Episode 122: The Shortest Straw

This is the story of the one.

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The sailors had been stranded on the snow and ice for eight months when their rescuers finally arrived.

Of the 25 men who had begun the expedition in June of 1881, only seven survived.

One man had been shot after stealing food rations for the second time, but the rest had simply frozen or starved to death.

When they were brought on board the rescue vessel, there was a palpable feeling of celebration.

Against all odds, these seven men had managed to fight off death with little more than hope to sustain them.

They were living examples of just how strong the human will to live can be.

They'd been on their expedition for three years, with orders to set up a chain of weather stations north of Canada in the Arctic Circle.

Their target had been a small Canadian inlet known as Lady Franklin Bay, situated just off the coast of the northwest tip of Greenland.

But the frozen waters delivered a tragic 1-2 punch.

Their resupply ships couldn't reach them through the ice, and then that same ice crushed their own ship, the Proteus.

The survivors were celebrities back home.

When they arrived in America in early August of 1884, a funeral was held for all who had perished on the expedition.

Soon after that, efforts began to retrieve the bodies of those left behind, to give them a hero's burial.

But when the body of Lieutenant Frederick Kislingbury was exhumed, a horrific discovery was made.

He'd been eaten.

Not by a scavenger animal after burial and not in some sort of vicious attack that led to his death.

No, the lieutenant had died of natural causes.

And then a long while later, his corpse had been expertly cut with a knife in order to pull edible meat from his bones.

His death aided in the survival of others.

Like I said before, the human spirit is a powerful force.

When faced with death, that will to live kicks in and gives people the courage to do what is necessary to survive.

Whether it's the strength to sever your own limb to escape a dangerous situation or the stubborn refusal to give up hope of rescue, people are capable of extraordinary things.

And when their very life is on the line, desperate people will do anything to survive.

I'm Aaron Mankey and this

is lore.

Sailors called it the custom of the sea, but at the end of the day, that was just a fancy euphemism for cannibalism.

Now, don't get me wrong, sailors didn't invent cannibalism.

It's not even unique to humans, with over 1,500 other species who have been caught in the act, and it's a lot older than you might expect.

Human bones with clear evidence of cannibalism have been dated back as far as 600,000 years, and that evidence is global too.

with examples found in almost every area inhabited by our prehistoric ancestors.

Eating each other, it turns out, is one of our oldest hobbies.

As civilizations began to solidify, cannibalism found its way into their written history.

There are mentions of it in ancient Egyptian texts and the myths of the ancient Greeks, among many others.

And as legal codes were solidified across the ancient world, you might expect that these new laws would be emphatically against it, but they were more nuanced than that.

In ancient Rome, for example, cannibalism and murder were both accepted under an idea known as necessity.

The actual maxim declared that from necessity springs privileges upon private rights.

In other words, sometimes we have to do horrible things in order to survive.

And no example is more powerful than the one I mentioned earlier, the custom of the sea.

The way it worked was simple.

In the event of a shipwreck, if the crew were able to do so, they can draw straws to see who survives and who will become sustenance for the rest of the party.

The sailor who drew the shortest straw would be the one to sacrifice their life, while the second shortest would earn the job of butcher.

And while we know this went on for hundreds of years, the earliest recorded instance dates back to the early 1600s.

Sometimes though, there were no straws to draw, or no opportunity to engage in the custom of the sea in a proper ceremonial way.

Sometimes it was all the crew could do to survive.

And one example of that took place in 1710 off the rocky coast of Maine.

The Nottingham Galley had been heading south along the coast of New England on December 11th of that year when a storm pushed them onto a small barren piece of land known as Boone Island.

It's roughly the size of two football fields put together and is so low and flat that at high tide or during rough weather, the water level would cover the entire surface of the island.

Of the 14-person crew to survive the shipwreck, the cook was the first to die.

The others, hopeful for a quick rescue, released his body into the sea, hoping that the waves would drive it to shore and alert someone that they needed help.

But they might as well have tossed a note inside a bottle into the ocean.

That's how low their chances were.

