Two years later, John Deane amended his will in the light of the death of one of his four trustees. He appointed a new trustee. But something seemed to have happened in the intervening time that obliged, forced, or provoked Deane to modify his previous generosity to certain family members. He reduced the amount of money he had ceded to his sister Martha. The £20 he had bequeathed to his nephew was altered to ‘a few pounds and no more’. A sum of £100 from which he would give money to the poor was reduced to £25, although the poor of Wilford would still receive their £5 per year every January, presumably until the £25 ran out. Whether the changes in the will were necessitated by some alteration in his finances or whether he was punishing all and sundry for unrecorded offences is not currently known.
The events of Boon Island still weighed heavy on John Deane and he felt a powerful obligation to provide for one of the shipwreck’s indirect casualties. Miles Whitworth was the son of Charles Whitworth, Deane’s late friend and business partner. Miles Whitworth lived in New England. In his will John Deane arranged for £100-worth of goods to be bought in London and shipped to America and given to Miles, presumably to sell or dispose of as Miles saw fit. Deane bequeathed three personal items to Miles: a silver hilted sword, three volumes of sermons and a pair of pistols. Deane placed great value on the pistols. He recorded in his will that the weapons had ‘saved my life in the year one thousand seventeen hundred and twenty upon the River Volga’. It was a tantalising hint at a lost anecdote of close-quarter survival from Deane’s time in exile transporting timber from Kazan to Lagoda Lake.
In August 1761 John and Sarah Deane died within a day of one another. There were no children to survive them. Husband and wife were buried together in St Wilfrid’s cemetery. Their epitaph reads:
Here lieth the body of John Deane, Esq, who from the year 1714 to 1720 commanded a ship of war in the Czar of Muscovy’s service; after which, being appointed by his Britannic Majesty Consul for the ports of Flanders and Ostend, he resided there many years. By His Majesty’s leave retired to this village in year 1738, where he died August the 18th, 1761, in the 82nd year of his age. His wife, Sarah Deane, lies here also interred who departed this life August 17th, 1761, Aged 81.
The tombstone makes no reference to Boon Island.
Epilogue
In intermittent fits and starts, the potency of Captain John Deane’s fame lasted into the twentieth century.
In 1762 Miles Whitworth reprinted the 1711 version of the Boon Island tragedy.
In 1870, the novelist W.H.G. Kingston wrote John Deane: Historic Adventures by Land and Sea. The novel was a work of fiction, an adventure story for boys. Anecdotes in the novel that had no basis in fact would soon be reported as true. For example, John Deane fought in the War of Spanish Succession under Admiral Sir George Rooke where he was promoted to the rank of captain. Deane was present at the liberation of Gibraltar. Deane feuded with his brother. The reason for the feud was revenue lost during the shipwreck at Boon Island. Kingston described the consequences of the disagreement as John and Jasper Deane walked across Nottingham to attend dinner at their sister’s house:
On their way, some remarks made by Dr Jasper irritated John Deane, as he considered them unfair and unjust, and angry words were heard by some of the passers-by, uttered by him to his brother. They reached the door together. A flight of stone steps led to it from the street. Unhappily, at this moment the doctor repeated the expressions which had justly offended the captain, who declared that he would not allow himself to be addressed in so injurious a manner. As he spoke he pushed impatiently past his brother, who at that moment stumbled down the steps. The doctor fell; and as Captain Deane stooped to lift him up, to his horror, he found that he was dead! Rumour, with her hundred tongues, forthwith spread the report that the fire-eating captain had killed his brother. The verdict however of the jury who sat to decide the case was, that Dr Jasper Deane had died by the visitation of God.
Although it is almost certain that there was no truth in the story, the anecdote became the most salacious tall tale believed wholesale by those who would periodically excavate John Deane’s history.
In 1899 John Deane’s History of The Russian Fleet during the Reign of Peter the Great was published by the Navy Records Society. The society had no idea of the true identity of the document’s author.
In 1917 the Jasper Deane account of the Boon Island shipwreck was republished in The Magazine of History and Biography.
Kingston’s novel went out of print. Deane’s pamphlets were no longer in circulation.
In 1934 John Deane was identified as the author of History of the Russian Fleet.
In New England a renewed interest in John Deane was fanned into flame by a local novelist. In 1956 Kenneth Roberts, a native of Maine, wrote a fanciful but forensically accurate novel about the wreck of the Nottingham Galley called Boon Island.
On Boon Island itself a few of the Nottingham Galley’s cannons were discovered by scuba divers. The cannons were resting on a ledge 25 feet below the surface of the ocean. In 1994 the University of New England decided to remove the cannons, their decision hastened by a rumour that Massachusetts salvage hunters were on their way to claim the antique weapons for themselves. The cannons are the only surviving physical evidence that the Nottingham Galley ever existed.
Kenneth Roberts’ novel went out of print but was republished by the University Press of New England in 1996. The new edition of Boon Island contained reprints of John Deane’s, Jasper Deane’s and Christopher Langman’s accounts of their Boon Island experiences. The novel fell out of print for a second time.
At the time of writing John Deane is probably better known in New England than he is in his own country. In Britain he has been largely forgotten when at one time, trailing only behind William Bligh’s misadventure on the Bounty, the wreck of the Nottingham Galley was perhaps the most notorious English naval scandal of the eighteenth century. Even in Nottingham and its neighbouring Wilford village, John Deane is barely known. Two houses that Deane had had built in the 1730s still survive, yards away from the church in which he is buried. His tombstone is easy to find. The inscription is still legible but the grave rarely visited.
Appendix 1
John Deane in Fiction 1
In the preface to his novel W.H.G. Kingston cites an anonymous friend from Nottingham whose history of Deane’s adventures provides the well from which he would draw material for his story. Kingston iterates that John Deane ‘was a real person’, implying that Deane’s memory may have fallen out of fashion in the year of the book’s publication. He provides a brief summation of Deane’s life, background and principle exploits:
He was born at that town A.D. 1679. Though of gentle parentage, in his early days he followed the occupation of a drover. He then went to sea, and became a Captain in the Navy; after that he was a Merchant Adventurer. He next took service under Peter the Great, and commanded a Russian ship-of-war. On leaving Russia, he obtained the post of British Consul at Ostend, held by him for many years. Returning home, he was made a Burgess of his native town, and took up his abode at the neighbouring village of Wilford, where, in 1760, he died.