In April 1884, an Australian lawyer named John Henry Want paid £400 for a 52-ton yacht called the Mignonette, intending to sail her as a pleasure craft in Australian coastal waters. To get the vessel from Southampton to Sydney, a voyage of some 15,000 miles, he hired Tom Dudley, a 31-year-old mariner of good character. Dudley recruited two experienced sailors, Edwin Stevens and Edmund Brooks, and took on a 17-year-old cabin boy, Richard Parker, for what would be his first and last seagoing voyage. They left Southampton on 19 May 1884, heading west along the coasts of France and Spain, then down the west coast of Africa, calling at Madeira for coal, provisions, and water.

By early July, with the southeast trade winds behind them, they had crossed the Tropic of Capricorn and drifted wide of the regular shipping lanes. On the afternoon of 5 July, roughly 1,600 miles northwest of the Cape of Good Hope, a gale-force wind struck. Dudley ordered the yacht to heave to so the crew of four could rest for the evening. Almost immediately, Stevens, who was at the tiller, cried out a warning.

A giant wall of seawater crashed into the lee side of the hull, crushing the Mignonette between two enormous forces and smashing in her side. “My God, her side is all knocked in,” shouted Stevens. It was quickly clear the yacht would sink. Dudley ordered the small mahogany punt lowered.

Brooks cut the ropes with a hatchet while Dudley grabbed the binnacle, containing a compass and chronometer. Parker seized a water holder, but it was lost in the turbulent sea. Dudley went below as the cabins filled with water to fetch tins of food; only two tins of turnips survived. Within minutes, the four men scrambled into the lifeboat, and the Mignonette disappeared beneath the heaving ocean.

The men found themselves adrift in the South Atlantic in a tiny rowing boat, some 700 miles from the nearest land, the island of St. Helena. Their ordeal had only begun. The boat leaked, and they managed to locate and plug the source.

A shark came alongside during the night, and they fought it off with the boat’s tiller. By dawn, the storm still raged. They rigged a makeshift sea anchor from the binnacle and planks to steady the boat, and Stevens took their position from the sun at noon: latitude 27°10 south, longitude 9°50 west. It was a terrible place to be, far from the shipping lanes and an impossible distance from land.

Exhausted, frightened, hungry, and thirsty, they settled in to wait. For days they drifted. On the fifth day, they caught a sea turtle, killed it, and ate it with the second tin of turnips. They tried to drink its blood, but it became contaminated with seawater, so they drank their own urine.

Rain fell occasionally, and the men stood with their oilskins outstretched to catch what they could, but it was never enough. As the days passed, their minds turned to the unthinkable. They all knew of the so-called “custom of the sea,” an eventuality so terrible that it was known to all seamen but discussed by few. With four men, custom dictated that lots must be drawn to decide who should be killed so the others might live by feeding on his flesh and blood.

On 20 July, after fifteen days adrift, they inscribed a message on the binnacle case: “We have neither food or water and are greatly reduced… may the Lord have mercy upon us. ” By 24 July, nineteen days at sea and twelve days without food, Parker and Stevens were sick, apparently from drinking seawater. Dudley told them plainly that one of them must die to provide food for the others, and the only way was by drawing lots.

Brooks refused, saying he would not like anyone to kill him, nor would he kill anyone else, and that they should all die together. That evening, Dudley raised the matter privately with Stevens. “The boy is dying,” he said. “You have a wife and five children, and I have a wife and three children.

Human flesh has been eaten before. ” Parker, he noted, was only a lad without such responsibilities. Stevens nodded. Later he said, “The lad dying before our eyes, the longing for his blood came upon us.

”

At daybreak on the twentieth day, realizing Brooks would not agree, Dudley and Stevens exchanged looks and signaled silently to each other that Parker should be killed. Brooks, understanding what was happening, went to the bow of the boat and covered his head with his oilskin. Accounts vary on the details, but it seems agreed that Dudley said a brief prayer over Parker, that Stevens held the boy down, and that Parker awoke and said faintly, “What me, sir? ” Dudley replied, “Yes, my boy, your time has come.

” He then took out his pocket knife and plunged it into the side of Parker’s throat. The boy died in about fifteen seconds. The two men collected his blood from the jugular in the compass case and an empty turnip tin and drank it greedily. In Dudley’s words, “We was all like mad wolves who should get the most.

” Brooks recovered and joined in. Dudley stripped the clothes from Parker and butchered him like a lamb. The men ate his heart and liver first, then cut strips of raw meat from his limbs, throwing the unwanted scraps overboard. For the next four days, they lived this way.

Then on 29 July, some twenty-four days after the Mignonette had sunk, Brooks, who was steering, sighted a sail on the horizon. It was the German bark Montezuma, trading from South America with a cargo of guano, bound for Hamburg. The lookout spotted the tiny boat by telescope, and the ship changed course to rescue the frantic men. As the Montezuma drew alongside, her crew beheld an appalling sight: three wasted, wide-eyed men with feet swollen by seawater, and in the boat the dismembered, rotting remains of a boy, his ribs picked clean, hidden beneath rags.

