Hell's Gates by Paul Collins

Author:Paul Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
ISBN: 9781740661485
Publisher: Hardie Grant Books
Published: 2010-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

It is significant that it was the ex-mariner who initiated this discussion, for it was not unknown for shipwrecked sailors to resort to cannibalism. The term ‘the custom of the sea’, originating in the seventeenth century, referred to the practice of drawing lots in situations of starvation to see who would be sacrificed to save others. Just a year and ten months before the Pearce party escaped from Macquarie Harbour, the Nantucket-based whale ship Essex had been attacked and sunk by a massive and boisterous sperm whale in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, just over 3220 kilometres (2000 miles) almost due west of the Galapagos Islands. The twenty-one officers and crew took to the boats, and after ninety days two whaleboats containing eight survivors were picked up near the coast of Chile. In one boat two emaciated men sat sucking the marrow from the bones of their dead comrades as the rescue ship came alongside.The survivors had drawn lots to see who would be killed, and they did not hesitate to eat the bodies of the dead.

Later there would be the story of the yacht Mignonette, which sank off the coast of West Africa in 1884 after being hit by a 12-metre (40-foot) rogue wave in a storm. It left the four English crewmen adrift in the mid-Atlantic in a small dinghy for over two weeks.They were all starving and the captain announced that they would have recourse to the time-honoured custom. One of the four, a cabin-boy, was already delirious and close to death. Eventually they decided that the captain would kill him and they would all eat him. Three days later they were rescued, but when they got back to England they were charged with murder. The English legal establishment was determined to stamp out this type of customary law, and in a test case the captain was put on trial and condemned to the mandatory death sentence, although this was commuted to six months’ imprisonment ‘without hard labour’. The English Chief Justice, John Duke Coleridge, ruled in convoluted legalese that ‘the temptation to the act which existed here was not what the law has ever called necessity . . . The absolute divorce of law from morality would be of fatal consequence; and such a divorce would follow if the temptation to murder in this case were to be held by law an absolute defence of it’. It is safe to assume that Lord Chief Justice Coleridge had never been lost at sea in an open boat without food or water.

But cannibalism was not confined to shipwrecks. The most famous case of it in United States history is that of the George Donner party, a group of ten unrelated families and sixteen other individuals, eighty-seven people in total, headed for California, who were trapped in the high Sierra Nevada, south-west of Reno, by the early snow of the winter of 1846–47. About half of the survivors resorted to cannibalism, although there was no direct killing of anyone for the purpose of eating them.

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