‘What happened next?’ Danckwerts said.
‘The boy was lying in the bottom of the boat. I went and lay down in the bow with my head right forward and my feet under the thwarts. I had an oilskin coat over my head. I — I heard no words, just a little noise. I looked around and saw the boy’s neck was cut. I could not tell how, I did not look enough.
‘I fainted away just after then for a minute or two. When I looked round again I saw Dudley and Stephens drinking the blood. The boy’s eyes were quite white. I asked Dudley for some.’
He fell silent and Danckwerts prompted him. ‘And he did so?’
‘Yes, quite congealed, but I sucked it down as well as I could. I saw the knife soon after. There was blood on it.’ Again he hesitated.
‘What happened next?’
‘I went aft to steer the boat and Stephens and Dudley cut the boy’s clothes off. We ate his heart and liver between us and lived on the body for a few days afterwards.’
Danckwerts allowed a silence to build as his gaze travelled along the faces of the magistrates, measuring the impact of Brooks’s words. ‘I thank you, Mr Brooks,’ he said. ‘I am grateful for your courage and honesty in recounting such a terrible tale.’
Tilly rose to begin his cross-examination. ‘You were all in a terribly bad state when you were in the dinghy, thin and weak? You were getting sore in your bodies by sitting and your feet and hands were very much swollen?’
‘Yes,’ Brooks said, keeping his face averted.
‘And the lad was in a great deal worse condition than any of you. He appeared to be dying?’
‘To the best of my judgement. He was lying with his face on his arm, not speaking or taking any notice of anything for a great many hours.’
Tilly broke off and paced to and fro in front of the witness box, the sound of his boots on the worn wooden floor echoing through the courtroom. He waited until Brooks darted a nervous glance towards him, before speaking again. ‘Did you really object to casting lots?’
‘Y-yes, at all times.’
‘And why did you object?’
‘I thought it would be better for us to die all together.’
‘Now, let me ask you as a sailor, assuming one has to die, is not the casting of lots the fairest way?’
Brooks hesitated. ‘I would rather die than cast lots. I should not like to kill a man nor for anyone to kill me.’
‘Did you not give as your reason at the time that you had a wife and family and the boy had none?’
‘I did not.’
‘Are you sure? You are on your oath.’
‘I did not.’
‘But you had conversations together that something would have to be done and you understood that to mean that someone — the lad — would have to die.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘There was some conversation with you as to who should kill the boy, wasn’t there?’ the lawyer said, fixing him with his gaze. ‘I remind you again that you are on your oath.’
Brooks looked away and muttered something.
‘What?’ Liddicoat said. ‘Speak more clearly, please, Mr Brooks.’
‘No, sir, there was no conversation.’
‘But you knew he was going to be killed. Were you told to go forward or was there any sign made to you to go forward?’
‘No, sir.’
Tilly rapped his knuckles against the edge of the witness box. The noise made Brooks start and his eyes flickered towards him. ‘Did you by any act of yours try to prevent the lad being killed?’
‘No, sir.’
‘And after the boy was killed you shared his blood?’
‘Yes.’
‘Thank you, Mr Brooks,’ Tilly said. ‘That is all.’
‘Sir.’ Brooks hesitated, glancing towards Tom and Stephens in the dock. ‘I — I should like to add that but for the death of the boy I believe we would have died from hunger and thirst. And if the boy had died we should not have any blood from him, and of course it was something to drink that we wanted. I felt quite strong afterwards. In fact we all made use of the expression that we were quite different men.
‘I and the Captain fed on the body and so did Stephens occasionally but he had very little. We lived on it for four days and we ate a good deal — I should think quite half of the body before we were picked up, and I can say that we partook of it with quite as much relish as ordinary food.’ His voice trailed away. ‘That is all I have to say.’
Danckwerts was already on his feet, raising his voice to drown the buzz of conversation from the public. ‘That is the evidence I have to lay before you for the prosecution and I submit it will be your duty to commit the prisoners for trial.’
Liddicoat glanced towards the defence. ‘Mr Tilly?’
The lawyer stood up. ‘I am uncertain if Your Worships are still open to legal argument on the committal of the defendants, but this I must say at all events.’ He had been holding a sheaf of papers, but now paused, threw them on to the table behind him, and spoke without notes. ‘In former times, when the survivors of a shipwreck related how they had been driven by their unspeakable anguish to cannibalism, it was usually the custom of our grandsires to feel deep pity for them, to shelter and comfort them, to furnish them with money and in many other ways to let them know how thoroughly they understood the fearful distress they had happily come through, and how great was their compassion.
‘I know of no incident — though there are a thousand cases of manslaying and man-eating by famine-stricken seamen and passengers in our own marine annals — of men who had killed a shipmate and drunk his blood and eaten his flesh for the preservation of their own lives, having been cast into gaol on their arrival home and left to languish there until the judge and jury had decided their fate.
‘And why?’ He paused before answering his own question. ‘Not only because such tragical things were as frequent then as they are rare now, and because the necessity of them was accepted as a condition, the last indeed, but nevertheless a condition of man’s terrible and maddening strife with the remorseless deep, but because the whole world felt that deeds of this kind were outside the sphere of human jurisdiction.
‘The deprivation of instinct by exquisite suffering such as no healthy mind can bear to think of compels an action for which the doer, as part of the nature that incites him, must not and should not be arraigned.
‘Who amongst us who are judging Captain Dudley and his mate, who that shall judge them when they are brought up to their trial can in the smallest possible degree understand what it is to be exposed for twenty-four days in mid-ocean in a small boat without food or drink?
‘Think of it. These sailors are plain men like most of their kind. They can only depose in brief, unlettered terms what they have passed through. To tell the truth, the truth as it happened to them, they would need to be great artists capable of analysing and expressing their own lives as day after day passed, seizing upon and exhibiting all of those hundred subtle flights of fancy, of hope, of terror, of wild thoughts of maddening despair, of burning resolutions which went to swell some total of their time of agony.
‘Unless we know the sea, unless we know what exposure to nights of wet and days of scorching sunshine is, unless we know how thirst breeds madness and how madness robs the heart of its manhood and the soul of its divinity, how, I say, can we imagine what these men endured? What went before to bring them to the path of slaying Parker and how, not being able to imagine, shall we be capable of judging them?
‘The sailors will be with them, I’ll vouch. For it needs a sailor to know what will be the feelings of four men afloat in a little dinghy upon a heavy sea with nothing to divide amongst them as food but two tins of vegetables. Far out of the track of ships, presenting so small an object upon the heave of the surges of the dark blue ocean as to easily escape the observation of a vessel passing at a distance of a mile.