It seemed to be a time of introspection for John Deane. He was concerned with questions of command now that a form of de facto equality had fallen on the marooned crew. Aboard the Nottingham Galley his authority had been absolute. He would have expected his orders to have been obeyed without question. Deane had been on the island for less than a few days and some of the crew had refused simple requests as well as direct commands. Crew members were shirking the common tasks. Deane’s response was to neither impose command nor insist on obedience. He wandered off alone to search for materials, a pretext designed to give the crew the necessary room to decide for themselves if they still wanted him to lead them. The crew talked in Deane’s absence. The majority came to the decision that Deane would remain their captain; that they would defer all powers of command to Deane exactly as they had when on board the Nottingham Galley. Ten men were in agreement. There were three voices of dissent, the first mate Christopher Langman and two unnamed sailors. Langman and company were overruled. John Deane was made aware of the crew’s decision. He agreed to carry on as before with the concessionary gesture of consulting the crew in the case of certain important decisions.
The next few days on Boon Island were spent searching for further materials and tending to the sick. Three crew members had fallen ill. They all convalesced together. Worst among them was the ship’s cook. He was physically weaker than the rest of the men and inexperienced when it came to toughing out the natural rigours of life at sea. In these extreme circumstances it was more than his body could bear. At noon, on the third or fourth day, the crew reported the cook’s death to John Deane. Deane ordered the cook’s body to be taken to edge of the island and given to the waves.
When the cook had been alive he had been the most conspicuous in his complaints about the lack of food on Boon Island. He seemed to feel the extremities of hunger before anyone else. The other crew members hadn’t arrived at that point of desperation quite yet. But as the cook’s body was given to the ocean many privately considered whether his corpse might not have been put to better use as a meal for the living. These were the first thoughts of cannibalism among the crew. Even John Deane was not immune, pondering privately whether it might not have been better to eat the dead cook rather than bury him at sea.
The supply of cheese had not yet run out. There was about half a pound of cheese for each man. During the food distribution Deane would ensure that everyone received exactly the same ration. This was an act of diplomacy on Deane’s part. Despite the crew’s decision to obey Deane’s orders, not everyone appeared to be pulling their weight in the allocation of daily tasks. Deane could have withheld food from those he deemed to be wilfully lazy but he chose not to.
In that first week on Boon Island, in addition to the cheese, the crew ate powdered bone. The bones were from pieces of beef from the food supplies of the Nottingham Galley. Fish had eaten the meat but the bones had washed up on shore. The crew smashed the bones to powder on the rocks in order to render them digestible.
The men were starting to show the grotesque physical effects of half a week in the freezing wet. Most of the crew were suffering from frostbite. Many had lost some degree of feeling in their fingers and their toes. When fleeing the Nottingham Galley some members of the crew had gone barefoot. Others had worn boots and stockings. Those that wore boots had to have them cut from their feet. As the boots were removed and the stockings peeled off, skin and toenails came away with the material. Feet were horribly blistered. Deane tended to the wounds of his men as best he could. He personally dressed ulcers, binding feet in makeshift bandages fashioned out of linen, rags and oakum that had washed up on shore. He cleaned wounds, washing them with an antiseptic brew concocted from a mixture of seawater and human urine.
The hands of many of the crew had begun to change colour. This was a source of pressing concern for Deane. Discolouration presaged the onset of mortification. It was important to keep the blood circulating in the hands and feet, or fingers and toes might have to be amputated. The best defence against the mortification of the skin was work. And there was important work that needed to be done. The canvas sheet could not continue as their only defence against the night cold. A shelter had to be constructed. Building work would be easier than had been previously anticipated as carpenter’s tools had been discovered in the preceding day’s search for materials.
The first structure built by the survivors of the Nottingham Galley was a tent. It was triangular in shape. The tent was between 8 and 9ft in diameter. It was made from a mixture of canvas and sail and bits of oakum. The tent pole was a wooden staff. On top of the pole was a flag made out of a piece of cloth that stood as a signal to passing vessels. It was an important achievement but there was a problem. When it came time for the men to bed down for the night it became evident that there wasn’t enough space within the shelter for everyone to lie down properly. All of the crew were obliged to sleep on their sides. Problems arose whenever a single crew member decided he wanted to turn over. If a man turned over it caused disruption among the other men. Deane’s solution was to regiment the men’s sleep. During the night, at two-hourly intervals, a call would be given and the entire crew would turn over in unison. Comical though it must have appeared, it seemed to work and the men’s chance of getting some approximation of rest was substantially increased.
Deane and the crew began to turn their attention to getting off the island. Having built a tent they now felt galvanised enough to try their hand at constructing a small boat. In terms of materials there was now sufficient wood washed ashore to build a boat. Nails had been discovered in the rocks. As far as tools were concerned the men had a caulking mallet and a cutlass. Many of the crew had their own knives. They used the knives to carve teeth into the cutlass blade, turning a weapon into an improvised saw.
John Deane described his crew’s efforts:
Three planks were laid flat for the bottom, and two up each side, fix’d to stanchings, and let into the Bottom timbers, with two short Pieces at each End, and one Breadth of new Holland’s-Duck round the Vessel, to keep out the Spray of the Sea: they caulk’d her with Oakum, drawn from old Junk: and secured the Seames with Canvas, Pump-leather, and sheet-lead, as far as the extent of their small Stock would allow; a short mast was fix’d, with a square Sail; seven Paddles provided for Rowing, and an eighth, longer than ordinary, for Steering.
While constructing the boat the workforce consisted of John Deane and two members of the crew. A working day lasted four hours. The cold prohibited working any longer than that. On some days the cold was so intense that no work was done at all. The irony of the entire endeavour was that the man best qualified to oversee the building of the boat was too incapacitated to help. The ship’s carpenter was so weak he couldn’t even offer advice. He had been among the first of the survivors to fall ill. He coughed up large amounts of phlegm and suffered from back pain and neck stiffness. He would lose the use of both feet and be incapable of walking.