Weeks slowly trickled by with no sign of rescue.

The survivors had tried to set up a makeshift camp, but their tents were made of ripped canvas and would flood during the high tide, leaving them constantly wet and freezing.

A few of the men grew desperate enough to build a small raft from the wreckage of their ship, and they soon pushed off toward the the coast.

But they never made it alive.

One of the bodies did wash up on the shore of the small village of York, which caught the attention of the locals.

They quickly put together a party that sailed out to Boone Island, but the choppy sea prevented them from landing or even sending supplies.

All they could do was observe the gaunt, pale shapes of the stranded sailors and pray for a window of opportunity.

When the ship's carpenter died from exposure, Captain Dean knew what had to be done.

He did his best to cut the flesh off his dead crew members in a way that made it indistinguishable from any other kind of meat, but all of them knew.

Even as they ate it to preserve their own lives, they knew what they were doing, and that was hard for many of them to live with, even after they were finally rescued.

A French vessel known as the Medusa encountered a similar challenge a century later in 1816.

It was a warship that had begun sailing along the western coast of Africa, near the Bay of Arguin, when it ran aground.

Around 20 of the soldiers decided to stay on the ship and wait for rescue, while over 150 others opted to build an enormous raft from the wreckage and sail to the coast.

But the ocean had other ideas.

Over the course of the first two nights, around 80 men on the raft lost their lives.

Some were washed into the sea, while others were murdered by their fellow crew members.

It was clear that not everyone was going to survive, and it seems that some had begun to try rigging the system in their favor.

By the eighth day on the raft, only 15 sailors survived, roughly 10% of the men who had climbed on a week earlier.

Without food or fresh water, conditions on the raft fell apart quickly.

They drank their own urine to quench their thirst, and eventually cut strips of flesh off the dead to fill their bellies.

When another French vessel, the Argus, discovered the raft and rescued the men, of course there were whispers about cannibalism.

It was expected in circumstances such as those, and the new sailors understood that if they were ever put into a similar situation, they would probably make the same decisions.

It wasn't ideal, but it was the best anyone could do.

It was the unwritten law of the sea, after all.

Necessity might be the mother of invention, but it was also the justification for unspeakable things.

Far from home, with danger constantly knocking at the door, few things stood between a desperate sailor and his will to live.

and just about everyone else was okay with that.

But in the middle of the 19th century, all of that began to change.

They say he was a bit of a playboy.

John Henry Want was a wealthy lawyer from Australia with rugged features and an extravagant mustache, and he wanted a yacht.

So, in 1883, he boarded a ship in Sydney and traveled all the way to England to find one.

What he bought was a 16-year-old sailboat that was sure to impress the elite back home down under.

But he wasn't about to sail it home himself.

No, he found a captain willing to do it for a hefty paycheck.

He gave the man man the equivalent of roughly $30,000 in modern American currency as the first half of his fee and then told him to have the ship repaired and to hire a crew to help him in the journey.

And then John Henry Want boarded a luxury liner and headed home.

The newly hired captain had a wife and three children at home and he knew the job would take him away from them for a very long time.

But the money was too good to pass up, so he had the ship inspected and started looking for men to help him.

That was the easier part, it turns out.

First mate Ed and experienced sailor Ned both signed up almost immediately.

And as a bonus, a 17-year-old young man named Richard joined them as a cabin boy, hoping to kickstart his own career on the sea.

The ship itself, though, needed help.

Timbers were rotting out.

There were holes in places where you didn't want holes on a ship.

and there were general questions about the ship's seaworthiness.

But the captain was in a hurry.

The quicker they left, the quicker they returned home, after all, and so he paid the bare minimum necessary to get the yacht into the water and then prepared to depart.

They left England on May 19th of 1884, and the first month or so on the open sea was fairly uneventful.

They stopped for supplies at Cape Verde on July 3rd, and the records tell us that the sea was calm and the winds were normal.

But two days later, all of that changed when a massive storm blew in, and being hundreds of miles from land, they chose to continue on.

And that's when the captain's decision to scrimp on repairs came back to haunt him.

