Murder or Necessity? The Harrowing Tale of the Mignonette

Episode Transcript
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(00:17):
Picture this.
It's July 1884, and a smallcrew have been lost at sea in the
South Atlantic for 20 days.
Now the sun is is a hammer andtheir boat is little more than a
large rowboat.
The salt has cracked theirlips into a bloody mosaic.
There are four men in theboat, but only three are truly conscious.
And a question unspoken fordays is finally given a voice.

(00:40):
A terrible, logical, monstrous question.
The question is, if the onlyway to live is for someone to die,
is it still murder?
This is the story of a smallBritish yacht, the Mignonette.
It's a story of four men castadrift in the middle of the South
Atlantic, over 1600 miles fromthe nearest piece of land.

(01:04):
But this isn't just a story ofsurvival against the odds.
It's the story of a landmarklegal case that would pit our most
basic instinct, the will tolive, against the very definition
of civilized law.
Welcome to history's greatest crimes.
I'm Elena.
And I'm Michael.
In today's episode, we willexplore the harrowing journey of

(01:25):
the ill fated ship theMignonette and the trial that followed.
The Queen versus Dudley and Stevens.
It's a case that forced theproud, orderly society of Victorian
England to stare into theabyss and confront a horror it preferred
to leave in the shadows of the sea.
A case that asked, where doeslaw end and necessity begin?

(02:06):
Our story begins not in thedesperate expanse of the ocean, but
in the bustling port ofSouthampton, England in May 1884.
This is the absolute zenith ofthe British Empire.
Queen Victoria was on thethrone in London and her empire covered
almost 25% of the world.
1884 was also the year of theBerlin Conference which oversaw the

(02:27):
colonization of Africa inwhich Great Britain played a large
role.
And in addition to Africanterritories, by 1884 the British
also controlled large swathsof Central and Southeast Asia, the
Caribbean and Canada.
The famous saying at the timewas that, quote, the the sun never
sets on the British Empire,end quote.

(02:48):
Which was true, since the sunwas always shining on at least one
British territory at any given time.
British maritime confidencewas also at an all time high in the
late 19th century.
It was a world of steam, steeland the firm belief that the British
order could be imposed on anycorner of the globe.
And in that world of globalcommerce, a wealthy Australian barrister

(03:13):
made a personal order for anew yacht.
Jack Wundt, a tall man with afashionable beard and flashing eyes,
was a yachting enthusiast.
His contemporaries describedhim as flamboyant and ostentatious.
Apparently the selection ofyachts in Australia wasn't good enough.

(03:33):
So Jack traveled to England tolook for something suitable.
And while there, Jackpurchased a 52 foot cruiser called
the Mignonette.
The Mignonette had been builtabout 15 years previously in 1867
in Essex by the Aldousbrothers, who were well known in
the boat racing world.
It was a handsome boat with amain mast and a small mizen mast

(03:57):
aft.
The Mignonette's rig rose some60ft above the deck and she carried
a small dinghy that served asa lifeboat.
But at its core, theMignonette was a pleasure craft.
Its very name seemed to signalthat, as the name Mignonette came
from the French for little darling.
This ship was built forsailing along the coast.
It was built for weekendregattas in the English Channel,

(04:20):
not for the 15,000 mile voyageto Sydney, Australia.
The yacht was, by design,completely unsuited for the open
ocean and the violent weatherof the South Atlantic.
This was a known risk fromJack Want.
It was essentially a giantcorner being cut.
The tragedy of the Mignonettebegan with a series of mundane human

(04:42):
choices, all rooted in theeconomic realities of the Victorian
era.
The owner, Jack Want, neededhis boat moved.
And it was the late 1800s, theGilded Age, a time of rapid industrialization
and monopolies, when rich menlike Jack Want could pay enough to
acquire whatever they wanted.
Without question, aprofessional mariner would have likely

(05:05):
recognized the immense risk oftaking a coastal cruiser on such
a colossal journey.
Yet a crew was found to sailthe Mignonette from England to Australia.
The crew was led by CaptainTom Dudley, 31 years old.
He wasn't some swashbucklingadventurer from a novel.
He was a working professional,a family man, described in court

