Tilly swung back to face Tom again. ‘I bid you good-day, Captain Dudley. I shall call on you in the morning when we shall begin preparations for your defence.’
‘Thank you for what you have done for us today, Mr Tilly, but God’s truth is the only preparation I need.’
The lawyer smiled. ‘I envy you, Captain Dudley. I shall need considerably more than that. Until the morning, then.’
The superintendent’s apartments were on the first floor of the building. If cramped, the room into which Tom, Brooks and Stephens were ushered was at least dry and airy, but the iron bars on the window were a constant reminder of their plight.
Whatever doubts there had been in Falmouth about the failure of the men to draw lots had now been forgotten. Collections were already being taken in the streets and taverns to pay Tilly’s fees for their defence, and there was only sympathy and support for the three men, coupled with hostility to those responsible for keeping them behind bars. But whatever a seafaring community might have thought, they were soon made aware that metropolitan opinion would be very different.
Along with the meals Tom had ordered, supplied by a neighbouring inn, the turnkey brought them the local newspaper. In addition to reporting their appearance before the bench in minute detail, it also reprinted the editorials on the case in the London papers.
If Tom was surprised that the case of the Mignonette should command national coverage, he was horrified by its nature. The London Standard set the tone.
The mere outlines of the tragedy are so revolting that we might under other circumstances have set it down as the ravings of a brain disordered by hunger and hardship, but we fear that this last comfort is denied us.
The picked bones of the cabin boy were lying by the side of those who had devoured him when the Moctezuma came alongside the boat, and the men have told the story with such circumstantiality that they will find it difficult to modify their cold-blooded narrative in any of its most damning features when they appear in the dock to stand their trial for the murder of Richard Parker.
Evidently they expected no such episode at the end of their voyage and until the law has decided whether three men are justified, in order to save their own lives, in taking that of a fourth, we may forbear to discuss the ethics of a tragedy the callousness of which it is hard to redeem by any casuistry.
The Spectator was no more sympathetic.
The magistrates of Falmouth have done a public service in arresting Captain Dudley of the yacht Mignonette upon the charge of murder, and in insisting upon an open inquiry. It is high time that the hideous tradition of the sea which authorizes starving sailors to kill and eat their comrades, should be exposed in a Court of Justice and sailors be taught once for all that the special dangers of their profession furnish no excuse for a practice as directly opposed to human as it is to divine law.
Nobody doubts that shipwrecked sailors left without food in open boats have in certain instances killed each other and have sustained life for various periods on human flesh, and nothing would be gained by calling attention once more to incidents so horrible. The case of the Mignonette is, however, peculiar in this, that it reveals in a special way and past all question, the hold which the diabolical tradition has upon all sailors and, as we discover with surprise, even upon landsmen.
The sole authority for the shocking stories that have incriminated them is the yachtsmen themselves. So complete is the belief of sailors in their right to eat their comrades that Captain Dudley, believed to be a most respectable man and certainly with an excellent record, who spoke most kindly to his victim and asked God’s pardon before he took his life, without any compulsion voluntarily related the whole story to the Custom House officers at Falmouth in all its details, some of which are worse than any we have given, and subsequently signed his narrative as a formal deposition.
He did not, be it understood, make a confession as one who committed a crime and was full of remorse, but simply narrated with the straightforward truthfulness with which a sailor usually describes any noteworthy incident of a voyage. He had apparently had no idea whatever that he was liable to legal proceedings and when arrested expressed nothing but astonishment.
Before the magistrates he denied nothing, but broke repeatedly into tears. He was in fact obviously originally a decent man of the ordinary type under the influence of the traditional feeling of his profession that cannibalism is excusable in a starving sailor and that even killing a man in order to eat him is, if all alike perishing in an open boat, not an act amenable to human justice.
That is the belief of all seamen and even of Arctic voyagers, and of course tends directly to induce them when in extremity to resort to the traditionary means. To our amazement, we find at least half the journalists who have mentioned the case are of the same opinion. The public in the port is on the same side and the Falmouth magistrates are blamed for breach of the unwritten law which compels or, it is argued, should compel us to condone or pass over such offences.
We have little patience, we confess, with a modern tolerance of cannibalism which came out so strongly in the discussion of the recent case in the Arctic regions. It is excusable on the ground of insanity caused by suffering but on no other grounds whatever.
There are things which man has no right to do, not by reason of their consequences but because they are forbidden by the most direct command, the inner conscience, which is the same in all races and all regions. There is no good race of cannibals and never will be and no race which when it has once risen to the possession of full consciousness is not instinctively ashamed at the practice and debased by having resort to it.
In its origin cannibalism springs from an enthusiasm for murder from the spirit of brutal destruction carried to its last, extreme expression, and is as little to be excused as any other crime against the inherent instinct.
The Times took much the same line, expressing surprise that, ‘The common people received them with every mark of sympathy and regard, and treat them as if they had performed some meritorious and praiseworthy act.’ It also approvingly quoted a British precedent in 1836 when the dead were cast overboard, ‘lest the living should be tempted to forget themselves and seek relief from their misery in a horrible repast’.
The only consolation that Tom and Stephens could draw from the paper was that reporters had also interviewed both Philippa and Ann at their homes. The accounts gave them their first news of their wives since they had set sail.
Philippa was,
in frail health and very concerned for her husband. She was continuing to teach at the Newtown Board School where she had received a large number of letters from friends and former subordinates and superiors of Captain Dudley. All expressed their highest admiration of him. One person wrote to him: ‘I have thought of you many times since you left and tell you candidly I was afraid you would not get by with the yacht.’
‘I believe my husband has told everything as it happened,’ Mrs Dudley said. ‘He was always candid and I don’t think he means to contradict the main incident but I cannot believe they were in their right minds. There must be something else. Put yourself in his place. Would not any man with a wife at home and children dependent upon him have acted similarly? I have heard that it was he who went back for food while the others entreated him not to risk his life. He must be a brave man to have done that. And he is a Christian man.’