The four men had been drifting for twenty days when Tom Dudley and Edwin Stevens exchanged a look that needed no words. The small mahogany punt rose and fell on the long Atlantic swells, the sun scorching their cracked skin, their bodies wasted by nearly two weeks without food. Edmund Brooks had moved to the bow and covered his head with his oilskin, shutting out what he knew was coming. The cabin boy, seventeen-year-old Richard Parker, lay curled and barely conscious, sick from drinking seawater.
Dudley spoke a brief prayer over the lad. Stevens either held the boy down or stood ready with a receptacle to catch the blood—the accounts differ. Parker stirred and murmured, “What me, sir? ” And Dudley replied, “Yes, my boy, your time has come.
” He took out his pocket knife and plunged it into the side of Parker’s throat. It took fifteen seconds for the boy to die. Brooks peered out from beneath his oilskin, saw the staring whites of Parker’s eyes, and fainted. Dudley and Stevens seized the compass case and one of the empty turnip tins, collected the blood from Parker’s jugular, and drank it greedily.
In Dudley’s own words, “We was all like mad wolves who should get the most. ” Brooks recovered and joined them. Dudley stripped the clothes from Parker and butchered him with his pocket knife. They ate his heart and liver first, then cut strips of raw meat from his limbs and gorged themselves, heaving the unwanted scraps overboard.
For the next four days they lived like this, consuming the flesh of their shipmate from their terrible pantry while the meat rotted in the atrocious conditions of the open boat. It had begun more than a month earlier, far from this scene of horror. In April 1884, an Australian lawyer named John Henry Want visited Britain and bought the *Mignonette*, a fifty-two-ton yacht, for £400—roughly £60,000 in 2024. He intended to use her for leisure sailing in Australian coastal waters and needed her transported the fifteen thousand miles to Sydney.
For the passage he employed Tom Dudley, a thirty-one-year-old experienced mariner of apparently good character, to sail the yacht from Southampton to Australia. Dudley recruited two other experienced sailors—Edwin Stevens, thirty-seven, and Edmund Brooks, thirty-eight—to serve as crew, and took on seventeen-year-old Richard Parker as cabin boy. It was to be Parker’s first seagoing voyage, and it was also to be his last. They set sail on the 19th of May 1884, out of Southampton, heading west along the coast of France and northern Spain, then down the coast of West Africa, calling at Madeira for coal, provisions, and water on the 1st of June.
Southeast trade winds carried them out into the Atlantic south of Sierra Leone, and they drifted wide of the regular shipping lanes. They had just crossed the Tropic of Capricorn when, on the 5th of July, a gale-force wind blew in sixteen hundred miles northwest of the Cape of Good Hope. It was half past four in the afternoon. The small craft was stable, and skipper Tom Dudley ordered her hove to—proceeding on a fixed helm and sail so the crew of four could retire for the evening.
But no sooner had the order been given than Edwin Stevens, who was at the tiller, cried out, “Look out! ” The men clung to the boom and deck hatches as a giant wall of sea crashed into the lee side of the hull, crushing the *Mignonette* between two gigantic forces and smashing in the side of the boat. “My God, her side is all knocked in! ” cried Stevens.
It was quickly apparent that the yacht would sink. Dudley ordered the thirteen-foot mahogany punt lowered. Brooks took a hatchet to cut the ropes holding the punt, while Dudley grabbed the binnacle containing compass and chronometer. Parker grabbed a water holder, but it was lost in the turbulent sea.
Dudley returned below as the cabins rapidly filled with water, to fetch tins of food—but most were lost. Only two tins of turnips survived before the four men scrambled into the lifeboat. Within minutes of their doing so, the *Mignonette* disappeared, sinking into the heaving ocean. The four men drifted in the South Atlantic in a tiny rowing boat little more than a tender, seven hundred miles from the nearest land—St.
Helena, where Napoleon had spent his final years in exile. Their ordeal was just beginning. The boat was taking on water, and with some effort they found the source of the leak, plugged it, and bailed out much of the seawater. Night came fast, and around midnight a shark came alongside the boat, slapping against it for company, sensing the fear and vulnerability of the men.