(05:26):
records as a yachtsman ofacknowledged skill and courage.
Captain Dudley was a short manwith reddish hair and a bushy beard.
He made his life at sea at theearly age of 10, sailing with various
crews and ships and earning areputation for courage and seamanship.
One newspaper described him aspossessing the character of a bold

(05:51):
and fearless man, much soughtafter by owners of yachts.
Outside of his sailing profession.
We also know that CaptainDudley had a wife named Philippa
and three young children whowould wait for him back in England.
Perhaps this voyage was anattempt for Captain Dudley to provide
for them.
The terms of the contractbetween Tom Dudley and Jack Want

(06:12):
were generous, and there was apossibility that in Sydney, Dudley
would become the permanentcaptain of Jack want's new yacht.
Captain Dudley's small crewwas made up of three other men.
There was Edwin Stevens, whowas 37 at the time of sailing.
Like Dudley, Edwin Stevenswent to sea at an early age and was

(06:33):
considered a master sailor.
But Stevens career was a rocky one.
A few years before, somethingdisastrous had happened while he
was sailing on another shipand he had since had trouble finding
work in England.
In addition to Captain Dudleyand Edwin Stevens, there was also
Edmund Brooks, aged 39 yearsold and also a veteran of the sea.

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And then there was the cabinboy, Richard Parker.
He was just 17 years old.
Parker was an orphan, raisedby his older sisters.
This was his very first deepsea voyage, a grand adventure for
a boy with few other prospects.
His family later said he hadjoined the crew with the brightest
hopes for the future.

(07:17):
Dreaming of a life at sea.
He was the most vulnerableperson on the boat in every sense
of the word.
So you had a ship on a journeythat it was not built for, a capable
but likely pressured captainand a crew that included a young,
inexperienced boy seeking opportunity.

(07:38):
The seeds of disaster weresewn long before they left the site
of land.
The Mignonette set sail fromSouthampton in England on May 19,
1884.
The plan was for the crew tosail first to the Madeira island
off the coast of northwest Africa.
Then they would continue downthe coast of Africa and around the
southern tip of the Cape ofGood Hope in South Africa.

(08:00):
At that point, they sailacross the Indian Ocean, sticking
close to the shoreline beforerounding the northern coast of Australia
and docking in Sydney.
In total, it would be 15,000miles and the goal was to make it
in at about four months.
The initial leg of the journeydown the coast of Europe and Africa
was long and arduous.

(08:21):
The small yacht was batteredby the elements, a constant grinding
test of the boat and the men.
This wasn't a pleasure cruise,it was a grueling delivery.
The vastness of the SouthAtlantic became a character in itself,
immense, indifferent and isolating.
By early July, they hadcrossed the equator on the western

(08:42):
side of Africa and were deepinto the southern hemisphere.
They entered an infamous beltof latitude called the Roaring Forties.
As the name suggests, thisarea is located around 40 degrees
south of the equator and it'sknown for its ferocious winds and
mountainous seas.
On the morning of July 5,1884, they were over 1600 miles from

(09:05):
the nearest land.
They were utterly alone, farfrom any established shipping lines
and the sky began to darken.
The.

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The storm that caught themignonette on July 5th of 1884 was
not a gradual buildup.
It was a sudden, violent assault.
Captain Dudley being Thecompetent sailor he was recognized
the danger.
He ordered the crew to heaveto a defensive maneuver where a vessel
is essentially stalled andpositioned to ride out the heavy

(09:55):
waves bow first.
This was the correct textbook procedure.
He was not being reckless.
He was doing everything right.
But sometimes doing everythingright isn't enough.
In the middle of the storm, arogue wave, a wall of water of immense
size and power, rose out ofthe churning sea.
It struck the Mignonette withcatastrophic force.

(10:18):
Captain Dudley would laterstate in his deposition that the
wave had broken clean over theship, smashing the yacht's bulwarks,
the low protective wallsaround the deck.
Seawater poured into the vessel.
In that single violent moment,Dudley knew, as he put it, that the
ship was doomed.

(10:40):
They had less than fiveminutes before she would found her.
The scramble to abandon shipwas frantic.
Their only hope was a flimsy13 foot dinghy, little more than
a rowboat.
It was a floating coffin inthe middle of the South Atlantic.
In the chaos, they managed toget the dinghy into the water, but
with almost no supplies.

