My life is finally starting to settle down a bit, after an extended stretch of insanity. I apologize for being gone for so long, but I couldn’t do much about it.
Today’s Shipwrecked Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Among shipwrecked sailors, “the practice of eating each other when they became hungry” was so well-established that it was widely accepted as an occupational hazard. In November 1820, for example, the Essex, a ship from Nantucket, sank in the South Pacific after being rammed by a mammoth sperm whale (an incident that served as the inspiration for Melville’s Moby-Dick). Though the twenty crewmen might have easily sailed to the relatively accessible islands of the Marquesas, they were terrified of falling into the clutches of the reportedly cannibalistic natives and chose instead to make for the coast of South America, nearly three thousand miles away. After two nightmarish months adrift on the ocean, the starving survivors turned cannibal themselves.
For the most part, they consumed the corpses of shipmates who had perished of exposure or starvation. In one instance, however, a seventeen-year-old seaman named Owen Coffin – cousin of the ships’ captain, George Pollard – was sacrificed for food after drawing a losing lot. When Pollard was finally rescued, he was found at the bottom of his whaleboat, sucking marrow from his butchered cousin’s bones. Despite having engaged in gastronomic incest, Pollard’s townspeople absolved him of blame, the drawing of lots for the purpose of survival cannibalism having long been accepted as the “custom of the sea.”
Culled from: Man-Eater: The Life and Legend of an American Cannibal
Wretched Reviews: Man-Eater
Man-Eater: The Life and Legend of an American Cannibal
by Harold Schechter
I love true crime books by Harold Schechter. He is so good at getting to the details of the case without leaving anything essential behind. Here, he cuts through to the bone of the Alfred Packer case. You remember Alfred? He went into the Colorado mountains in 1873 with 4 other men, but he was the only one who walked out; the rest were found butchered and devoured. Packer admitted cannibalizing the men but insisted that one of the other men had gone crazy and killed three of them while Packer was away, and that Packer had to kill him in self-defense when he came back to camp. A likely story, and one that was not believed in court.
This book also talks about several other famous cases of cannibalism which I will undoubtedly be using for Morbid Facts in the near future. The only less than stellar thing about the book is its primary subject matter. There really wasn’t a lot to Packer once you got past the cannibalism, so some of the book drags a bit. But hey, at least we got ‘Cannibal: the Musical’ out of Packer’s primal brutality!
4/5