Adam Nightingale - The Shipwreck Cannibals

The novel begins to pile enough coincidence upon coincidence as to make even Charles Dickens embarrassed by the contrivance of it all. Deane liberates a slave who happens to be his beloved Elizabeth’s father. The Huguenot he had met previously happens to be Elizabeth’s mother. Deane and his crew are captured by pirates. The pirate captain happens to be Pearson who happens to have Elizabeth stashed away on an island in the West Indies. Deane and Elizabeth are reunited and fall in love. The island is liberated by the British navy. Pearson gets away. The captain responsible for the rescue turns out to be Elizabeth’s uncle. Elizabeth and Deane are parted once again.

Deane serves under Admiral Rooke. Once again he distinguishes himself in combat and earns further promotion. By this point in the novel, the battles begin to resemble history lessons as Kingston the pedant battles and triumphs over Kingston the storyteller. He seems to forget he is writing a novel about a man called John Deane and only tells the reader Deane’s part in the battle as an afterthought rather than relaying the battle through Deane’s eyes as he had done earlier in the story. And when Kingston allows John Deane centre stage in a military engagement, the result is ridiculous. The apex of Deane’s military career is his part in Rooke’s assault on Gibraltar. During the attack Deane volunteers to lead an attack on a fortress by climbing, ‘a part of the cliff which the Spaniards had never thought it possible any human beings could climb’. But Deane manages it, taking prisoners and sparing Catholic women. Deane is promoted to captain. The flawed hero of the first half of the novel is now a martial saint, faultlessly courageous, perfectly honourable in combat and utterly boring.

All the while Deane longs for a respite in his adventures so that he can return to England and marry Elizabeth. When he finally gets the chance he discovers that Elizabeth is not in England. Elizabeth and her mother have been shipwrecked off the coast of New England. Deane wants to go to New England and find her. His need to see Elizabeth coincides with plans among his friends and relatives in Nottingham to trade in America. Deane agrees to captain a ship to New England. The ship is named the Nottingham Galley .

After thirty-four chapters W.H.G. Kingston finally tackles the incident that made John Deane famous. He devotes a little over a chapter to the Boon Island episode and seems to go out of his way to get every single detail wrong. The Nottingham Galley is manned by forty sailors and protected by twenty guns. The voyage is ‘prosperous’ with no intimation of any encounters with French privateers or discord among the crew. The Nottingham Galley is bound for Delaware. When it is just 50 leagues from the American coast a gale blows up. The Nottingham Galley is driven onto the rocks of an island. Most of the crew are drowned or die when they are ‘dashed furiously against the rocks’. John Deane is swept overboard. He is set on a beach. Apart from Deane there are five other survivors. Deane and company discover an abandoned shelter built from wreckage complete with a door, a table, a shuttered window and silk, evidence of the presence of ladies. Deane discovers a Bible that belongs to Elizabeth. The Nottingham Galley is lost but one of its boats has washed ashore. The boat is intact but will let in water if the survivors try to use it. Casks of food have been salvaged. Drinking water is a problem but not for long. Deane discovers a tree on the island that yields moisture seeping from its roots. Days pass and the food begins to run out. A carpenter’s chest is discovered between the rocks. It contains everything the castaways need to repair the boat. A ship is spotted. Deane and company sail to meet it. It is a pirate ship manned by none other than Pearson. After a tense exchange Pearson agrees to set Deane ashore for old times’ sake. Deane finds Elizabeth and is married. The Boon Island episode is done and dusted without a single mention or insinuation of cannibalism.

The novel is not quite finished. Kingston saves his most anomalous detail for last. Deane returns home war rich from prize money but having lost the investors their cash from the Boon Island adventure. It is not Deane’s fault but a contingent in Nottingham blames him all the same. Jasper Deane is among them. Tensions between the two brothers result in the argument that causes Jasper’s death. John Deane is legally exonerated but nevertheless held responsible by many in Nottingham. The scandal is too much for Deane to bear. He accepts an offer to travel to Russia with his wife in answer to a call for naval talent by Peter the Great.

The death of Jasper Deane is such a throwaway piece of writing, one wonders why Kingston included it. The anecdote does have the faint ring of verisimilitude about it as it is so at odds with the pantomimic tone of the majority of what has preceded it. In reality, as his will attested, there were tensions between John Deane and his brother’s daughter. Jasper’s accidental death might have been the reason. More likely the story is a contrivance, devised as an alternate motive for John Deane to go to Russia so as to deflect attention from the historical reasons for his actual departure; accusations of fraud and stories of cannibalism.

The rest of Deane’s career is given a jaunty spin by Kingston.

His time in Russia:

He rendered great assistance in organising the navy of that wonderful man Peter the Great, and after serving with much credit for a few years, he returned to England.

His time in Ostend:

Captain Deane had during this time found a number of friends, and by their means he was soon afterwards appointed English consul at Ostend, where he lived with his wife Elizabeth till they were both advanced in life.

Kingston portrays Deane’s retirement in Wilford as a pastoral utopia:

As an elderly couple they came back to Nottingham once more, and went to live in the sweet village of Wilford, on the opposite side of the silvery Trent. It was the peaceful green retreat that had beckoned him back to England from many a scene of foreign grandeur, and smiled across many a time of tumult and of battle.

W.H.G. Kingston was a religious propagandist. His novels were written to simultaneously entertain and instruct Victorian boys in morality and patriotism. They were published by Christian organisations. As liberally interpreted by Kingston, John Deane’s life was the classic Prodigal Son story. So, having erred and repented, having been reborn as a knight errant, Kingston ends his novel with a blissful rendering of Deane’s final internment complete with the promise of heavenly reward:

The tomb of John Deane, Captain R.N., and of Elizabeth his wife, is to be seen on a little green promontory above the sparkling Trent and near the chancel of the parish church, where sweet strains of music, accompanying the sound of human voices and the murmurs of the river, are wont to mingle in harmonious hymns of prayer and praise. A more fitting spot in which to await in readiness for the last hour of life than Wilford can scarcely be imagined, nor a sweeter place than its church-yard in which the mortal may lie down to rest from toil till summoned by the last trump to rise and put on immortality.

Kenneth Roberts’ 1956 novel is an entirely more factually accurate account of the shipwreck than W.H.G. Kingston’s panoramic fantasy. It draws scrupulously on the Jasper Deane, Christopher Langman and John Deane accounts for its details but is unashamedly partisan in favouring the Deanes’ cause over Langman’s. The majority of the story takes place during the ordeal on Boon Island. But Roberts allows himself a lengthy prologue in England, as bizarre in its own way as anything W.H.G. Kingston had written.