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Richard Parker tried to grabsome fresh water before they abandoned
ship, but he had to throw mostof it overboard because lowering
it into the dinghy would havebeen too risky.
As the captain, Dudley was thelast man aboard the sinking ship.
He quickly grabbed the sextantand chronometer before leaving, which
was smart because they wouldhelp in navigation.

(11:22):
He also tried to throw tins offood toward the dinghy, but only
two 1 pound tins of turnipsmade it.
Stevens, Brooks and Parkercalled out to Dudley to come on.
Captain Dudley then got intothe dinghy and within five minutes
the Mignonette sank, sendingthree men and a boy out into the

(11:43):
open sea with a total of twotins of turnips, no water, one oar
and a few navigational tools.
That night, the four men didall they could to stay alive.
Captain Dudley described theawful scene, stating, it was a very
bad sea, like a mountain attimes, and water coming in faster

(12:04):
than we could bail it out.
And night was coming on.
And if that wasn't stressfulenough, later that night, the men
watched as a large sharkbumped against their small boat.
Dudley wrote in his journalthat it made him fear that they would
soon become dinner for somesea creature.
Quite frankly, their locationwas a death sentence.

(12:24):
They were a microscopic speckin an immense empty ocean.
The chances of a passing shipfinding them were practically zero.
Surveying the scene, CaptainDudley directed his men to get down
on their knees with him and pray.
This is where the True horrorof the story began not with a sudden
bang, but with a slow,grinding erosion of the human body

(12:49):
in spirit.
And yet in those first daysadrift at sea, they tried to maintain
order.
And this is a critical point.
Their initial actions on thatdinghy demonstrate a commitment to
the established maritimediscipline that they had lived their
whole lives by their entirecareers by.
Captain Dudley made amakeshift sale with their shirts,

(13:11):
and they didn't tear into theturnips in a panic.
They made it two days beforeopening the first tin, and then they
carefully rationed the twotins over the next week.
At one point, a rain showercame and the men were able to catch
some fresh water.
They were even able to captureand cook a sea turtle.
Between the turnips and theturtle, the Captain and his three

(13:34):
crewmen managed to survive 12days fairly comfortably on the open
sea until July 17th.
That brief period of success,that brief flicker of hope, only
makes the subsequent declineeven more poignant.
After the turtle was gone,there was nothing.
The psychological toll was immense.

(13:55):
The constant exposure to thesun and salt, the gnawing hunger
and a thirst so profound itdrove them to drink their own urine.
Their lips and tongues wereparched and black, their feet and
legs were swollen and theirskin developed sores.
At one point they thought theysaw a ship, a distant sail on the

(14:16):
horizon.
But it was a false hope thatappeared and then vanished, leaving
them even more alone than theywere before.
Captain Dudley wrote what hethought to be his farewell letter
to his wife.
He said, I am sorry, dear,that I ever started on such a trip,
but I was doing it for our best.
I should so like to be spared.

(14:36):
You would find I should live aChristian life for the rest of my
days.
If this note ever reaches yourhands, you know the last of your.
Tom.
By July 20, they had beenwithout food for eight days and without
any water save their own urine.
For six days.
They were skeletal.
Their bodies were covered insalt water sores.

(14:58):
They were on the absolutebrink of death.
And it's at this point thatCaptain Dudley introduced an idea.
An idea born not of his ownmadness, but of a dark, unwritten
and brutal tradition of the sea.
He brought up the custom ofthe sea.
This was not a myth.
It was a grim, informal codeof survival that had existed among

(15:21):
sailors for centuries.
The custom dictated that whena crew was faced with certain death
from starvation, the on theopen ocean and all other hope was
lost, they could draw lots.
The loser of the lottery wouldbe killed and his body would be used
as food to Allow the others to survive.

(15:59):
Captain Dudley and his crewhave been lost at Sea for 15 days
on July 20.
And they were faced with aterrible choice.
Die together or sacrifice oneso that the other three could live.
It wasn't an entirely unheardof practice.
There were precedents.
In 1841, the American shit.
The William Brown sank afterhitting an iceberg.

