Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley (18 page)

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Authors: Kenneth Roberts,Jack Bales,Richard Warner

Tags: #Survival After Airplane Accidents; Shipwrecks; Etc., #Nottingham (Galley) - Fiction, #Transportation, #Historical, #Boon Island (Me.) - Fiction, #Boon Island, #18th Century, #Survival After Airplane Accidents; Shipwrecks; Etc - Fiction, #Survival After Airplane Accidents; Shipwrecks; Etc, #Shipwrecks, #Fiction, #Literary, #Sea Stories, #Historical Fiction, #Shipwrecks - Maine - Boon Island - History - 18th Century - Fiction, #test, #Boon Island (Me.), #General, #Maine, #History

BOOK: Boon Island: including Contemporary Accounts of the Wreck of the Nottingham Galley
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Page 95
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.
 
Page 96
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
 
Page 97
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
 
Page 98
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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