The Whaleship Essex — Rammed by a whale, doomed by fear of the wrong shore

On 20 November 1820 the Nantucket whaleship Essex, under first-time captain George Pollard Jr., was rammed twice and sunk by a large sperm whale in the remote equatorial Pacific, roughly 2,000 nautical miles west of South America. The crew of twenty escaped into three small whaleboats with a meager salvage of bread and fresh water. Twelve of them would not survive. After about three months adrift, only eight men lived to be rescued; some endured by eating the bodies of shipmates who had died, and in one boat by killing a chosen man after the survivors drew lots.

The disaster turned on a single navigational decision. The Marquesas and Society Islands lay downwind, within reach. Pollard wished to run for them, but his officers, Owen Chase chief among them, feared the islanders were cannibals and argued instead for the far longer beat toward the coast of Chile and Peru, against wind and current. Pollard yielded. The choice condemned the men to a voyage of more than 2,500 nautical miles in open boats, and to the very starvation and cannibalism they had sailed to avoid. The islands they feared were, in fact, safe; traders had been calling at them without harm.

The Essex is remembered less for the whale than for what followed it: a clinical demonstration of how fear of the unknown can be deadlier than the unknown itself, and how command under starvation collapses into the drawing of lots. First mate Owen Chase published his Narrative in 1821; cabin boy Thomas Nickerson wrote his own account decades later. Together they reached a young Herman Melville, who built the ending of Moby-Dick upon a whale that turns on the ship that hunts it.

The Mignonette — Starving survivors killed the cabin boy, and the law called it murder

The yacht Mignonette, a small cruising boat being delivered from England to a buyer in Australia, foundered in a gale in the South Atlantic on 5 July 1884, roughly 1,600 nautical miles northwest of the Cape of Good Hope. Her four-man crew — captain Tom Dudley, mate Edwin Stephens, the sailor Edmund Brooks, and the seventeen-year-old cabin boy Richard Parker — escaped into a thirteen-foot lifeboat with almost no provisions: two tins of turnips and no fresh water. They caught a turtle a few days later, but by the third week they were starving and drinking their own urine, and Parker, who had also drunk seawater, lay dying in the bottom of the boat.

On 25 July, after about twenty days adrift and with no sail in sight, Dudley, with the assent of Stephens, cut the boy’s throat with a penknife. The three men drank his blood and ate his body to survive. Brooks took no part in the killing but shared the food. Four days later, on 29 July, the German barque Montezuma sighted the boat and rescued the three living men. They made no secret of what they had done, believing it sanctioned by the seafarers’ grim “custom of the sea” — that starving castaways might draw lots and sacrifice one to save the rest.

The law disagreed. Dudley and Stephens were tried at Exeter and, in the judgment of R v Dudley and Stephens (1884), convicted of murder, the court ruling that necessity is no defence to the deliberate killing of an innocent person. Sentenced to death, they were reprieved by the Crown to six months’ imprisonment. The case did not turn on whether the men were monstrous — the court accepted their suffering — but on whether desperation can license one person to kill another. It remains a cornerstone of the common law on murder and necessity.