(16:22):
And sailors in one of thelifeboats threw passengers overboard
to lighten the load, arguingit was necessary for the survival
of the rest.
The case that followed, UnitedStates vs Holmes, resulted in a conviction
for manslaughter.
But it acknowledged theterrible pressures of the situation.
Dudley was not inventing this concept.

(16:44):
He was invoking a ghost thathaunted the maritime world.
But just as they began tocontemplate how they would choose
who to sacrifice, it seemedlike fate made the decision for them.
17 year old Richard Parker,delirious with a raging thirst that
no one could truly imagine,did something that experienced sailors
knew was a death sentence.

(17:06):
He began to drink seawater.
To a modern person, that mightseem like a desperate but understandable
act.
To a 19th century sailor, itwas suicide.
They knew that drinking saltwater did not quench thirst.
It accelerated dehydration,which caused violent illness and
led to a rapid agonizing death.

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Parker's desperate act sealedhis fate in the eyes of the other
men.
He was now in their minds,already dying.
This was the pivotal moment.
Captain Dudley saw Parker nowlapsing into a coma from seawater
poisoning.
And his grim calculus shifted.
Dudley apparently askedStevens, quote, what is to be done?

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I believe the boy is dying.
You have a wife and five children.
And I have a wife and three children.
Human flesh has been eatenbefore, end quote.
He argued that it was theironly chance for any of them to survive.
Edmund Brooks flatly refused.
He would have no part in it.
Edwin Stevens was deeplydistressed and hesitant.

(18:12):
But Dudley's logic eventuallyswayed him.
Parker was the logical choice.
He was the weakest.
He had no wife or childrenwaiting for him and most importantly,
he was already dying.
To Dudley, this was not murder.
It was a pragmatic, ifterrible choice.
It was a form of triage.

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Sacrificing the one who couldnot be saved to rescue the ones who
could.
This is the absolute core ofthe moral and legal dilemma.
The custom of the sea, for allits brutality, had one element that
gave it a veneer of fairness.
The lottery.
The drawing of lots was anappeal to fate.

(18:54):
A quasi democratic processthat gave every man, regardless of
his station or health, anequal chance of living or dying.
It removed the burden ofchoice from the survivors.
But Dudley's decision makingprocess transformed the concept of
the custom of the sea.
Although he initiallysuggested drawing lots, once Richard

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Parker took a turn for theworse, the captain made the choice
for everyone.
His justification was autilitarian calculation based on
his own criteria of who wasthe most valuable and who was the
most expendable.
He appointed himself judge,jury and executioner.
This is the detail that thelaw would seize later upon.

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Even by the brutal standardsof this unwritten code, what he was
proposing was a perversion ofthat custom.
Now, to their credit, theywaited another five days to do something.
On or about July 25, the 20thday adrift, the moment came.
The court records describe itwith a chilling, clinical detachment.

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I agree.
Elena Dudley, a religious man,said a prayer for the boy's soul.
Then, as the official recordof the trial states, Dudley, with
the assent of Stevens, went tothe boy who was lying at the bottom
of the boat quite helpless,and did not resist nor make any sign
of consciousness.

(20:19):
Dudley put a knife into histhroat, killing him then and there.
End quote.
Over the next few hours, theydismembered the body.
Brooks later described thescene as a horrible sight and no
mistake.
End quote.
Similarly, when Captain Dudleytalked about it, he said, I can assure
you I shall never forget thesight of my two companions over that

(20:42):
ghastly meal.
And for the next four days,the three remaining men survived
on the body of Richard Parker.
According to the trial notes,Captain Dudley was quite convinced
that it had saved their lives.
On Tuesday, July 29, 24 daysafter the shipwreck, a sail appeared
on the horizon.

(21:03):
This time it was real.
It was the 442 ton Germansailing barque Montezuma, which was
on a return voyage from Chile.
When the ship came closeenough, the captain of the bark,
a German, spoke to them in hisnative tongue and sent two of his
crew down to help the threemen in their dinghy.

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The captain later describedthe survivors as little more than
skeletons, their voices weakand hollow.
They were rescued from thevery edge of death.
And here the story takesanother shocking turn.
Their honesty.
When the Montezuma eventuallylanded them in England, Captain Dudley
did not try to hide what had happened.