They fought it off with the boat’s oars. By dawn the storm still raged, tossing the boat about carelessly, the seas around them like gray mountains. They constructed a makeshift sea anchor from the binnacle and some planks to stabilize the boat, and Stevens got their position from the sun at noon: latitude 27°10′ south, longitude 9°50′ west. It was a bad place to be—out of the shipping lanes and an impossible distance from land.
Tom Dudley, born Thomas Riley Dudley on the 24th of April 1853 at Tollesbury, Essex, had gone to sea as a boy and risen quickly to master mariner, or skipper, in the merchant navy. He married at twenty-eight in 1877, and the couple had three children, living in Surrey. He had commanded a variety of vessels, including the steam yacht *Myrtle* and the *Nixia*, before undertaking the commission that would bring him lasting, dubious, and unwanted celebrity. The wages offered were good—Brooks was paid £5 and 10 shillings per month, thirty shillings more than the usual rate.
The seaworthiness of the yacht had been questioned, but she was built only in 1867, hardly an ancient vessel. More questionable was her position when she foundered, wide of the regular shipping lanes to the Cape, and her suitability for such a voyage. Stevens and Brooks both had extensive deep-sea experience. Parker’s was limited to the south coastal waters of Britain.
Both his parents had died some years before, leaving him an orphan, and he had been fostered by Captain Matthews and his wife of Itchen Ferry, Southampton. The four men had been at sea for five days in their small punt, with only the compass and the stars to fix their position. The situation was hopeless—it would be a matter of sheer luck if a sail appeared on the horizon. But they did not give up.
When the storm blew out, they constructed a mast from one of the oars and made a sail from their shirts. The boat ran with the sea and the wind, and they took up a course heading west, hoping to catch any ships on the trade route. It was a strange decision on Dudley’s part: the route took advantage of the prevailing trade winds but carried the hazard of taking them further west into the vastness of the Atlantic. They were possibly as close as five or six hundred miles off the Namibian coast at that point, yet this was their plan.
But want of food and water was the most immediate concern. At the end of the third day they had eaten one of the tins of turnips, and on the fifth they caught a sea turtle, killed and butchered it, and ate it with the second tin of turnips. Day by day until the twelfth day they tried to drink its blood to quench their thirst, but it became contaminated with seawater, so they drank their own urine instead—a diminishing resource. As the days went by it rained a little, and the grateful men stood with their oilskins outstretched to catch whatever they could and drank it, but it was not enough, and seawater got into it too and spoiled what remained.
The raw turtle meat was gone, and the parched sailors, scorched by the sun and the salt wind, sucked on turtle bones and chewed the skin for residual moisture. Then, gradually, by degrees, their minds turned to the unthinkable. The men knew what it meant: the so-called custom of the sea, an eventuality so terrible that although it was known to all seamen, it was discussed by few. There were four men.
Custom dictated that they must draw lots to decide which of them should be killed so that the others might live by feeding upon their flesh and blood. There are many tales alluding to such cannibalistic practices at sea. In 1643, a Dutch traveler, the surgeon Nicholas Tulp, reported that seven Englishmen in the Caribbean, lost at sea for seventeen days, had cast lots to see who should be sacrificed; the loser was killed and eaten. They were tried on the island of St.
Christopher but pardoned, their actions being mitigated by necessity. But no record of such a trial exists in the West Indies, and the single reference, which spawned many others, was that of the Dutchman. The tale finds no support in any record or independent account, which such a dramatic event would surely have attracted, suggesting it may be a tale—or at best one founded on a real event of unknown origin, embellished in the retelling. Yet legal authorities have been known to cite this dubious tale as if it had authority.
A better-evidenced tale is that of the American whaleship *Essex* in 1820, where a lifeboat of starving men held a lottery and a man called Owen Coffin was killed and eaten. This story was told in two separate accounts, one published soon after the event, giving it substance. It became famous, and Herman Melville used it in part thirty-one years later as inspiration for his novel *Moby-Dick*. And just ten years before the case of the *Mignonette*, on the 9th of August 1874, the *Yukon* had indulged in the same grim practice, feasting on one of their number.
As it had occurred in a far-flung post of empire out east, there were jurisdictional issues as to whether the matter should fall to Singapore or Britain, and no action was taken. There can be no doubt that the men of the *Mignonette* had heard such stories. But now such stories were with them, and their horror was real enough. Should they kill one of their number and eat him?
