The _Wager_ had sailed on her fatal voyage on September 18, 1740, and had been lost in May of 1741. These three survivors had therefore spent more than five years in the endeavor to reach home. By devious ways three parties of the _Wager’s_ people had finally extricated themselves from the toils of misfortune, Midshipman Byron and Captain Cheap, and a few of those who had lived through the cruise in the long-boat, and these three men who had been marooned. Left unfinished were those other tragic stories, shrouded behind the curtain of fate, the four marines and their farewell huzza, the crew of the barge who basely abandoned their companions, and the eleven people who requested to be set ashore in Patagonia sooner than endure the horrors of the long-boat. The wreck of the _Wager_ is a yarn of many strands, an epic of salt water, and still memorable, although the ship was lost almost two hundred years ago. CHAPTER XIII THE GRIM TALE OF THE _NOTTINGHAM GALLEY_ Within sight of Portsmouth Harbor, no more than a dozen miles off the coast where Maine and New Hampshire meet, lies Boon Island, small and rock-bound, upon which a tall lighthouse flings its bright message to seaward. It is in the track of the coastwise fleets of fishermen and trading schooners, of yachts and steamers, of the varied traffic which makes those waters populous; but Boon Island was a very lonely place two hundred years ago. And if it is true, as many mariners believe, that the ghosts of dead sailors return from Davy Jones’ locker to haunt the scenes of their torments in shipwreck, then Boon Island must be tenanted by some of the crew of the _Nottingham Galley_. The story survives in the narrative of the disaster as written by the master of the vessel, Captain John Deane. It was printed as a quaint and unusual little book, which is now exceedingly difficult to find, and the fifth edition bears the date of 1762. The tragedy of the _Nottingham Galley_ was one of those instances, lamentably frequent, in which men were driven to the dire necessity of eating one another under the awful compulsion of hunger. Such a theme is abhorrent, but to realize how men felt in such circumstances, those who were otherwise kindly and brave, and long-suffering, is to add to one’s perspective of human nature and to gain truthful glimpses of what the toilers of the sea have endured. When Captain John Deane took his pen in hand to set down his experience, it was as though his conscience had driven him to the task, and he expresses this prompting in a solemn preface, which reads: