Horrific Boon Island Wreck Has Portsmouth Link |
HISTORY MATTERS
Don’t ask what Captain John Deane and his shipwrecked crew of the Nottingham Galley ate for Christmas dinner in 1710. It’s a menu beyond imagining. And yet we cannot look away from the most horrifying tale in the annals of local maritime history. (Continued below)
It happened in December on a barren spit of land called
Cold as Hell
No bigger than two football fields, Boon is a flat mass of broken rock barely 15 feet above sea level. There is no vegetation out there other than seaweed and no life other than mussels and the occasional visiting seabirds and seals. To be precise it was a solitary seagull that the starving crew devoured raw near Christmas Day. When the ship’s cook died, the crew released his body into the sea, hoping it might wash up on the mainland and alert residents to the stranded mariners. It did not.
During an earlier shipwreck in 1682, four crewmen lived for a month on Boon before being rescued. But they were able to catch fish and birds in warmer weather. And spotting smoke on distant
By Christmas the 13 survivors had been lying huddled together under a piece of canvas sail on the sharp frozen ground for two weeks, semi-conscious from exposure and rotting away with frostbite. At high tide the frigid ocean washed into their makeshift tent. Some small bits of waterlogged cheese from their cargo washed ashore and they salvaged enough fresh water to cling to life. But without winter clothing or the ability to make a fire, the crew had all but abandoned hope.
Under impossible conditions a few men managed to build a crude sailboat from the wreckage of the Nottingham Galley, but it capsized in the cruel weather. Then they built a raft on which two volunteers made a last ditch effort to reach shore six miles away. But the two volunteers never returned, and by the time the ship’s carpenter succumbed to the elements, the men on the hellish island were utterly desperate.
What happened next is what makes the story a classic among
BOON ISLAND continued
No stone unturned
In 1710 seacoast residentmussels finally discovered the plight of the men stranded on
But for many days the heavy storms prevented the rescue party from getting the survivors off the island. Locals could not even get supplies to the men stranded on Boon until the weather cleared. It was during these final days that they resorted to cannibalism. Trained in
The gruesome details of how the crew of the Nottingham Galley consumed the ship’s carpenter have been known for three centuries. Captain Deane wrote a full report soon after he and the emaciated survivors arrived in
Captain Deane’s account became the bloody heart of an historical novel by
Roberts’ accepted Captain John Deane’s testimony as gospel and made him the hero of the novel. But a newly published nonfiction book offers a much more detailed and complex, yet no less thrilling, version of the wreck and its aftermath. The title tells all.
Co-author Andrew Vietze is a skilled veteran writer of six books and a seasonal ranger at
A
The authors alternate the action from the cold isolated ledge at sea to the
Rather than sign-off on Deane’s deposition, three of the sailors hired a lawyer and wrote their own version of the truth. Deane’s family was in debt, the crewmen claimed, and he wanted his ship to be captured by privateers or wrecked in order to collect the insurance money. The captain whipped and starved his crewman, took unnecessary risks at sea, and feasted more than the rest on the ship’s dead carpenter, they said.
The war of words continued back in
CONTINUED BOON ISLAND
History’s mysteries
Was Captain Deane trying to commit insurance fraud? Did he have a secret deal with French privateers? Was his brother Jasper in on the scam? Or were the crewmen of the Nottingham Galley, perhaps, working some mutinous revenge of their own against the innocent captain? Were they driven mad with feasting on their dead companion? Inquiring minds still want to know.
“All history is interpretation,” Erickson says. “When you are dealing with something that happened 300 years ago, sources are scarce.”
“It became very clear to me,” says co-author Andrew Vietze, “working on the structure of this book, that it was just begging to be treated like a mystery novel. Open with a body, follow up with twists and turns and hints of menace, and then close with the big reveal. The story is one of history's great mysteries - you have the Captain saying one thing and the First Mate and two other crewmen saying something else entirely, and under oath.”
Equally mysterious is what will happen to the 137-foot lighthouse that now stands on
“The future of Boon Island Lighthouse is in limbo at the moment,” says historian and author Jeremy d’Entremont. “The light itself, still used for navigation, will continue to be maintained by the Coast Guard for the foreseeable future. The lighthouse tower, however, is up for transfer to a suitable new owner.”
“It's one of the most fascinating lighthouse locations in the country, but it has none of the advantages of tourist attractions like Portland Head Light and the Nubble Light,” d’Entremont adds. “
Victorian poet Celia Thaxter may have said it best from her vantage point on the Isles of Shoals 15 miles away.
Copyright © 2012 by J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved. Robinson’s history column appears in the