It was probably on Tom Dudley’s mind before he raised it—perhaps on Stevens’s too. As the days went by and their meager resources diminished, they grew weaker, bitterer, and hungrier. On the 20th of July, fearing their end would come, they inscribed upon the binnacle case a message: “To whoever picks this up, Sunday July 20th, p. m.
We, Thomas Dudley, Edwin Stevens, Edmund Brooks, and Richard Parker, the crew of the yacht *Mignonette*, which foundered on Saturday the 5th of July, have been in our little dinghy 15 days. We have neither food or water and are greatly reduced. We suppose our latitude to be 25° south, our longitude 28° west. May the Lord have mercy upon us.
Please forward this to Southampton. ”
The following day they discussed the matter of food earnestly. Sixteen days they had been adrift in an open boat, and nine days without food. But they could not reach a decision on its remedy.
By the 24th of July—nineteen days at sea now, and twelve days without food—Richard Parker and Edwin Stevens were sick from thirst and from drinking seawater. Dudley told them plainly that one of them must die to provide food for the others, and that the only way of doing this was by drawing lots. Edmund Brooks refused: “I should not like anyone to kill me, and I should not like to kill anyone else. We should all die together.
”
That evening Dudley raised the matter privately with Stevens. “The boy is dying. You have a wife and five children, and I have a wife and three children. Human flesh has been eaten before.
” He also pointed out that Richard Parker was only a lad, without such responsibilities. Stevens nodded. Later he said of the matter: “The lad dying before our eyes, the longing for his blood came upon us. ” They glanced at the obstinate or faint-hearted Brooks and the recumbent cabin boy, oblivious to their decision, and agreed to wait until daybreak before acting.
As the light broke, the small boat drifted helplessly upon the wide sea, heaving on the great swelling waves at the mercy of fate, without any change in their situation but a fervid desperation for survival driving them. It was the twentieth day of their ordeal. Realizing Brooks would not agree, Dudley and Stevens signaled to each other silently that Parker should be killed. Ironically, that same day it rained.
They held out their oilskins and drank the water, which also cleansed their bloody faces. Then, on the 29th of July, some twenty-four days after the *Mignonette* had sunk, Brooks, who was steering, saw something on the horizon. It was an impossible sight, almost a mirage. A sail.
The German bark *Montezuma*, trading from South America with a cargo of guano nitrates and headed for Hamburg, spotted them—a speck in the ocean. The vessel’s lookout picked them out by telescope, and the curious ship set a course to rescue the frantic men. It took an hour and a half for the *Montezuma* to reach them. As she drew alongside the tiny boat, her crew could hardly believe the appalling sight they beheld: three wasted men, wide-eyed with starvation, skeletal, their feet swollen by seawater, ravenous enough to eat human flesh, and a boy butchered and rotting, dismembered in the boat, his ribs picked clean, hidden beneath the rags of his clothes.
The German captain, Simonson, ordered them taken aboard, and the remnants of Richard Parker were thrown overboard. The punt was roped and hauled on deck. The captain and men of the *Montezuma* would have their nightmares supplied with what they had seen for the rest of their days. The men’s position when recovered was latitude 24°20′ south, longitude 28°25′ west—they had drifted a thousand miles west toward Brazil.
It was to be five more weeks before the *Montezuma* entered the English Channel, by which time the men had largely recovered from their ordeal. A pilot touting for business among vessels in the Channel approached her, and the captain informed him he had three English castaways and requested him to take them ashore, as he was bound for Hamburg. But the pilot informed him it was law that he take them himself, and put into Falmouth for that purpose. Simonson did so.
The captain and the three men duly went to the Customs officer and Receiver of Wrecks, Mr. R. G. Cheesman, at the Falmouth Customs House to report their arrival.
They recounted their story in the presence of the harbor police officer, Sergeant James Lavy. As he listened to their candid account of what had happened and what they had done, he quickly realized the seriousness of the matter to which they had openly confessed. On the authority of a warrant issued by the mayor, Henry Liot, 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. “It was the custom of the sea,” they protested. All sailors knew of it. The matter came before magistrates at Falmouth Town Hall on the 8th of September, the men represented by local solicitor Henry Tilly.
