot. At the first Publication of this Narrative, the Master, the

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  Mate, and Mr. Whitworth, were all in England; but, in a Course of fifteen Years since, the Master alone survives of all that he particularly knew.

  And now, after such an Interval of Time, to do Justice to the Names and Memories of those beneficent Gentlemen, whose admir'd Humanity on this Occasion, deserves Applause and Imitation throughout succeeding Ages; and in order to perpetuate the Remembrance of the Gracious Proceedings of Divine Providence in its admirable Conduct towards them, the Master is making a Provision to have the Annual Commemoration of their Wonderful Deliverance celebrated in New-England, as nearest adjoining to the Principal Scene of Action; and that in such a Manner, as may, with the Divine Blessing, prove of Service to reclaim some of the unthinking Part of his own Fraternity.

  FINIS.

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  II

  KENNETH ROBERTS AND BOON ISLAND

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  Kenneth Roberts and Boon Island

  A Study of Historical and Literary Perception

  Jack Bales

  Boon Island is located about 14 miles off the coast of Maine, measuring 150 yards by 50 yards. It is so few feet above 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 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 d
ay 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, written from two distinct and opposite sides, fit perfectly with Roberts's typical literary style. Numerous details, however, that were essential to his story were omitted from the two journals, details he had to supply from his own imagination. As with the situation he confronted while writing Northwest Passage, the material and episodes he added did not contradict what he learned from the two primary resource accounts, and Roberts's solutions to the problems he faced are a tribute to hisand the men'singenuity.

  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 to beg an equal Share in the common Allowance. The Master, to prevent Dispute, distributed it by Lot, with the utmost Impartiality; and to take off any Aversion, enjoin'd them to call it Beef" (82). Langman merely notes that "the Mate, the Boatswain [Nicholas Mellen], and George White wou'd not touch any of it till next Day that they were forced to it by Extremity of Hunger"(54).

  Roberts's dramatization of this decision is one of the most emotional and chilling sections in the bookand one Roberts fortunately does not overdo, for he intended the novel not to be a morality story of cannibalism but one of survival. Because Langman's account is signed by Mellen and Whitethe same two who refused to eat the meatRoberts of course portrays them as Langman's henchmen throughout the entire story:

  When we returned exhausted and depressed to the tent to feed those comrades who had lain there, sunk in helplessness because of some frightened quirk of their disgusting brains, Langman, White and Mellen, as able-bodied as any of us, refused to eat.

  "An insult," Langman mumbled, "to the spirit of a friend."

  "Langman," Captain Dean said, "my duty by you is done. Eat or don't eat, as you please. But my duty to the rest of us is not done, and if I hear any more talk out of you about this meat being anybody's spirit, you'll rue the day!"

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  "Are you threatening me?" Langman asked.

  "Yes, I'm threatening you," Captain Dean said. "If you pour out your spleen on these others, I'll protect them by stopping your mouth. This meat I'm offering is nobody's spirit. It's beef. It was animated once by a soul and a spirit, but the soul and the spirit have gone from this island, leaving only beef behind." (29899)

  As Langman explained in his account of the wreck of the Nottingham Galley, he, Mellen, and White ate their share of the dead man the next day. Roberts writes in Boon Island that Langman tells the captain that the three changed their minds because they realized "it's not a sin to eat beef. When we understood it was beef, we saw we'd made a mistake" (302).

  While book reviewers were pleased to see a new Roberts novel in bookstores, many shared the opinion of one of the author's close friends, who regarded the story as "a failure if judged by the magnificent qualities of his earlier books." 12 As a reviewer for the Chicago Tribune elaborated: "This novel lacks the range of character, setting, action, and reflection of Roberts' previous books. Instead of that full fare it offers a somber study in merciless hunger and pitiless coldand in the greed and endurance, the treachery and loyalty that emerge in men under stress."13

  But Boon Island is more than just this "somber study." Because Roberts, throughout his career, was intent on producing works of fiction that were both historically accurate and readable, he seldom used symbolism or allegories. With Boon Island, however, his last novel, not only are his characters symbolic of good and evil but his geography is as well. When the men are finally rescued Roberts several times contrasts England with the United States, portraying America as the safe and secure haven where a man can achieve his potential through diligence and hard work, as opposed to a corrupt and amoral eighteenth-century Europe inhabited by scoundrels, thieves, and ne'er-do-wells. When Miles Whitworth tells one of their rescuers, Colonel Willi
am