Miles is home from Oxford, and meets Neal, a clever boy who catches whitebait when he's not learning the theater. Through various circumstances, Neal needs to leave England in a hurry, and Miles' father gets them both booked as crew on a cargo ship head for America.
The first mate is a disagreeable man named Langman, who is always against any action and tries to make the captain look incompetent. The end result of that is the ship ends up wrecked on a crappy bit of rock off the coast of Maine in the dead of winter. Miles and Neal both remain loyal to the captain as he struggles to maintain discipline and the crew disintegrates over the weeks.
The book was published in 1956, but in the broad outline of the plot, feels like a throwback to books of a century earlier. The young men forced to grow up fast in a difficult adventure due to calamity at sea. The book's written from Miles' perspective, and Roberts includes many paragraphs of Miles berating his past self for not realizing how good he had it, or opining on how little other people understand of true hardship. That brand of self-pity that feels like a moral tirade.
Although, it's been a long time since I read Robinson Crusoe, but I don't recall descriptions of toes falling off from frostbite, or men pissing into a powder horn and pouring it over their feet to treat the sores. Of course, that was a tropical island, not much risk of frostbite.
Most of the book is focused on the struggle to survive on Boon Island. Trying to find enough wreckage to build a shelter, eating seaweed and sucking on salty ice to cope with hunger. There are two attempts to build an escape raft, so there are problems with how to construct it from limited tools and when to try and get it in the water gives the surf and all the rocks. The men like Langman, who seem determined to protest every action, but demand extra rations when they finally fall into line, or the ones who pretend to be too injured or sick to help. I expected more of an open mutiny at some point, but it never came around.
And, of course, the apparently inevitable question of cannibalism. I don't know if Roberts breezes past the moral qualms of eating a dead human too quickly or not. The only ones who object are Langman and his batch, and only for a day. Probably to see if a ship arrived so they could point the finger of horror at everyone else. If you're that hungry, maybe there are no qualms. No energy for them, at least. Miles quickly begins to refer to the flesh as "beef", and that's pretty much it. More time spent on how they worked to skin the body or separate out the flesh to make it easier to chew.
The end of the book drags on a bit. Like Roberts wanted to wax about how kind and intelligent Americans were. They all want to help the survivors, none of them are so foolish to pay any mind to the nonsense Langman and his cronies spout. After everything else, it felt strange for the characters to be worried about things like that, rather than leaving it on Miles grateful to be away from Boon Island.
'Swede rolled over clumsily to look at Langman. "Langman," he said, "you're a whoreson, beetle-headed, flap-ear'd knave! You're against everyone and everything, and you keep right on telling lies to try to prove you're right. If we leave the snow on the tent and get more snow, the canvas will split, or it'll fall down on us. Snow's heavy! And you talk about Eskimos!"'
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