Does survival ever excuse murder? Is killing one innocent person justified if it saves the lives of others? Such are the questions posed by Captain’s Dinner, Adam Cohen’s thought-provoking and lively account of a scandalous voyage and murder trial.
In 1883, prominent Australian lawyer John Henry Want travelled from Sydney to London to go boat shopping. As Cohen tartly notes, “Want bought the Mignonette to frolic in the waters off Sydney. The perilous work of delivering it would be handed off to working-class sailors.”
Perilous indeed: in 1880, one in 60 British sailors died violently at sea. Captain Tom Dudley, the man hired to undertake this long and difficult trip, had never crossed the Equator, nor had he first-hand knowledge of the risks and dangers that lay ahead.
The Mignonette set sail on May 19th, 1884. When the yacht was overwhelmed by a huge wave in the South Atlantic, Dudley and his crew of three escaped to the lifeboat. This dinghy had no provisions, its flimsy wooden frame “barely more substantial than the sides of a cigar box”.
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Weeks later, lost at sea and facing starvation, Dudley and navigator Edwin Stephens decided that the only way to save their lives was to kill and eat 17-year-old cabin boy Richard Parker (a third crewman refused to participate). Eating dead crew members was not unknown in such situations (and accounts exist of people volunteering to be eaten to save others), but Parker, though unconscious, was still alive.
The men were rescued days later and returned to Cornwall. They assumed they would be welcomed for surviving against the odds, but instead, both Dudley and Stephens were charged with murder. Their sensational trial established the legal precedent that necessity cannot justify murder.
They were sentenced to death, but the British crown later reduced the punishment to six months in prison. This was not the first act of cannibalism in the name of survival, Cohen says, “but it was the first that changed the world”.
Cohen’s detailed account is billed as a must-read for students of legal history, yet because his prose style has the storytelling flair of fiction, Captain’s Dinner (I will never be sold on the title) occupies a sweet spot readers will love: where information and imagination meet.
Henrietta McKervey’s latest novel is The Woman in the Water
