boon granted by God, the men are said to have dubbed it Boon Island. However, Celia Thaxter, a 19th-century American writer of poetry and stories, described the ironically named Boon Island as "the forlornest place that can be imagined." Nottingham Galley (1710) More famous was the shipwreck on December 11, 1710, of the British merchant ship, Nottingham Galley, captained by John Deane. All fourteen crewmen aboard survived the initial wreck, however, two died from their injuries – the cook, who died a few days after the initial wreck, and a carpenter, who died two weeks after – and another two drowned attempting to reach the mainland on an improvised raft. The remaining ten crewmen managed to stay alive despite winter conditions with no food and no fire for twenty-four days, until finally rescued. They resorted to cannibalism, eating the carpenter after his death, which gave the incident a notoriety that it retains even today. The story also features a conflict between the captain and members of his crew, primarily his first mate, Christopher Langman. Langman, backed by two of his crew mates, claimed that Deane turned the ship over to French privateers and then planned to wreck the ship for insurance money. When his crew learned of this, they mutinied and forced Deane to continue to Boston, resulting in its wreck on Boon Island. A vigorous public relations battle ensued in London the following summer between the captain and members of his unhappy crew, which also helped make the story famous in its day. The harrowing story was fictionalized by Kenneth Roberts in his 1956 novel Boon Island. The only non-fiction history of the event, "Boon Island: A True Story of Mutiny, Shipwreck and Cannibalism," by Andrew Vietze and Stephen Erickson, appeared in 2012. It is said that after the Nottingham Galley disaster, local fishermen began leaving barrels of provisions on Boon Island in case of future wrecks. Speaking of provisions for shipwrecked sailors, just 8 miles southeast of Boon Island lie the Isles of Shoals. On Smuttynose Island, a cottage built in the 1950s by Rozamond Thaxter, great-granddaughter of the poet Celia Thaxter, is always open to "mariners in distress of weather". It contains a barrel of provisions for survivors of shipwrecks. In 1995, Dr. Warren Riess, University of Maine, mounted an expedition to retrieve possible artifacts from the Nottingham Galley. He and his team were successful in the