A Popular History of Unpopular Things
A podcast that makes history more fun and accessible - we love all things gory, gross, mysterious, and weird!
A Popular History of Unpopular Things
The Mignonette Shipwreck
Join Kelli as she goes over ANOTHER shipwreck that ended in cannibalism - that of the Mignonette, a sailing yacht that went down in the South Atlantic. But the Mignonette wasn't really seaworthy, and should never have been out that far... so when a rogue wave destroyed it, and the four men on board had to take their chances on a small dinghy with essentially no supplies... it didn't end well for one of them.
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The Mignonette Shipwreck
Intro
Welcome to A Popular History of Unpopular Things, a mostly scripted podcast that makes history more fun and accessible. My kind of history is the unpopular stuff - disease, death, and destruction. I like learning about all things bloody, gross, mysterious, and weird.
I’ve covered several shipwrecks now that have gone wrong, most recently with the wreck of the Medusa - and there is seemingly an endless amount of them! And today, I want to cover another one - the Mignonette shipwreck. But unlike with the Medusa, the Mignonette wasn’t a huge frigate… it was a relatively small English yacht, bought by an Australian lawyer who hired a team of men to sail it over to him. But the yacht was plagued with problems and frankly wasn’t ready for a open ocean adventure… and it ended with tragedy. And cannibalism.
So today, I want to talk about this shipwreck and how it fits into the context of the late nineteenth century, that’s the 1800s, when it wrecked - was sailing any better for the crew of the Mignonette compared to previous ones I’ve talked about, like the aforementioned Medusa? Once we have a good understanding of the times, we’ll talk about the shipwreck itself: was there anything that could have prevented this shipwreck? And what happened to the men on board that led to another instance of survival cannibalism?
And in this case, the shipwreck and survival cannibalism wasn’t even the end of the story, because once the survivors arrived back home to Britain, they had to deal with a murder charge.
The Mignonette is a story about survival at sea, but on the cusp of a changing Victorian England - one less tolerant of the so called “custom of the sea” - the inevitability of survival cannibalism if it saves the rest of the ship. It’s a fascinating story, and one drenched in blood and guts. My favorite!
So let’s get started!
Historical Context
The Mignonette was a private yacht - not a Royal Navy ship. But regardless, it still had to be held to some kind of standard; who was going to make sure it was seaworthy? That conditions on board were tyrannical for the crew? That it had every chance of survival at sea? For commercial ships of all sizes, that was the general responsibility of the Board of Trade.
In the early to mid 19th century, there wasn’t too much protection for merchant seamen sailing to their deaths on overloaded or unseaworthy ships. And any legislation that did exist was squarely on the owner’s side; if a sailor refused to sail for whatever reason, like not wanting to die on board a leaky ship, they could be jailed. And this was obviously not a very fair thing to do, was it?
Deaths aboard ships, and indeed sinkings, were more common than you’d think in the 19th century. According to author Neil Hanson in his book The Custom of the Sea, between 1879 and 1899, 1,153 ships went missing and over 11,000 lives were lost. So if there were ships with problems, then someone needed to make sure those problems would be addressed. And throughout the late 19th century, several reformers worked hard to make sure that sailing was made safer.
One of those reformers was a man named Samuel Plimsoll, who made it his mission to support sailors and crewmembers at sea in what they called coffin ships - heavily insured but dangerous ships that risked the lives of its crew, while lining the owners’ pockets if it went down. And like any good politician, Plimsoll knew the best way to make things happen was to turn the public opinion in his favor. So, he wrote a book - Our Seamen - in 1873. This helped show the British public how dangerous sailing was; as late at 1880, 1 in 60 seamen died violently at sea. 1 in 60! Another dangerous job - coal mining - was only 1 in 315 dead on the job!
Eventually, Plimsoll saw the Merchant Shipping Act pass through Parliament. This gave power to the Board of Trade to inspect outgoing ships for basic seaworthiness but also how much cargo it held. The “Plimsoll” Line or more generically the load line was also painted onto ships, showing the maximum load a ship could take before it was unsafe. When you load stuff on a ship, it displaces more water with the extra weight, right? The Plimsoll line shows the maximum depth your ship can sit in the water; any higher than the line, and it’s unsafe.
And it was measures like these that helped usher in a new era of safety for ships.
However, it took years for these practices to be put into place consistently, and in the meantime, corners could still be cut.
And this is what happened with our boat, the Mignonette.