As the waves and wind thrashed the fragile yacht, problems started to magnify.

Soon there was a hole above the waterline and another forming down below.

The delicate ship with the delicate name, the Mignonette, had stopped being a safe place to stay and had quickly become a death trap.

All four men grabbed what they could and scrambled into the small lifeboat.

But the yacht was going down fast and there was little time to take an inventory and plan ahead.

They grabbed and they ran.

Five minutes later, the mignonette was slipping beneath the waves and was lost forever.

The dangers were far from over though.

The first night in the lifeboat, none of the men slept because they had to defend the boat from a shark attack.

And when the sun came up, they took stock of their supplies.

And the results were disheartening.

Two tins of turnips and no fresh water.

That was all they had.

and they knew instinctively that it wouldn't be enough.

They rationed the food of course and they tried to take advantage of fortuitous moments like when they spotted a sea turtle.

The meat from that catch probably saved their lives so early in that trip, not to mention the blood, which they drank to quench their thirst.

But even with all of that help, they were completely out of food within 10 days.

Desperation makes people do unthinkable things.

Rather than drink the sea water, which was guaranteed to kill them through dehydration, they began to drink their own urine.

But it soon became clear that the cabin boy, Richard Parker, was ignoring that rule in the middle of the night.

While the others were declining slowly, Parker was quickly spiraling toward death.

And then it arrived, that moment all captains must have dreaded, the moment when the good of the many needed to be weighed against the good of the few.

They began to discuss the custom of the sea.

The captain, Tom Dudley, was the first to suggest it, and while the others were reluctant, they debated it as an option.

Parker was most likely too sick to say much, but the first mate, Ed Stevens, seemed to agree with the captain, while seaman Ned Brooks resisted the idea.

On their 19th day adrift, and over a week since their last bite of food, Captain Dudley told the others that if they saw no vessel in the next 24 hours, they should kill Parker, who was already nearly dead.

There would be no drawing of straws for them this time.

Parker wasn't going to survive, but everyone else could be preserved if they did the difficult thing.

The following day arrived with no sign of rescue and a dark cloud of sadness over everyone.

Dudley and Stevens were in agreement about what needed to be done, but Brooks refused to participate.

After a short prayer, Dudley used his penknife on the young man's throat, while Stevens held his legs down.

Brooks, upon seeing the murder take place, was said to have fainted.

When he awoke, the others were drinking Parker's blood, which they then offered to him.

And as horrible as he felt about where it came from, he knew that the blood, still fresh from Parker's body, would help restore his strength.

So he accepted it.

Over the next few days, the surviving men consumed more and more of Richard Parker.

The young man's internal organs were the first to provide them with much-needed sustenance, followed by his flesh.

Captain Dudley did most of the cutting, but all three of the men ate their fair share.

I can't help but wonder at the emotional maelstrom that they had to weather.

They did a thing they were told never to do, murdering an innocent man, and then they had to live with that guilt while they consumed the man's flesh to save their own lives.

Eating Richard Parker must have felt like a betrayal of their very humanity, and yet if they refused, his death would have been for nothing.

It was a moral no man's land.

and I can't begin to imagine how they processed it all.

On July 29th, 29th, they spotted a sail on the horizon.

It was a German ship called the Montezuma, and when it finally arrived, the three survivors had been adrift for over three weeks.

The German vessel helped Dudley, Stevens, and Brooks on board and began to give them whatever help they needed.

Six weeks later, they were entering port at Falmouth in Cornwall.

One of the first things Dudley did when they arrived was draft a telegram for his wife.

He wanted to let her know what had happened and that he was alive.

What he sent her was an incredibly brief and highly edited version of what had transpired.

Mignonette found her July 5th, he wrote, 1,200 miles from the Cape, in boat 24 days, suffering fearful.

Am well now.

Dudley, though, may have spoken too soon.

The sailors had returned to a very different England than they'd once known.

No, they hadn't slipped through some crack in reality and ended up in an alternate dimension.

The changes had been going on for a few decades already, but their arrival and the stories that came with them brought all of it to a forefront.