The German captain, Simonson, ordered the men taken aboard, and the remnants of Richard Parker were thrown overboard. Five weeks later, the Montezuma entered the English Channel. A pilot told the captain it was law that he take the castaways ashore himself and put into Falmouth for that purpose. The three men reported their arrival to the customs officer and Receiver of Wrecks, R.

G. Cheesman, and recounted their story candidly in the presence of a harbor police officer. As they confessed to what they had done, the officer realized the seriousness of the matter. On a warrant issued by the mayor, he arrested Dudley, Stevens, and Brooks on suspicion of murder and took them to the local jail.

The men were indignant. They had done nothing wrong, they insisted; it was the custom of the sea. News of the Mignonette electrified the country. Two of the greatest human taboos, murder and cannibalism, had been breached by three desperate men.

Public opinion was divided between sympathy and horror. Falmouth, a seafaring community, was largely sympathetic. A brother of Richard Parker shook hands publicly with the men, acknowledging he bore them no malice, though he asked that any wages due his brother be paid to him. The law, however, saw it differently.

Whatever the dire conditions, the men had murdered a seventeen-year-old boy. On 18 September, the men appeared in court charged with feloniously, willfully, and with malice aforethought killing and murdering Richard Parker on the high seas. The Treasury counsel offered no evidence against Brooks, acknowledging he had played no part in the killing and had refused to agree to the drawing of lots or to the victimization of Parker. His testimony would also be needed to prosecute the other two.

The magistrates committed Dudley and Stevens for trial at the Exeter winter assizes. A defense fund was established and attracted many contributions; even the owner of the yacht sent £100 from Sydney. The trial opened on 6 November 1884 before Justice John Walter Huddleston, a judge from a seafaring family who had earlier served as Judge Advocate of the Fleet. Arthur Charles, QC, prosecuted for the Crown, while Arthur J.

H. Collins, QC, acted for the defense. Charles dismissed the notion that the men had acted out of necessity, and he also dismissed any defense of insanity. The fact that the men said a prayer over Parker before killing him indicated full knowledge of what they were about to do, he argued, though he suggested an appeal to clemency might be appropriate given the circumstances.

Collins argued that the boat was not a British vessel and therefore the court lacked jurisdiction. The argument was dismissed, as was the claim of necessity. Recognizing the danger that a sympathetic jury might acquit the men and thereby establish necessity as a defense in murder, Huddleston directed the jury to return a special verdict, a rare device deferring the matter to a panel of judges. The jury found the facts of the case but declared themselves ignorant of whether the prisoners were guilty of murder, referring the question to the court.

The case was heard before five judges at the Queen’s Bench Divisional Court on 4 December 1884, presided over by the Lord Chief Justice. The court rejected the defense of necessity. Its judgment was emphatic: to preserve one’s life is a duty, but it may be the plainest and highest duty to sacrifice it. To allow the principle of necessity to succeed would invest some with the right to determine who should live and who should die, and would provide a cloak for crime.

The court acknowledged that the temptation facing the men had been terrible, perhaps such that any man would submit to it, but the principle that temptation could not be resisted must be denied at any cost. Dudley and Stevens were sentenced to death, with a recommendation to mercy. It was widely expected they would be pardoned. The Home Secretary, Sir William Harcourt, was an opponent of the death penalty, but he saw the difficulty of letting two men convicted of murder simply walk free.

After consultation with the Attorney General and Solicitor General, he decided the men should not be pardoned but given a short prison sentence of six months without hard labor at Holloway Prison. They were released on 20 May 1885. Tom Dudley remained unrepentant. He immigrated to Sydney with his wife and children in August 1885 and opened a ship’s chandlery.

In February 1900, he fell ill during an outbreak of bubonic plague. He died on 23 February 1900, apparently the first person in Australia to die of the disease. His body was wrapped in disinfected sheeting, placed in a small skiff, towed downstream, and pitched without ceremony into an unmarked grave. He was 46 years old.

Edwin Stevens, it was said, never really recovered, though he was still married and living with his wife at his death in Hull in 1914. Edmund Brooks enjoyed brief notoriety touring with a circus act in which he demonstrated how the cabin boy had been eaten, but the show was short-lived, and he returned to work on South Coast ferries, marrying in 1892 and dying in 1919. A memorial stone was laid near the graves of Richard Parker’s parents at Christchurch, Southampton, paid for by a London benefactor. A drawing of the boy was commissioned from a photograph of his brother, taken at the same age.

The Mignonette case established that necessity could not be a defense for murder, a principle that has endured in English law. In a curious footnote, almost fifty years before the case, Edgar Allan Poe had written a story in which a desperate crew facing starvation drew lots to decide whom they should eat; the character who drew the losing lot was named Richard Parker.