By the time John Deane was ready to embark for New England, Nottingham was still the modest conurbation that Daniel Defoe would describe in the 1720s as, ‘one of the most beautiful and pleasant towns in England’. Wilford was a benign satellite to the pleasant East Midlands town. Although subject to the rigours of an eighteenth century quasi-pastoral existence that included unnavigable roads, punishing winters, flooding, poaching and the occasional act of highway robbery, Wilford was a relatively pleasant place for John Deane to have grown up in. The only real emblem of the chaotic world beyond the county’s borders was the presence in Nottingham of a prisoner of war, the French aristocrat Camille d’Houston, the Comte de Tallard, captured at the Battle of Blenheim and residing in the town under luxurious house arrest.
The biographical void of John Deane’s early years would become filled with tall tales. John Deane was a butcher’s apprentice. He fell in with a gang of professional deer thieves. He left the gang for fear of the gallows but the itch for excitement remained. He sought satisfaction through legalistic channels and joined the Royal Navy. He fought against the French in the War of Spanish Succession. He prospered under the martial governance of Admiral Rooke. He was present at the liberation of Gibraltar. He was promoted to the rank of captain. He left the navy but by 1710 was broke and in need of a financially rewarding venture that would satisfy his taste for high adventure. He threw in with his brother and decided to go to New England.
Apart from the friends and business contacts the Deanes had clearly established in New England, and a reference in a letter John Deane wrote in the late 1720s to having been in the coastal Irish town of Dungarvan ‘at the beginning of the late French wars’, virtually nothing of the elaborate prequel to the events of 1710 can be substantiated. Most of it came from the imagination of the forgotten Victorian writer W.H.G. Kingston, author of a popular novel about John Deane. Many of the fanciful imaginings of Kingston’s fiction were reported as fact by Victorian and Edwardian historians and still exist as corruptions in the biography of John Deane to this day. Whatever the true nature of John Deane’s naval apprenticeship, his brother Jasper certainly felt confident enough in his abilities to offer him the captaincy of a small ship in a trade voyage to the English colonies on the east coast of North America. Jasper Deane had gone into partnership with the merchant Charles Whitworth. He had bought a 120-ton ship. He named the ship the Nottingham Galley. Its cargo of rope and cheese was jointly owned by Jasper Deane and Charles Whitworth. A crew was recruited and plans were made for a late-season voyage to Boston in 1710.
The Nottingham Galley may have originally been Swedish, a prize taken in war and then sold on to Jasper Deane. Its ten guns were certainly Swedish. If the vessel itself wasn’t from Sweden then the guns may have been fitted onto an unarmed English vessel, weapons on a merchant ship being a necessity even in times of peace as attack from pirates was a constant threat. But England was still at war with France and the coastal waters were fertile hunting grounds for Louis XIV’s privateers.
Half of the Nottingham Galley’s cargo was in London. The other half was in Ireland. To get there the Nottingham Galley would have to sail the long way round the British coast in order to minimise the chance of encountering the French. This was not the only risk. The lateness of the season meant a greater chance of storms and bad weather.
In August 1710 fourteen men set sail for New England. What follows is John and Jasper Deane’s version of events.
2
The Captain’s Story
John and Jasper Deane’s account of the voyage began as they approached the Irish port of Killybegs to pick up their cargo before setting sail for Boston. Prior to this, as Langman’s account would attest, they had set sail from Gravesend in early August and sailed to Whitby under the protection of a merchant convoy guarded by two men-of-war before Deane had broken away from the convoy and sailed to Killybegs. Between the shore of the mainland and the island of Arran, as they approached Killybegs from the south, they spotted two ships heading toward them. The ships were French privateers.
Langman would make much of Deane’s encounter with the privateers, accusing him of deliberately trying to secure the ship’s capture. John Deane, in his account, didn’t mention the privateer episode at all. The Jasper Deane-sponsored account gave it short shrift, stating that John Deane’s intentions, should the Nottingham Galley fail to outrun the French, was to run the ship aground and torch her rather than submit to capture.
The privateers were successfully evaded and the Nottingham Galley docked in Killybegs. Deane’s cargo was a mixture of rope, which he had taken on board in London, and butter and cheese, which was waiting for him in Ireland. Three hundred pieces of cheese and 30 tons of butter were loaded onto the Nottingham Galley at Killybegs. The ship set sail for Boston on 25 September 1710. Nothing dramatic happened of any significance until the Nottingham Galley approached New England in early December.
Land was spotted. The Nottingham Galley was east of the Piscataqua River, heading south toward Massachusetts Bay. The coast of New England was covered in snow. A north-easterly gale assailed the Nottingham Galley with hail, rain and snow. A thick fog enveloped the ship and the mainland was obscured from view. The fog hung on the ocean for approximately twelve days. Around the eleventh day the fog lifted for fifteen minutes. In that tiny window of visibility John Deane observed the mainland and tried to determine where they were. Neither Deane nor his crew could make any kind of accurate judgement as to their exact position; ‘unaccountable currents’ had dragged them off course. Nevertheless John Deane ascertained that the safest course of action would be to steer the ship in a south-westerly direction because the wind was blowing in from the north-east and land lay to the north-east and the south-west. His intention was to sail south-west until ten o’clock that evening and then lie by until daybreak the following morning. It was the eleventh of December, or thereabouts.
The weather was against them. The Nottingham Galley was peppered with further rain, wind and snow. John Deane had posted a member of the crew as a lookout. Deane stood watch himself. The time was somewhere between eight or nine o’clock at night. Through the evening black, John Deane spotted waves breaking where there shouldn’t have been waves. He called instructions to the steerman to, ‘Put helm hard a starboard!’ The command caught the steerman by surprise. The steerman bungled his orders but it made no difference. The command had been issued too late. The Nottingham Galley had struck rock.
The impact was violent and disorientating. The waves were high and the night so dark that whatever the ship had hit was barely visible through the black. The crew couldn’t stand upright on deck. The ship was lifted by the waves and swung parallel with an island that none of the crew could yet see. Waves broke across the deck. John Deane ordered his crew to take immediate shelter in his cabin. Fourteen men huddled together below deck. John Deane called his crew to prayer for their immediate deliverance. Once they had offered up pleas to God, John Deane set them to work. He ordered his men back on deck. He commanded them to chop down the masts. He led by example. Some, but not all of the crew, followed him. Those that stayed behind had temporarily lost their nerve, paralysed by the fear of death and the prospect, despite their prayers, of imminent eternal damnation.