To understand these changes, we need to step back a few centuries.

When King Henry II became King of England in 1154, he attempted to nationalize the laws of his kingdom.

Rather than being a disparate collection of unwritten accepted behaviors, customs, and traditions, he wanted all of it under one metaphorical roof, which is where English common law comes in.

For a very long while, court cases were overseen by traveling judges who set up temporary courts around the country.

Then those judges would return to London and share the outcome of their cases with their peers, who eventually began to incorporate those decisions into their own.

So for a very long while, and by long, I mean hundreds of years, every court decision was made based on past decisions, not statutory codes or pre-written laws.

In 1765, a man named Sir William Blackstone began to publish the definitive collection of all those centuries of oral tradition and legal decisions.

He called it Commentaries on the Laws of England.

and it put understandable printed legal decisions into the hands of everyday commoners with no legal training.

That was a good thing for for a lot of reasons, but it also opened a new door.

If all the prior legal decisions were now gathered into one big reference set, they could serve as a list of rules and law rather than just a record of what happened in the past.

All of a sudden, centuries of court cases involving the custom of the sea were up for debate.

It was a slow battle, but by the time the survivors of the mignonette were delivered to the port in Cornwall, there was a growing opinion that a solid definitive legal decision needed to be etched into the pages of history.

And Dudley, Stevens, and Brooks handed that opportunity to those legal minds on a silver platter.

We can't blame Dudley and the others, though.

They endured something horrific and lived to tell the tale.

And as far as they were concerned, they had acted in the age-old tradition that had preserved the lives of sailors for centuries.

Because of that, they told their story freely and without hesitation.

So when an officer of the law showed up the day they arrived, Dudley spared no details, even going so far as to give the officer the very penknife he used to murder Richard Parker.

But Dudley was thinking of an older England, where experiences like his were met with sympathy rather than contempt.

So while he was being honest and forthright, the authorities were beginning to wring their hands in fear.

Richard Parker had been murdered, they whispered.

And someone needed to pay for that crime.

The three sailors were arrested and brought in for questioning.

Brooks made it clear from the start that he did not not participate in the murder, but did later partake in the unfortunate meal that sustained them.

And because Dudley and Stevens backed up his testimony, Brooks was soon released, a free man without legal guilt.

Dudley and Stevens, though, found themselves in hot water, which must have been frustrating for them because of the customs they had been raised with and the specific situation they alone had to live through.

But the authorities weren't sympathetic, and soon enough, a trial date was set.

The sailors weren't without support though.

It turns out the general public fully supported the things they had to do to survive because it was part of life at sea.

And remember, Falmouth was a port city, and in the late 1800s, it was probably impossible to find someone in town who didn't have a sailor in their family.

They understood the risks of a life at sea all too well and would have expected their own kin to make the same decisions that Dudley and the others had.

The court, though, disagreed.

And thanks to a new system for capital charges that was instituted just two months before the voyage of the Mignonette began, it was up to the judges from London and not local magistrates who were about to make the final decision.

And at the center of that was an eager judge named Baron Huddleston.

He saw an opportunity to have his name on the definitive court decision regarding cannibalism at sea and threw himself into the case with both feet.

His goal was to see the men executed for the crime of murder, even though the public rooted for their release.

In fact, Richard Parker's older brother even visited Dudley and Stevens in jail, dressed in his own saline attire, and shook their hands to show his support.

They ate his brother, and he still considered them without guilt.

Huddleston, though, used every trick in the book.

He brought a jury in that had just delivered the death sentence in another case the day before.

He ran the trial with complete and obvious bias.

And then, when it came time for a verdict from the jury, he showed up that day with a pre-written verdict statement and told them it would just be easier if they all agreed with him.

The judge literally scripted the verdict, and the jury went along with him.

It didn't matter that Dudley and Stevens only did what they did to survive.

It didn't matter that centuries of custom and tradition had told them it was acceptable to do it.

And it didn't matter that the entire community around them cried out in support of them.

Huddleston only saw murder, and he treated the trial as a search for justice.

And he got it, too.

