Who ate the cabin boy?

Work on this month's issue of folk law was well under way when I told the tale of John 'Babbacombe' Lee in September. It was then I realised that Exeter Assizes and home secretary Sir William Harcourt were common to this equally infamous West Country case that took place some four months before the murder in Babbacombe, Torquay shocked Victorian England.

On 19 May 1884, an English yacht, Mignonette, set sail for Sydney from Southampton with a small ship's company: Captain Tom Dudley, Edwin Stephens, Edmund Brooks and a cabin boy named Richard Parker. The Mignonette met stormy weather 1,600 miles northwest of the Cape of Good Hope and on 5 July a large wave hit the ill-fated vessel causing it to sink within five minutes of being struck. With his ship destined for the bottom of the ocean, Captain Dudley ordered the single lifeboat to be lowered within seconds of impact and the men managed to salvage some navigational equipment, two 1lb tins of turnips and no fresh water in the short time they had to abandon ship.

The shipwrecked sailors were some 1,000 miles away from land in a flimsy open boat. Their meager rations were all consumed in 12 days, and by 13 July they began to drink their own urine. The poor cabin boy became ill through drinking seawater and Stephens himself was also unwell. Drawing lots to nominate a sacrificial victim was discussed on more than one occasion but never implemented as Brooks wanted no part in such an impious scheme. But things changed when Parker the cabin boy fell into a coma '“ lying at the bottom of the boat helpless and weak.

On 23 July, Dudley again raised the issue of nominating a sacrificial victim, pointing out that the cabin boy was dying and that he and Stephens had families back home in Old Blighty '“ Parker was only 17 and had nobody.

The next day, with no sail in sight nor any reasonable prospect of relief, Dudley plunged his knife into the boy's jugular vein as Stephens held firm the victim's struggling legs. Dudley said a prayer moments before his bloody deed, asking forgiveness and that their souls might be saved. The body was carved up and devoured by the starving mariners who fed upon the flesh and blood of the boy for four days, when they were picked up by a passing vessel.

The barque that saved the survivors docked in Falmouth on 6 September, and all three men gave candid statements of what had happened.

The depositions were telegraphed to the Board of Trade in London which ordered the men to be detained, and, after the weekend, the file landed on the desk of the home secretary, the aforementioned Sir William Harcourt.

Cannibalism on the high seas was not a regular occurrence so the home secretary consulted both the Attorney General and Solicitor General before deciding what to do with Dudley and Stephens. Harcourt ordered a prosecution and committed them for trial at Exeter.

Special verdict

Dudley and Stephens were tried at the winter assizes at Exeter on 6 November 1884, before Huddleston B, when, at the suggestion of the learned judge, the jury returned a special verdict, setting out the facts but giving no opinion on guilt. The jury found that the men would probably have died within the four days had they not fed on the boy's body, that Parker would probably have died before them, and that, at the time of the killing, there was no appreciable chance of saving life, except by killing one for the others to eat. The matter was thence transferred to the Royal Courts of Justice.

The court sat as the Queens Bench Division on 4 December and convicted Dudley and Stephens of murder on the basis that 'necessity' was not a defence to homicide. They were sentenced to death in the usual form but the judge, Lord Coleridge CJ, said, 'if in any case the law appears to be too severe on individuals, to leave it to the sovereign to exercise that prerogative of mercy which the constitution has intrusted to the hands fittest to dispense it'.

Queen Victoria had to exercise the royal prerogative of mercy on the advice of the home secretary. Harcourt wanted justice to be seen to be done and thought that imprisonment for life would be appropriate. The AG suggested three months imprisonment for various reasons but Harcourt finally decided on six. Not-withstanding the fact he took a young life to save his own, Dudley went to the grave never accepting the justice of his conviction.