(21:47):
There was no conspiracy of silence.
He walked into the harbormaster's office and made a full,
unvarnished statement to theauthorities, detailing every event,
including the killing ofRichard Parker.
And he even presented thepenknife that he had used.
This is not the action of aman with a guilty conscience.
This is the action of a manwho genuinely believed he had done

(22:10):
no wrong.
In his mind, he had actedunder the jurisdiction of a different,
more ancient law, theunwritten law of the sea.
He expected sympathy, perhapseven praise for saving the lives
of his crewmates.
And initially, that's exactlywhat he got.
Public opinion wasoverwhelmingly on the side of the

(22:31):
survivors.
The press portrayed them asheroes who had endured an unspeakable
ordeal and had made animpossible choice.
A relief fund was set up forthem and their families, and money
poured in from a sympatheticpublic who saw them not as murderers,
but as victims of fate.
It was a similar response towhat the survivors of the American

(22:52):
donner party experienced 40years earlier.
In 1846, trapped in the deepsnow of the Sierra Nevada mountains,
some members of the DonnerParty had survived through cannibalism.
The survivors of that ordealwere objects of horror and pity.
But there was no landmarktrial for them.
There was no prosecutions for murder.

(23:14):
The event was largely seen asa tragedy beyond the reach of the
law, a horror of the untamedwestern frontier, where the rules
of civilization simply didn't apply.
But the British establishmentsaw things very differently.
The Victorian state wasobsessed with order, progress, and
the absolute supremacy ofcodified law.

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The idea that there was someanarchic, unwritten custom that could
supersede English law, even inthe middle of the ocean, was intolerable
to them.
They needed to make an exampleof Dudley and Stevens.
This impulse to impose asingle universal legal standard was
a hallmark of that era.

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It was a project of state building.
The state was asserting itsmonopoly on justice, declaring that
no circumstances, howeverextreme, could place a British subject
beyond the reach of theQueen's law.
To achieve this, they offeredthe seaman, Edmund Brooks immunity
from prosecution in exchangefor his testimony against the other

(24:21):
two.
The trial began in thisEnglish city of Exeter, but the authorities

(24:45):
quickly realized they had a problem.
The judge, Baron Huddleston,knew that a local jury, swept up
in the public sympathy for thesailors, would almost certainly acquit
them.
When Dudley, Stevens andBrooks made bail and were released,
the townspeople arranged aspecial benefit to raise money for
them.
The dinghy with its bloodstains was exhibited in the town.

(25:09):
Newspaper editorials werefavorable toward the men.
One stated, it is utterlyimpossible that men can endure the
tortures of 19 days ofstarvation, the exquisite agony of
a long, continuing thirst, theanguish of mind, the prospect of
excruciating death without themind becoming, in a measure, at least,

(25:30):
deranged.
Newspapers also printed thecaptain's letter to his wife that
he had written when he thoughthe would die at sea.
So it was likely that thecaptain and his crew would not be
charged with anything fortheir crime of cannibalism at sea.
But an acquittal would be adisaster for the establishment, as
it would implicitly validatethe custom of the sea.

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So the judge and prosecutionorchestrated a brilliant and controversial
legal maneuver called aspecial verdict.
Just as an aside, the trialjudge, Baron Huddleston, was an interesting
individual.
He was apparently in the habitof wearing gloves in court.
Black gloves for murder,lavender for breach of promise, and

(26:15):
white for conventional cases.
But back to Barron's special verdict.
What was that, Michael?
A special verdict was aprocedure commonly used at the time
to ensure that the case wouldbe reviewed by a higher court.
Instead of asking the jury fora simple verdict of guilty or not
guilty, the judge asked themonly to rule on the facts of the

(26:36):
case.
He essentially said to them,your job is not to decide if this
was murder.
It is murder.
Instead, your job is only toconfirm the story.
End quote.
So the jury was asked toaffirm a set of facts.
Did Dudley and Stevens killRichard Parker?
Yes.

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Did they do it without his consent?
Yes.
At the time of the killing,was the dinghy more than a thousand
miles from land?
Yes.
Was there any reasonableprospect of rescue?
No.
And finally, was it the casethat unless they fed upon the boy,
they would all have died of starvation?