Bail was refused, and the three men were remanded in custody until the 11th for the magistrates to communicate the matter to the Treasury. After a further hearing they were bailed—£200 for the captain, Tom Dudley, and £100 each for the other two men—by John Burton, the owner of the Old Curiosity Shop in Falmouth, named after the Dickens novel and the London shop of that name. The news of the *Mignonette* and her crew electrified the country. Two of the greatest human taboos had been breached by three desperate men: murder and cannibalism.
People were divided by sympathy and horror at the ghastliness of the tale. It is said that Falmouth, being a port with a seafaring community, was generally sympathetic to the plight of the three men, and that a brother of Richard Parker shook hands with the men publicly, an acknowledgement that he bore them no malice. He also asked for any wages due his brother to be paid to him. But so far as the law was concerned, whatever the dire conditions the men had labored under, and whatever the inducements to try to preserve their lives, they had murdered a seventeen-year-old boy.
The custom of the sea might have a place amongst seamen and savages, a kind of harrowing folklore, but it had no place in the laws and practices of a civilized society. On the 18th of September, amidst huge public interest, the men again appeared in court, charged with having “feloniously, willfully, and with malice aforethought” killed and murdered Richard Parker on the high seas. The Treasury counsel, William Otto Dan, offered no evidence against Edmund Brooks, on the basis that it was acknowledged he had played no part in the killing of Parker and had also refused to agree to the drawing of lots. It was understood too that his testimony would be required if a conviction was sought for murder against his two crewmates.
The magistrates’ court heard the details of the case. Dan said that all would feel pity for the men, but by the law of England anyone who took another person’s life was guilty of murder. The depositions of the three men given to Cheesman were read to the court. Solicitor Tilly objected to the statements being heard on the basis that none of the three had been cautioned, but had made the statements voluntarily, all expecting that no action would follow.
Nevertheless, the magistrates committed them for trial at the Exeter winter assizes, scheduled to begin on the 1st of November 1884. A defense fund was established and attracted a great many contributions. The owner of the *Mignonette*, John Henry Want, even sent £100 from Sydney—approximately £15,000 in 2024. The matter came before a grand jury on the 3rd of November 1884.
Justice John Walter Huddleston presided over the court, and the line he took was emphatic from the outset. As far as the claim that the men were acting from necessity went, he said: “I can find no authority for that proposition, and know of no such provision in the laws of England. ” It was also quite impossible, he said, to argue self-defense in this case: their lives were imperiled not by Parker but by the absence of food and drink. Further, if the boy’s death was caused or accelerated by the act of one or both of the accused, it was a case of deliberate homicide.
In such a case the grand jury must find a true bill of murder against them. With this heavy steer, the grand jury returned a true bill against Stevens and Dudley. The trial of Thomas Dudley and Edwin Stevens commenced on the 6th of November 1884 before Huddleston, himself from a seafaring family and a former Judge Advocate of the Fleet some years earlier, well placed to hear the case. Arthur Charles QC prosecuted for the Crown, and Arthur J.
H. Collins QC acted for the defense. The case was beset with problems to begin with. Until 1898 an accused person could not appear in the witness box to give evidence in their own defense.
This effectively meant that if all three men had been charged with the murder of Richard Parker, then none could speak in court, and there would be no firsthand account of the crime—the case would inevitably collapse. By offering no charges against Brooks, his account of the men’s actions could be heard in court, and the case of murder could be prosecuted against the remaining two. Charles opened for the Crown, dismissing the notion that the men had acted out of necessity in killing Parker, and likewise dismissing the defense of insanity. The men’s claim that they had said a prayer over the unfortunate Richard Parker indicated full knowledge of the nature of what they were about to do, he said.
He did suggest, however, that an appeal to clemency because of the exigency of their circumstances might be appropriate. Collins argued that as the boat was not a British vessel—which the Merchant Shipping Act defined as any vessel being used in navigation not propelled by oars—then the boat in which the killing took place was not a British vessel. Had the killing taken place aboard the *Mignonette*, jurisdiction would be established, but this was not so, and therefore the court had no jurisdiction in the matter. Huddleston suggested the boat was part of the yacht and therefore bound by the same rules.
Charles declared that by a statute of Henry VII, the foundation of the Merchant Shipping Act, any crime on either ship or boat fell within the jurisdiction of the law. He added that even in a strictly technical sense, the argument would be defeated, as a makeshift sail had been constructed—the boat had effectively been converted to a ship, just as a bicycle with a powerful motor attached would be converted to a motor vehicle, or a glider with an engine would become an airplane. The jurisdictional argument was dismissed. The witnesses were heard concerning the unfolding of the story of the mariners and their arrest, but the main evidence was that of Edmund Brooks.