After the jury agreed to the judge's own verdict of guilty, he sentenced Dudley and Stevens to death.

Others in the legal community were shocked.

Attorney General Sir Henry James even went on record claiming that no judge would have inflicted more than three months' imprisonment, and others agreed with him.

Huddleston had put his zealousness on display and won.

Sort of.

You see, those recommendations for a shorter sentence caught on, and soon a number of high-level people were clamoring for something more forgiving.

Huddleston, they believed, should change his sentence from the death penalty to a stay in prison.

And that's when Queen Victoria caught wind of it all and stepped in.

On the condition that both men serve six months in prison, She agreed to do something extraordinary, much to Huddleston's frustration.

And it changed their lives forever.

The Queen pardoned both of them.

There are a lot of easy decisions in life.

The sort of decisions that are clear and spelled out and simple to make.

They fall under the category of common sense most of the time, and rarely do they feel like they're life-changing.

Which is probably a good thing.

We don't want to go through life treating each and every decision we make as if they were all a matter of life and death.

That level of stress and anxiety would crush us and suck the joy out of life.

Easy decisions help give us rest for when truly difficult ones come our way.

It's also important to remember that life is rarely black and white.

It's a long, gradual scale of various shades of gray, and every decision we face falls somewhere along that chart.

Is it easy to view the death of Richard Parker as nothing more than a cold-blooded act of murder?

If that's all we're looking for, sure.

But knowing the full story reveals a much more complex situation.

I can't say what the correct decision was that day in the lifeboat.

I can see both sides of the argument and I understand where they were each coming from.

Those sailors saw hope for survival in Parker's unavoidable death, while the authorities saw two men taking the life of an innocent victim.

And both of those views were valid.

Either way, there were always going to be consequences.

Whether or not the trial ended in a guilty verdict, Dudley and Stevens weren't going to live out the rest of their lives in peace.

Sure, they might put on a happy face and try to move on, but I can't imagine it's easy to forget events like those in the lifeboat.

The survival.

The unnatural deeds, the public shame they must have felt.

None of that would ever go away.

Captain Tom Dudley and Ed Stevens both served their six-month terms in prison and were released on May 20th of 1885, a full year and a day after they had set sail on the Mignonette.

They paid the price that was set before them, and when they walked away, the court was satisfied.

Ed Stevens struggled with the consequences in his own way and spent the next 30 years slowly drinking himself to death.

Captain Dudley left prison and boarded a ship for Australia, hoping to start fresh in a new place.

I can't imagine what the journey must have felt like for him.

Memories of that first failed trip to Australia must have haunted him the entire way.

And they weren't the only ones to remember the events of 1884.

It was the kind of story that left an enormous footprint, both in the legal world and in popular culture.

So it should come as no surprise that tales of castaways and sailors lost adrift on an open sea have stuck around ever since.

In fact, one of the most popular movies of 2012 was about just that sort of thing.

The film, Life of Pie, adapted the novel of the same name by author Jan Martel.

In it, a teenager discovers he is the sole survivor after the freighter he had been sailing on is sunk by a massive storm.

But he's not alone.

Inside the lifeboat with him are a handful of animals from his family's zoo, including a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan, and a tiger.

Over the course of the story, the animals turn on each other, until the only survivors are the teenager Pai and the enormous tiger.

By the end of the film, it's clear that Pai owes his life to the tiger, even though their relationship is tenuous and strange.

Finally, 227 days later, the pair arrive on a Mexican beach and go their separate ways, providing a happy ending to a dangerous adventure.

And you're probably wondering why I'm telling you all about this, especially considering the fact that it's all made up, one big work of fiction, however award-winning and lauded it might be.

Well, two reasons.

First, the novel and film both illustrate just how powerful the story of being stranded and lost in the middle of the ocean can be.

All those tales we've discussed today, of the Nottingham Galley, the Medusa, and yes, the mignonette, are all part of a larger and older legacy, one that has never really gone away.

But the other reason is more poetic, because characters have names, and authors often pull those names from inspiration, either in their own lives or from within the subject matter they plan to discuss.