The Mignonette Sails
In 1884, an Australian named Jack Want purchased the Mignonette for racing while visiting England. The man he hired to sail the Mignonette to Australia was Tom Dudley, who had plenty of experience sailing yachts, but no deep-sea experience. Dudley initially wanted to bring his childhood friends on board as his crew, William and Jim Frost, but they were appalled at the state of the Mignonette - it was 20 years old and rotting. The brothers Frost ditched before they left English waters, and Dudley ended up hiring three men to replace them: Ned Brooks, an able seaman and the ship’s cook; Edwin Stephens, the navigator and mate; and 17-year-old Richard Parker, who had virtually no sailing experience and was more or less the ship’s boy. He was also an orphan.
Now the Mignonette was an inshore boat, not meant for oceanic crossings. But there was no other way to get it to Australia, so Dudley had to make it as seaworthy as possible. But he was also told that any repairs were to be on his dime; he was set to make 200 pounds from delivering the Mignonette to Australia - 100 now, and 100 on his arrival. To make sure he’d profit from the venture, he kept his repairs cheap - rotten wood wasn’t replaced, but patched up.
On May 19th, the Mignonette set sail from Southampton. The destination was Sydney, but of course they’d have to stop for provisions along the way; the Mignonette was only 50-ish feet long, so it could only carry so much cargo and supply before it ran out. So the plan was to stop at Madeira, then Cape Verde off the West African coast, Cape Town in South Africa, and then to Sydney. They planned for 120 days out at sea, approximately 120 miles a day. Optimistic for a little sailing yacht that wasn’t meant to deep-sea voyages, but not impossible. Neil Hanson has a really good quote in his book about this, quote:
“For a man with his limited deep-sea experience, in a small, frail, and elderly boat, his choice of route was entirely understandable. If anything happened to the ship, however, he was putting himself in dangerous waters.” End quote.
And unfortunately for the Mignonette, something did happen to the ship.
From around June 25th onwards, a terrible storm kicked up when the boat was sailing through the South Atlantic. For days, the crew fought against wind gusts that went up to 80 knots, with waves 40-50 feet high. Their canvas sailed ripped, the wood rotted even further, and previously repairs done back in Britain were starting to come undone; the ship was taking a beating. A rogue wave was the final nail in the coffin, wrecking the underside of the boat, tearing the garboard strakes from the keep - the Mignonette was sinking. The crew loaded as much as they could remember in their dinghy, then got in as the Mignonette sank next to them, stern first, vertically, until it was completely gone.
According to the dead reckoning of Stephens, their navigator, they went down at 27°10’ S and 9°50’ W; more or less the middle of the South Atlantic. Not a great place to be on a tiny, 13 foot long dinghy with limited provisions.
Survival Cannibalism
The only food Dudley was able to grab in the panic to get off the ship were two, one-pound cans of tinned turnips. That was it. So immediately, the concerns are going to be dehydration, malnutrition, sleep deprivation, and exposure to the elements - think of intense sunburns, salt rubbing into wounds, cold nights, a constant dampness, stiff, salty clothes… not great. And because they were stranded in a dinghy, there was no shade, either. Soon enough, without water or food, they’d start to see hallucatinations, become delirious, and potentially become violent.
Now Dudley, Stephens, and Brooks had had experience at sea and on ships, they knew of the risks of shipwrecks. Young Richard, on the otherhand, was new at this and wasn’t able to help much. So as things got inevitably worse, Richard started to panic. First, there was a hole in the dinghy, so the men were constantly baling it out. Dudley shoved some of his shirt mixed with frayed rope to patch it up, but it still slowly leaked, so baling was a constant job. Then, sharks started to bump into the boat - Dudley and the others mention hitting them and the seas around them with their oar to scare them away.
So what was their plan? Well, stay alive as long as possible and try to steer into the known shipping lanes in the South Pacific, in hopes that a ship will come by and rescue them.
Not long after being stranded, they got lucky and saw a turtle sleeping near the surface of the water; they managed to bring it on board, kill it, and drink some of its blood. And I know, I know, even the thought of having to drink down turtle blood sounds gross, but consider that they had no other alternative. And we all know you can’t drink large quantities of seawater, because that will only dehydrate you further, and you’ll get sicker.
The men butchered up the turtle, devouring its heart and liver on the spot, and cutting strips of meat to hang on their lines and dry. But the turtle meat only lasted a week, and it started rotting before that anyway, so once again they were faced with a lack of food and even less water. And this is when young Richard made a newbie’s mistake - he started sneaking seawater.
Tom caught Richard drinking some shortly after the turtle situation, and cautioned him against it, telling him to regard it as poison. But Richard was dehydrated and losing it, so he couldn’t help himself - he didn’t have the experience, knowledge, or willpower that the other, older men had, and he gave in to temptation.