He gave his account of Stevens’s and Dudley’s actions in the boat, of the atrocious conditions under which the four sailors labored to stay alive, and he accepted the suggestion of counsel for the defense that it was the belief of all three men that Parker would die first. Collins continued to press the claim of necessity, saying that in their judgment Parker’s death was imminent, and probably all four would have died before the *Montezuma* could have rescued them four days later. So pitiable was their condition, he insisted, Dudley and Stevens should be acquitted because they had acted from necessity. Huddleston refused to countenance the defense of necessity.
But he could sense the tendency to sympathy amongst the public and in the jury. He also realized that if the jury acquitted the men out of sympathy for their suffering, then the matter of necessity as a defense in a case of murder would be established. He was not prepared to allow this. He therefore directed the jury to return a special verdict—a rare device by which the matter would be referred to a panel of judges for consideration.
He presented them with a sympathetic narrative verdict of the nature of the circumstances, which ended: “but whether the prisoners were and are guilty of murder, the jury are ignorant, and refer to the court. ”
The matter was referred to the Royal Courts of Justice for the 25th of November 1884. Here, in number two court, the case was presented for the Crown again by Charles, with Collins again acting for the prisoners. Once again it quickly became bogged down by procedural issues and questions relating to the court’s authority and jurisdiction in the matter, and it was adjourned to be heard on the 4th of December.
Five judges—Justice Grove, Justice Denman, Baron Pollock, and Baron Huddleston—sat at a specially convened Queen’s Bench Divisional Court, presided over by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Coleridge. The report of the Exeter trial of *R v. Dudley and Stephens* was read out in full to the justices. Collins again challenged the competence of the court to rule in the matter, as the Exeter jury had not given a verdict but were obliged to return a special verdict deferring to the court; the proper course was for the matter to be heard at the assizes and a verdict duly given by the jury, he said.
The Queen’s Bench Divisional Court rejected this: the matter had been referred to the Royal Courts of Justice, and they were the body best constituted to hear the case. Charles argued there was no common-law authority to support necessity as a defense for murder. He also said Parker might have been saved by the appearance of a ship at any moment; by killing Parker, the men obtained no permanent relief from their predicament—only the chance appearance of a ship did this. Had the men stolen bread from Parker, it would be considered theft by any court; it therefore followed that a fortiori they were guilty of theft and murder, because they effectively did both.
The judges retired and conferred, and agreed on a conviction of murder. Tom Dudley and Edwin Stevens were confined to Holloway Prison until the 9th of December for sentence to be passed and details of the court’s ruling to be given. That ruling was then handed down: there was no defense of necessity to a charge of murder, on the basis of legal procedure or ethics. In particular, it found in its judgment: “To preserve one’s life is a duty, but it may be the plainest and highest duty to sacrifice it.
War is full of instances in which it is a man’s duty not to live but to die. The duty in the case of shipwreck of a captain to his crew, of the crew to its passengers, of soldiers to women and children, impose on men the moral necessity not of the preservation but of the sacrifice of their lives for others. ” To allow the principle of necessity to succeed would invest in some the right to determine who should live and who should die; it would further provide a cloak for crime. The ruling also accepted that the temptation facing the men had been a terrible one, 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 thus sentenced to death, but with a recommendation to mercy. It was widely expected that the two men would immediately be pardoned by the Queen—in practice, acting on the advice of the Home Secretary, Sir William Harcourt. Harcourt was an opponent of the death penalty, but he saw the difficulty of pardoning two men convicted of murder. It was contrary to the principle of justice in his view that two men convicted of murder in a court of law should simply walk free.
The court had refused to allow the consideration by the jury of a verdict of manslaughter, which would have involved a shorter sentence, and the punishment for murder was death. It was thus necessary that some form of punishment be meted out to the men in recognition of this. Following consultation with the Solicitor General and the Attorney General, the chief law officers of the government, Harcourt decided the two men should not be pardoned but rather given a short prison sentence of six months’ duration each, without hard labor, at what was then regarded as being the most comfortable of prisons, Holloway. He believed it was the softest sentence that could possibly be handed down in the circumstances.