So, it's no wonder that in a story that explores how one young man found the strength to survive from another passenger in his lifeboat, that his source of strength, the tiger, would have a significant name.

The tiger's name, you see,

was Richard Parker.

The story of those who survived the sinking of the mignonette is one that certainly blurs the lines between acceptable and taboo.

But outside its impact on the world of England in 1884, Their tale also manages to leave its mark in other places, just not where you might expect.

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Although he's known for his short stories, Edgar Allan Poe did publish one complete novel during his short career.

It began life as a serialized story published in a literary magazine, but the episodes stopped before he gathered the full story together and published it.

Its name was The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.

Most readers adored it for the adventure and suspense it delivered.

A few critics found it to be a bit too grisly for their taste, but I'm not sure what they were expecting.

This was Poe, after all.

Gruesome was a way of life for him.

The book's main story revolves around a young man named Arthur Gordon Pym, who stows away on the whaling ship owned by his friend's father.

Pym's friend, Augustus, doesn't tell his father about Pym's presence on the ship, which turns out to be an unfortunate thing.

When Pym first boards the ship and hides away, Augustus tells them that he will bring him food and water until the ship is too far from land to turn around.

But right away, something feels wrong.

No food arrives, and there's no sign of Augustus, and so Pym begins to worry, as any of us would.

As a side note, Pym also brought brought along his dog for this illicit adventure, a little thing named Tiger.

I'm not entirely sure how he thought that would help him hide away on a ship full of loud sailors, but that's what he did.

And after a few days of waiting for food, Tiger returned from one of his prowls around the ship with a note attached to his collar, a note written in blood.

It was from Augustus, and it detailed how shortly after leaving port in Nantucket, a mutiny had taken place.

A number of the sailors were slaughtered, but the mutineers won the ship and Augustus' father was placed into a lifeboat with a few others and set adrift.

Augustus himself, who wrote the bloody note, only managed to survive by pretending to agree with the mutiny.

Along the way, Augustus became friends with one of the younger mutineers, a sailor named Dirk Peters, who was beginning to struggle with regret over what he and the others had done.

And that's why Augustus had written to Pym.

They planned to retake the ship for the captain, and they needed Pym's help.

The rest of the story is something you might expect to see in a modern Hollywood film.

Pym is given the bloody clothing of a dead sailor, but because it's a ship out in the middle of the ocean, he couldn't just appear and pretend to have been there all along, so he pretends to be a ghost, naturally.

In the commotion that follows his ghostly appearance, Augustus and Peters are able to kill all the remaining mutineers but one.

a sailor named Richard, and they retake the ship.

Their victory is soon upset though, when a storm blows in and capsizes the vessel, leaving the four of them to cling to the wreckage.

There's a lot more that happens, but at one point long after the four men have been set adrift on the wreckage of the old whaling ship, they realize all of them are going to die of starvation unless they do the unthinkable, take part in the custom of the sea.

And so four splinters of wood are pulled from the remnants of the ship, and Pym held them out for the others to grab.

The second shortest piece fell to Pym, meaning that he would be the one to do the killing.

The shortest straw, the sign that fate or God or pure misfortune had chosen a victim, was drawn by the last remaining mutineer, Richard.

After that, we know how this story goes.

After all, that's most likely why the critics felt this novel was a bit too grisly, right?

By now, you probably wouldn't be surprised to learn that the name of this mutinous sailor, the one who had switched sides to help the others and eventually drew the shortest straw and provide for the survival of others, was named Richard Parker.

It almost seems fitting at this point, doesn't it?

But what is surprising about Poe's story is something more bizarre.

You see, his tale of the shipwrecked sailors and their fight to survive, a tale that involved the murder and butchering of a young man named Richard Parker, wasn't based on the events that took place on board the Mignonette in 1884.

They were powerful events, for sure.

But they didn't inspire Poe to write the narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.

How do we know?

Because of the date the novel was published, 1838.

46 years before the real Richard Parker met the same fate.

This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Taylor Hagerdorn and music by Chad Lawson.

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