But luckily for the crew, they say a sail on the horizon on July 18th! And better yet, it was an English ship! The crew stopped to see what was happening with the little dinghy, but the Captain refused to help - he told Dudley and his men that he had no provisions and no help to give, so he left them stranded there.
A few days later, another ship passed within 400 yards of the dinghy. The crew locked eyes with Dudley, but did not slow down or deviate from their path to help. What a morale buster, ey? Two ships saw you, stranded, on death’s door, and neither offered any help - essentially condemning these men to die.
Things progressively got worse on board the Mignonette. Tom’s teeth started falling out, the men’s skin was sunken in and sallow, slightly yellowed, covered in boils and burns. Richard was still sneaking seawater, and when he was caught again, he fessed up to drinking about three pints of it. He got incredibly sick - feverish, curled up on the floor of the dinghy with diarrhea and stomach cramps… he was very close to death by dehydration. They had no food, no water, and now no morale… so Tom Dudley brought up the Custom of the Sea.
The custom of the sea was a set of customs followed on the open ocean - things you have to do to survive. And the most notable of these customs was survival cannibalism - the act of killing one member to save the rest. It had happened so many times on wrecks, and though horrific, it was seen as a necessity. It wasn’t even a hidden secret - it was very much part of the known customs of sailing.
One line from the 1860 Walt Whitman poem, I Sit and Look Out, references it. Quote:
“I observe a famine at sea—I observe the sailors casting lots who
shall be kill'd, to preserve the lives of the rest;”
And here’s an excerpt from another poem, by W.S. Gilbert, in 1866, titled The Yarn of the Nancy Bell:
For a month we'd neither wittles6 nor drink,
Till a-hungry we did feel,
So we drawed a lot, and, accordin' shot
The captain for our meal.
'The next lot fell to the Nancy's mate,
And a delicate dish he made;
Then our appetite with the midshipmite
We seven survivors stayed.
'And then we murdered the bo'sun tight,
And he much resembled pig;
Then we wittled free, did the cook and me,
On the crew of the captain's gig.
'Then only the cook and me was left,
And the delicate question,"Which
Of us two goes to the kettle" arose,
And we argued it out as sich.
…
'And I eat that cook in a week or less,
And as I eating be
The last of his chops, why, I almost drops,
For a vessel in sight I see!
Fun fact about that last poem - it was meant to be published in Punch, a satirical and humorous weekly magazine in 19th century Britain, but it was considered too cannibalistic for even Punch. Hah!
Now as Walk Whitman’s poem suggests, sailors who are about to engage in the custom of the sea had to draw lots - they couldn’t just kill a man all willy nilly and eat him up, there needed to be some kind of civility to it. And this part is important. Much like with what we saw in the Donner Party episode, a group about to engage in survival cannibalism had to draw lots - straws, pieces of wood, whatever was around. One would be shorter than the rest. Whoever drew the short straw - literally or figuratively - would be the one killed to feed the rest.
Historian A. W. Brian Simpson wrote that, quote,
If properly conducted, cannibalism was legitimated by a custom of the sea; and the popular literature, augmented by the unrecorded tales seamen told each other, ensured that there was general understanding of what had to be done on these occasions and that survivors who had followed the custom could have a certain professional pride in a job well done; there was nothing to hide.
So when our Mignonette was at this point, where they had to engage in the custom of the sea, they needed to draw lots. Then they’d kill the unlucky one and feed on his blood and organs and flesh for survival, hoping another ship would come by and save them before they’d need to do it again. In this way, drawing lots and engaging in survival cannibalism, the act wasn’t considered a crime. It was just a necessity for survival, and all seamen knew that. It wasn’t prosecuted the same as straight up murder.
However. Dudley didn’t see the need to draw lots. They apparently went through the motions at first - taking four pieces of wood, making one shorter, and getting ready to pull. But Dudley showed the men the wood in his hand, so everyone (except Richard) knew where the short piece was. But Dudley reasoned what was the point? Richard was dying. He drank seawater. There was no point keeping him alive and killing one of the others, who was able-bodied and capable of keeping the dinghy afloat. So Dudley decided that Richard had to be the one who died so the others could live.
Tom Dudley told Stephens to hold Richard’s legs down if he struggled. Richard must have been conscious enough to hear this, and he responded with “What - me, sir?”