Tom Dudley and Edwin Stevens were thus returned to prison to serve their sentences. The judges had rejected the custom of the sea as firmly as they had rejected the defense of acting from necessity in a case of murder. The principle of necessity springs from the recognition that there are situations of such urgency in life that it becomes imperative to break the law. This obviously differs from self-defense, in which a person is attacked and, in defending themselves, kills their attacker—this is almost always accepted as a defense in law.
But necessity arises only rarely in English law. It was established by the *Mignonette* case that the principle of necessity as a defense cannot apply in the case of murder: harming another person could not be accepted as a matter of necessity unless immediate harm or death would occur to the perpetrator. The problem for Dudley and Stevens in claiming necessity was that the outcome was uncertain and the infraction extreme. They could not know Parker would die imminently, nor that killing him would ensure their survival.
The situation was not immediate, but the remedy was extreme. They killed the boy in the hope it would provide them relief; at any moment a ship might appear, and no one could know that one actually did. Lord Denning ruled in 1971 that if hunger were allowed to constitute necessity, then any hungry person could smash a window and steal food and simply explain they were hungry—that would defeat the purpose of the law. A more difficult and poignant application of the law governing necessity arose in 2001 in England, concerning a proposed operation for the separation of conjoined twins—two girls called Mary and Jodie, joined vitally at the pelvis, who would die within six months unless surgery was carried out to separate them.
But the surgery would cause the death of one of the twins. It was a tragic case in which no decision was likely to be entirely satisfactory, and yet one which medical staff judged needed to be taken urgently. The matter went to the Court of Appeal, and here the lawfulness of the surgery that would save one and kill the other twin was established as a necessity, by the fact that one conjoined twin was in effect killing the other simply by living. The decision of the judges was not unanimous, though one judge rejected this on the basis that the doctor who performed the surgery was not having his life threatened—he was in fact making a rational choice.
That dissenting judge was surely correct, and it seemed likely the other judges may have concurred but were seeking to make a pragmatic decision based on a real-life situation in which both twins would die if they did not act. But this dire case does not compare to the situation of Dudley and Stevens. Their decision was a rational one, but one made in favor of themselves. The only compulsion upon them to act was their own needs.
It is not enough. There are two parts to a consideration of the *Mignonette* case: one is legal, the other ethical, and the two are inextricably linked, because at the heart is the gravest of legal and moral offenses—murder. From a legal standpoint, necessity as a defense against a charge of murder was anathema. Huddleston explained to the jury why this was so.
It was a challenge to the basis of law and order in society to allow such a defense. It may also be said that we all act from a degree of necessity when we break the law—I steal a car because I can’t afford one; I rob a bank or shop or burgle a house because I don’t have any money. Such matters are obviously very different from being adrift in the Atlantic Ocean in a boat without food or water. But to admit of a sliding scale of necessity would drive a stake into the heart of the principle that the law divides right from wrong, and in particular that killing an innocent human being is never right.
Huddleston and those he consulted on this unusual case saw the danger of permitting a jury to make a decision on such an important point of law. He thought it a matter to be settled only by a higher court of judges. This was a tricky thing to manage—this was, after all, a murder trial in which the defendants had the right of being tried by twelve of their peers. But there was a real danger that a jury, understandably sympathetic to the plight of the men in the dock, who did not wish to see them hang for what they had done in such extreme circumstances, might choose to acquit the two men, which would have the effect of creating a precedent for the defense of necessity for murder.
The means Huddleston devised to avoid this was the best he could manage: he directed the jury to return a special verdict, deferring the matter to a panel of judges before whom the defense of necessity could be argued and the principle settled by thoughtful deliberation rather than by an unintended consequence of an acquittal. In Britain today, the Crown Prosecution Service determines which cases to prosecute on the basis that it must have a reasonable chance of success and it must be in the public interest for a prosecution to take place. Thus, by determining that a matter of this kind is not in the public interest, the problem is sidestepped. But this is by no means an ideal position either—it is an acknowledgement, perhaps, that the law cannot prescribe for every complex human situation.
It seems likely, even a certainty, that Dudley and Stevens would face no charges today. That may seem to many—perhaps to most—a satisfactory outcome; after all, these two men posed no individual threat to society. But there are several points of disquiet in the case which argue strongly against the actions of Dudley and Stevens. One: the men acted solely out of self-interest and instincts for their own preservation in killing Parker.
