A Ship Is Wrecked

BOON ISLAND (275 pp.)--Kenneth Roberts--Doubleday ($3.75).

Novelist Kenneth (Northwest Passage) Roberts likes men who pull their weight. His heroes are generally fellows whose characters are compounded of the good, old-fashioned virtues, and their crises sometimes find them with little but hope to sustain them under pressure. His new novel, Boon Island--the first since Lydia Bailey in 1947--is a grim little tale of survival. Based on a true story, it tells of a shipwreck in which each man's size and courage are fully measured during 24 days of simple horror.

On the night of Dec. 11, 1710, England's Nottingham galley was smashed to bits on rocky Boon Island, just six miles off the coast of Maine. What the crew of 14 sees the next morning is enough to test the fiber of any man: a ledge on which nothing grows, a slab of rock pounded by huge seas. The ship has vanished in the night, the men have nothing but the clothes they wear. There is no food, no firewood, no water. Novelist Roberts has a perfect chance to sort out the men from the weaklings. Some of them lie down and wait for death or rescue. But on that bare rock in those freezing temperatures, death is almost certain to get there first.

Still, Captain Dean and a handful of his men refuse to quit. They pull some of the flotsam from the sea and make a pathetic shelter. They find that ice ripped from boulders will do for water, that seaweed and mussels will keep a spark of life in bodies so frozen that toes fall off without giving pain. And when Chips, the ship's carpenter, dies, they find that his flesh can be eaten with an easy conscience, once they have decided to call it beef.

What the rescuers of the Nottingham's crew take off Boon Island after nearly a month is ten scarecrows who are close to sub-humanity. But Novelist Roberts is getting at something beyond a gruesome record of man's ingenuity and toughness. Look at Captain Dean, and Swede and Neal and Miles, he says. What did they have that brought them so close to nobility, when most men would have cracked? Character and more character. Just as the malingerers and whiners were bound to take it lying down because character is what they never had. Perhaps it all seems a little too simple and sententious, and this is certainly true of Novelist Roberts' writing, but that is the way it was on Boon Island.

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