In late May the British squadron arrived at Revel. The Russians were thrown into a state of panic, believing that they were about to be attacked.
In the hunt for information, John Deane lost a contact and gained a contact. Gustaf Armfelt, a Swedish general Deane had arranged to speak to effectively stood him up. Instead Deane sought out a prominent person he described as a ‘good king’s man’ who supported Hanoverian interests. Deane spent a night and a morning with his new associate trying to convince him to offer up any information that might be useful to British interests in the area. Deane’s prospective informer was ‘not unwilling but shy on the hazard should it be known’. Still, the intelligence gleaned was encouraging. The king’s man told Deane of ‘two couriers’ who had passed by recently and a ‘Russian count’ who ‘was in great consternation’ of the British presence in the Baltic. The count endeavoured ‘to put everything in a posture of defence at Kronslot’, having received ‘intelligence from England’ that the British intended to assault the port.
The king’s man was in weekly correspondence with an aristocrat in St Petersburg from whom he obtained useful information. Relaying intelligence would prove awkward. The king’s man was willing to pass information on to Deane but did not want to commit anything to writing. He would only tell Deane what he had discovered face to face, so that Deane had to contrive a reason to leave his official duties and be ferried, on a weekly basis, to see his new informer personally.
In June 1726 Deane learned that overdue prize money for ships captured by the Russian navy between 1718 and 1719 in the Great Northern War was being paid out. Some of that money belonged to Deane. He was incensed. Despite the futility of his suite, Deane wanted his money. He wrote to Admiral Apraxin asking for his assistance in ensuring that any wages he had earned were somehow forwarded to him. Deane also wrote to Townsend imploring the viscount to intervene in the matter on his behalf.
Aboard the Torbay, moored in the waters of Revel, as the summer drew to a close John Deane came into close proximity with a truly despised old enemy.
Deane was highly valued by Admiral Wagner and was a welcome guest at his dinner table. He enjoyed dining with the admiral. For John Deane, dinner was a form of sanctuary from the intensity and sometime madness of his duties. He described the custom in intimate terms as a place where, ‘we live here in tranquillity, not forgetting our friends in a glass after dinner’. The serpent in Eden was Thomas Saunders. The Jacobite admiral had been invited to dinner. As Russia and Britain were neither at peace nor war, diplomacy occasionally demanded that old enemies became temporary dinner guests. When Saunders came to dinner, the atmosphere appeared as one of strained politeness. One of Saunders favourite weapons was mockery. At the dinner table he sought to undermine John Deane with an observation. Deane recalled how Thomas Saunders compared ‘me to mercury, by my quick removal from England to St Petersburg, Stockholm, Hanover, The Hague, England and now again in Revel’.
Having eaten on board Wagner’s ship, Saunders was obliged to return the compliment. But that courtesy did not extend to John Deane, who was not invited to eat aboard Saunders’ vessel. Yet Deane was the topic of conversation. Saunders talked for an hour about John Deane. He praised Townsend who he believed was ‘a man of sense’ but was incredulous that the viscount should put any kind of stock in John Deane’s abilities. Saunders sent a personal message back to the Torbay for John Deane to contemplate. Deane had enjoyed a surprising degree of movement on the Russian mainland that summer. He had been ashore to Revel at least three times that season. Saunders issued a barely concealed threat. As far as he was concerned, Deane’s liberty was now at an end. Saunders let it be known that ‘it was not safe’ for Deane ‘to come any more on land’.
17
Revisions
John Deane returned to England. His duties in the Baltic almost at an end, Deane was once again facing the prospect of unemployment. Resident in London, having let it lie dormant for a decade and a half, Deane revisited his old Boon Island narrative. In autumn 1726 he published a revised account of the wreck of the Nottingham Galley entitled A Narrative of the Nottingham Galley, &c, Published in 1711. Revis’d and re-printed with Additions in 1726, by John Deane, Commander.
The revised edition told more or less the same story as his brother’s version. The most notable stylistic difference was that now the narrative was told in the third person. There was no introduction. Deane leapt straight into the account. He fleshed out the narrative with more detail than Jasper Deane or Christopher Langman had included. He omitted any mention of French privateers or the attempted murder of the first mate. He told the story (missing from the Jasper Deane account) of the attempted theft of the extra ration of human flesh. He provided a coda (also omitted from the Jasper Deane account) where he described his arrival in New England and his haggard black comic encounter in the home of his rescuer Jethro Furber. As the hero of his own narrative, John Deane presented himself as a man blessed by God, ‘in a greater share of health and strength of body, and likewise a proportionate vigour of mind’, for the purpose of instilling ‘into the hearts of the dispirited people a reliance on that almighty being, who is not confin’d to particular means, nor always acts to human probabilities’. In other words, Deane was the modest deliverer, appointed by his creator to lead his men to safety. Although no less dramatic in its storytelling, John Deane’s account was generally a more reflective narrative than those that had preceded it. The reader had greater access to Deane’s internal agonising over the impossible decisions he had been forced to make on a daily basis. Most importantly, it was a narrative stripped of the original agenda that had necessitated its predecessor. The crew, including Langman, were given their due in much the same way they had been in the Jasper Deane account. But gone was the sting in the tail, the defensive postscript fending off assaults on the Deane brothers’ reputations. The closing paragraphs of the new account were conciliatory and seasoned with a degree of grace for old enemies. John Deane wrote: ‘At the first publication of this narrative, the master, the 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.’ With the perspective of time and from the privileged vantage point of survival, Deane could afford to be magnanimous. In the closing paragraph of his account he announced his intention to make provision for an ‘annual commemoration of their wonderful deliverance’ to be held in New England for ‘those beneficent gentlemen, whose admir’d humanity on this occasion deserves applause and imitation throughout succeeding ages’, as well as ‘to prove of service to reclaim some of the unthinking part of his own fraternity’.
It was a noble and undoubtedly sincere sentiment but not without a possible dash of self-interest. John Deane could have initiated a memorial without the public hoo-ha of a fresh pamphlet opening old wounds. The Boon Island incident and its subsequent pamphlet war was after all the reason that John Deane had spent over a decade in self-imposed exile. But as well as being a survivor, John Deane was also a pragmatist. He was out of work. There was the immediate need for money and further employment. Up until now, publicity had mostly been John Deane’s enemy. Now it could work in his favour. For the first time John Deane took ownership of his legacy. He wouldn’t run from Boon Island anymore. He would take possession of it and make it work on his behalf. The pamphlet would bring in an immediate source of income. It sold well and was reprinted the following year. More importantly, it made Deane a public figure once again. It placed him back in the public’s awareness while he sought a new appointment. And there was a post that John Deane was specifically interested in: the commercial consul for the ports of Flanders and Ostend was up for grabs. Walpole, Townsend and Sir Charles Wagner were all keen for John Deane to have the post. The renewed celebrity the pamphlet provided could help secure the post. Deane’s strategy proved successful. He was offered the consulship.