Two: even from the viewpoint of the so-called custom of the sea, their act was deficient—no lots were drawn to select a victim, as in other cases we know of. Thus those who took the decision to kill and carried it out did not place themselves at equal peril with their victim. Three: there was no agreement among the men that they should kill Parker—it was a decision taken by two men, especially one, Dudley, in apparent defiance of Brooks. Four: the victim was selected on the basis that he was going to die anyway—yet that is hardly sufficient; all four men were going to die.
The criteria for selecting the cabin boy was that he was going to die first. That is different. It involved a judgment that he would die first, and that their lives would be prolonged by sacrificing his. Five: it is a fact that the cabin boy was ill, believed by at least two of the men that he would be first to die.
But they might be mistaken—they were not doctors. On at least one occasion Brooks said he had believed Stevens would die first. And even if their judgment was correct, why did they not wait for nature to take its course and then decide to eat Richard Parker? It suggests that necessity was to an extent driving their diagnosis of Parker’s condition.
Six: flowing from this is the fact that Parker was the cabin boy. It is a hypothetical question, but had he been awake and in the same condition as the other men, would he have had an equal chance of living, and another of being sacrificed in his place? Or was his selection as victim at least in part driven by his being of the lowest status? There is some suggestion that value was being applied to each man’s life.
Dudley said so explicitly when he spoke to Stevens on the evening of the 24th of July: “I am married and have three children, and you are married and have five children. Parker has no dependents. ” In fact, Parker was an orphan. The implication is that he would hardly be missed.
This is suggestive that selection was being made not on the basis of equality, as the custom of the sea dictated, or any other construction of natural justice, but on the basis of a value apportioned by one man with the agreement of another, who were also the beneficiaries and self-appointed killers. Richard Parker might consider their respective values differently—he might point to his youth and having his whole life in front of him, to the others being, comparatively speaking, old with shorter life expectations. There could be many ways of apportioning value to an individual’s life. It could not be left in the hands of an individual to volunteer another as being of lesser worth than their own.
It suggests that in so doing, the two men acted purely out of self-interest, their own desire to live. And what of the so-called custom of the sea, often presented in recent years as an unofficial common law in which the British legal system sought to interfere? It is a controversial matter. The best-known writer on the case of the *Mignonette*, Professor Brian Simpson, who wrote *Cannibalism and the Common Law: The Story of the Tragic Last Voyage of the Mignonette* in 1984, did much to promote it as an established practice amongst mariners, and that its status amounted to a common law amongst men of the sea which the English legal system was anxious to challenge.
But this is, to my mind, quite mistaken. Many of the stories he cites in support of his view have little or no foundation but are readily accepted by him as evidence of a common-law practice relating to survival cannibalism. There are no shortage of such stories—tales of cannibalism among sailors marooned and starved to a kind of madness are as old as the sea, weathered sailors sitting and telling such tales before flickering flames on dark winter nights to frighten themselves and others. But such events, even when real, hardly amount to a common law of the sea.
There is no doubt that men have resorted to cannibalism when isolated and suffering great deprivation, and that they have often resorted to some means of deciding who should die, is a natural consequence of the human social desire to regulate their own actions—as children will decide who goes first in a game by using an “eeny, meeny, miny, moe” or “one potato, two potato” methodology, or else flip a coin. It does not constitute a common law of the playground. That men had previously been said to have adopted such a methodology for deciding whom to maroon or kill or abandon points to the human habit of fairness in general, not to a common law in a specific and highly rare circumstance—that of deciding to kill and eat one of their company. It is also obvious that in proposing that the men eat Parker, neither Dudley nor any of his shipmates mentioned or referred to any custom of the sea, which they surely would have done if they thought it existed.
Dudley said merely: “Human flesh has been eaten before. ” This hardly gives support to the idea that he believed they would be acting in accordance with some common-law tradition or practice. Nor did Stevens offer anything of this kind in the statement he made by way of justification for their actions—he suggested they had “longed for his blood. ” And Brooks, the most experienced of the three men, appears to deny that such a tradition existed at all in saying he would not like to kill anyone, nor anyone else kill him—which suggests moral abhorrence and that it was not sanctioned by any lawful authority or practice.