Tom grabbed Richard’s hair and pulled it back with his left hand, then stabbed into the boy’s throat with a knife in his right hand. He quickly severed the arteries and sliced his windpipe, so the death would be quick. Tom collected whatever blood poured out in a metal bowl, while Stephens held his legs down as the poor boy inevitably thrashed around in his death throes.
When Richard was dead, the survivors quickly shared the blood before it started to congeal. Dudley set to work carving the boy up, and the men quickly devoured his heart and liver, much like they had done with the turtle. To make the whole experience less… horrendous… Dudley cut the boys head off and threw it into the water so he wouldn’t have to look at the boy’s face - the sharks made quick work of that prize. Dudley then tossed the larger bones, feet, genitals, and intestines overboard as well. Strips of flesh were cut out and dried across beams and lines, to help preserve them for a bit longer. The whole carving process took about 3 hours, and the men slowly ate through what was left of 17 year old Richard Parker.
Four days later, their 24th day adrift at sea in the dinghy, they saw another ship - the German Moctezuma, on it’s return journey home to Europe. And unlike the other two ships, the captain stopped for them and rescued them, bringing them on board. They were rescued at 24°28’ S, 27°22’ W, so about 1000 miles East of Rio. And if Stephens’ measurements were accurate, that would mean they drifted about 1000 miles, and would never have reached land alive, even if they ate each other until one man survived.
Dudley didn’t shy away from telling their story, including what happened to poor Richard. After all, it was the custom of the sea, right? They all would have died if they didn’t kill and eat the dying boy - that much is certain. Here’s how Dudley justified it, quote:
“The lad drank seawater during the night. He was dying anyway. What, then, would have been the sense in drawing lots between still living men with families and children depending on them, and a sick and dying orphan boy?” End quote.
I mean… yes, I see your point, but that is harsh.
Dudley, Stephens, and Brooks were eventually brought back home, where they reported to the Board of Trade and local customs house about what happened at sea - any loss, or shipwreck, had to be investigated, even it was a formality. That’s what Dudley thought, anyway. He told them everything that happened, including why they didn’t draw lots to decide which of the men would die. He assumed that the custom of the sea would exonerate them - after all, there were a lot of extenuating circumstances. And he didn’t feel like he did anything wrong.
The boat’s sinking was attributed to the freak wave - not the poor state of repairs, or the rotten wood, or a lack of oversight on whether or not it was actually seaworthy. But Richard’s death was labeled as “killed” on his death certificate. On the very same day the survivors made it back to England, they were arrested and charged with murder.
Trial
Things were changing in Victorian England. Ten years prior to the Mignonette’ case, there was another example of the custom of the sea on board the Euxine, and the Courts had opened up a case against them. The case fell apart, but the momentum was there to end the custom of cannibalism at sea - it was no longer going to be an acceptable practice, and the Courts would make sure that was going to be the new rule going forward. So when the crew of hte Mignonette roll in, thinking they would be protected by this age old mariner’s custom, they were instead faced with a Court just waiting for another opportunity to outlaw this practice once and for all.
Brooks was quickly released with charges dropped, as he had nothing to do with Richard’s death. But since Stephens held the boy down, he was part of the whole charade, so he was charged alongside Dudley.
Now public opinion was squarely in favor of the men - even Richard’s older brother, a sailor himself, publicly shook hands with Dudley and Stephens, showing that he forgave him and pardoned what happened to his younger brother. But the Courts were not so sympathetic. The trial took place in November of that same year, 1884, with the intention of establishing that there is no real justification for murder - just because times are tough, it doesn’t mean you can kill a man. Regardless of whether or not you drew lots beforehand. So even though Dudley and Stephens were not the first to engage in the custom of the sea, they were in the wrong place at the wrong time - a Court trying to outlaw the practice.
They were found guilty of murder, which at the time would condemn them both to death. But the public opinion was so strongly in favor of the men and what they had been through that they were instead given six months in prison for their crimes.
The case, Regina v. Dudley and Stephens, gave a definitive ruling against the custom of the sea, and more broadly against the idea of pleading necessity as a defence for murder. Now, thanks to what happened the Mignonette, there was a rule about cannibalism and murder - it doesn’t matter what the circumstances are, you cannot kill and eat someone, even if it’s a necessity for survival.
Which I feel like shouldn’t have to be said out loud. But then again, I’ve never been in a situation where I had to engage in cannibalism for my survival, so what do I know?!
Outro
Thanks for joining me for this episode of A Popular History of Unpopular Things. My name is Kelli Beard, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the story of the Mignonette Shipwreck. Thank you for supporting my podcast, and if you haven’t already checked out my other episodes, go have a listen!
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