You both know what must be done.
<*dv_0*> Better for us all to die than that, Brooks said.
<*dv_1*> Even when the death of one might save the lies of the rest?
<*dv_2*> This is the terrible dilemma that faced the shipwrecked crewmen of the Mignonette. It is the true story of four sailors who set sail from Southampton bound for Australia in May 1884. Half way through their journey their ageing yacht was caught in a violent storm forcing them to abandon their sinking ship. Adrift at sea for three weeks without food or water, their skin was blistered by the unrelenting sun making the slightest movement utter agony. In the age before radio, their only hope of rescue was to be spotted up by another boat. In the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean this was a slight prospect. Against this desperate backdrop the four sailors were forced to consider what the sailing fraternity euphemistically calls the Custom of the Sea, or as it is commonly called, cannibalism.
Hanson paints a vivid picture of a 19th century sailors life. It was a life that was unremittingly hard, where if ships were not overloaded, they were undermanned or unseaworthy. It was a world were drunken men would awake to find themselves Shanghaied, on board ships bound for the other side of the world with no choice but to become a willing crewman. Unscrupulous ship owners would overload and over insure boats not caring whether they made their destination safe in the knowledge that whatever happened they would make a tidy profit.
<*dv_5*> With safety hardly a concern shipwrecks were a frequent event. With no radio to summon help the survivors could only rely on each other. Literally. It was not without reason that cannibalism was known amongst the sailing fraternity as the custom of the sea, as Hanson illustrates, it was a discomfortingly frequent occurrence. So much so that the Victorian government no longer felt it could tolerate the practice and began to look for an excuse to outlaw it.
<*dv_4*> After their rescue by a passing ship the Mignonettes crewmen made no secret of how they had managed to survive. On their return to England and despite public opposition the men were arrested and put on trial in a case that would judge the legitimacy of the custom of the sea.
This is a gripping tale, due partly to the strength of the story and partly to Hansons pacy writing. He includes vital social history along the way, providing the context as to how cannibalism had become an accepted practice amongst seamen and the hypocrisy behind the Victorian governments move to make scapegoats of these men. The book does though have one flaw. Hansons style is part biography part novel. Some exchanges between characters and some of the mental states of mind attributed to some of the people must be pure invention. Is this for dramatic effect or to cover for gaps in the story? We are never told. This is frustrating as scenes are robbed of their power as it always in your mind that none of this may have happened in this way. You do though become used to this stylistic device and whilst the definitive version of this story may yet still be told, there is no denying that this is a riveting read.
TJB
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