Yet in spite of this, the custom of the sea appears to have gained in popularity in recent years, in part as a result of Professor Simpson’s book promoting this idea, and other books have arisen citing the custom of the sea. Against this, the anthropologist William Arens, in his work *The Man-Eating Myth*, cast doubt on the justification for a belief in cannibalism having any institutionalized foundation at all. He has been criticized for his work, but I am inclined to think he is more right than wrong. As far as the custom of the sea goes, it is a confabulation of tales and actual instances of cannibalism contrived into something very much akin to a myth.
The custom of the sea has no greater claim upon legitimacy than removing the scalp or head of enemies in battle can be claimed as a custom of war. Both are defeated by a superior canon of law which has and must take precedence. In legal and moral terms, Stevens and Dudley were wrong. They murdered Richard Parker because they could, and they did it to prolong their own lives.
The Royal Courts of Justice were correct in stating that there are occasions when there is a greater duty than the preservation of one’s own life—that of sacrificing it. The judgment that sacrificing one’s life in war constitutes such a duty might be challenged in an age where we have seen many wars prosecuted not for the greater good of many but for the benefits of a few, but few would argue against the greater good of a fireman who rescues a child from a blazing building at the cost of his own, or a person diving from a boat to save the life of a drowning woman and losing their own. Furthermore, it is sometimes, as Judge Huddleston stated at the Exeter trial, the case that a man ought to die rather than kill an innocent person. Perhaps the best argument in Dudley and Stevens’s favor is that they had succumbed to a kind of madness: four men in a tiny boat, divorced from all other human society and the laws which govern it, faced with the vastness of the sea, starvation, and thirst unseating their reason and causing them to consider monstrous ideas that would appall the lowest villain.
In such madness, their skin loose upon their bones, their legs bloated by constant immersion in saltwater, they did the unthinkable. Sane men would wonder at their actions. They would marvel themselves at these in the months and years ahead. Tom Dudley and Edwin Stevens served six months in Holloway Prison and were released at 7:00 a.
m. on the 20th of May 1885. Dudley was quite unrepentant. The brief and violent end of Richard Parker’s life was somewhat eclipsed, but not entirely: Mr.
Haskins of Victoria Street, London, paid for a memorial stone to be laid near the place where the boy’s mother and father were buried, at Perry Church, Southampton. A drawing of Richard Parker was commissioned by means of a photo of his brother William, taken at the age of seventeen, who was said to closely resemble Richard. Edmund Brooks enjoyed brief notoriety with a circus, touring with a macabre act called “The Cannibal of the High Seas,” which involved him being given a slab of raw meat and demonstrating how the cabin boy Richard Parker had been eaten by his three shipmates. The show was of limited duration, and he returned to work on South Coast ferries, marrying in 1892 and eventually dying in 1919.
Edwin Stevens was said never really to have recovered from his ordeal. It is said his marriage failed and he turned to drink, but no evidence for this exists—he was still married and living with his wife at the time of his death, which occurred in Hull in 1914, when he was sixty-six. Thomas Dudley never accepted that he had done anything wrong. He remained indignant that he had been found guilty of murder and had spent six months in jail.
After his release he braved the passage to Sydney one more time, immigrating there with his wife and children on the 19th of August 1885, where he opened a ship’s chandlery, Thomas Dudley and Co. , at 51 Sussex Street. He was to make the news one last time. While living at Cambridge Street, Drummoyne, in February 1900, he fell ill.
The diagnosis was bubonic plague, caused by an increase in the population of rats, and the Board of Health isolated the house and quarantined those within. Dudley died on the 23rd of February 1900—apparently the first person in Australia to die of bubonic plague. His body was wrapped in disinfected sheeting and placed in a small skiff, not unlike the one in which he and the crew of the *Mignonette* had inhabited for three weeks fifteen years earlier, and this was towed downstream to a place of quarantine and pitched without ceremony into an unmarked grave. He was forty-six years old.
It is a curious fact that in 1837, almost fifty years before the *Mignonette* case, Edgar Allan Poe penned a story called *The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym*—a horror story in which a desperate crew, facing starvation, draw lots to decide whom they should eat. The name of the character who was unfortunate enough to draw the lot was Richard Parker. A prescient coincidence.