(27:18):
Yes.
By getting the jury to agreeto these facts, Baron Huddleston
took the final judgment out oftheir hands.
The case was then moved to theQueen's Bench Division in London,
where a panel of five seniorjudges would look at the jury's factual
findings and answer theultimate legal question.
Do these facts, as stated,constitute the crime of murder under

(27:42):
English law?
It was a masterful way tobypass public sentiment and ensure
that the case would be decidedon pure legal principle.
The case came before the mostsenior judges in the land.
Their judgment, delivered onDecember 1884, would become one of
the most famous and widelystudied passages in the history of

(28:04):
common law.
They acknowledged the horrificcircumstances, what they called the
awful temptation the men faced.
But their ruling was unequivocal.
The judges said, we are oftencompelled to set up standards we
cannot reach ourselves and tolay down rules which we could not
ourselves satisfy.

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They admitted that the lawoften demands an almost superhuman
level of conduct.
They acknowledged that he andthe other judges in the same situation
might have done the same thingas Dudley and Stevens.
But the judges argued that thelaw cannot admit temptation, as an
excuse to do so would be tocreate a slippery Slope, who would

(28:52):
be the judge of necessity?
Would the strong always bejustified in killing the weak?
The court ruled that there isno defense of necessity for the taking
of an innocent life.
And then came the most famousline of the judgment, a line that
has echoed for over a century.

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To preserve one's life isgenerally a duty, but it may be the
plainest and the highest dutyto sacrifice it.
The court was establishing amoral absolute.
It was saying that the duty toone's community, the duty to protect
the innocent and the duty touphold the sanctity of life can in

(29:35):
some circumstances outweighthe instinct for self preservation.
They found Dudley and Stevensguilty of murder.
The mandatory sentence formurder was death by hanging.
And so the two sailors wereformally sentenced to be executed.
But this was largely for show.

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The court and the Crown hadwhat they wanted, the legal precedent
they had established once andfor all that the custom of the sea
was illegal and that necessitywas not a defense for murder.
The public outcry was immense.
The sentence was seen asmonstrously unjust.
But the system had a release valve.

(30:18):
Within weeks, the acting onthe advice of Parliament, Queen Victoria
exercised what was known asthe Royal Prerogative of Mercy.
She commuted Dudley andStephen's sentences from death to
just six months in prison.
This outcome reveals thesophisticated compromise at the heart
of the case.

(30:38):
First, the law with a capitalL made its absolute and flexible
statement of principle.
The murder of an innocentperson would always be murder, regardless
of the circumstances.
But then mercy in the form ofthe executive branch stepped in to
acknowledge the human realityof the situation and prevent a patently

(30:59):
unjust punishment.
This two part system, animpossibly high standard set by the
courts, softened by executiveclemency, preserved the sanctity
of the law while acknowledgingthe freedom frailty of humanity.
In a way, it's a legal fiction.
The law pretends we can all besaints and then the government quietly

(31:20):
pardons us for being human.
After their release, Dudleyand Stevens lived out their lives
in relative obscurity, forevermarked by the case.
Dudley eventually immigratedto Australia, which I think is personally
crazy considering the traumahe went through before.
But that's what he did.
It's unclear whether he wentwith the rest of his family, but

(31:41):
he went to Sydney, became asmall shopkeeper and he lived there
quietly until 1900, when awave of bubonic plague hit Australia
and he became the first victim.
Stevens lived a quiet life in Southampton.
He continued to supporthimself through odd jobs, but local
reports suggest that hecontinued to be consumed by his trauma

(32:02):
and went mad over time.
They were men who believedthey had acted honorably under an
ancient coat, only to findthat the world had changed around
them.
That's right, Elena.
The shadow of the Mignonetteis incredibly long.
If you walk into any firstyear law school class in the United
States or Canada, Australia orthe UK today, you will almost certainly

(32:25):
encounter the Queen versusDudley and Stevens.
It has become the ultimateintroduction to the fundamental conflict
between positive law, the lawthat is written, and natural morality.
And it has an even more famousintellectual descendant.
In 1949, the legal scholar LonFuller published a famous article

(32:46):
in the Harvard Law Reviewtitled the Case of the Spelunkian
Explorers.
It's a fictional case, butit's directly inspired by the Mignonette.
In Fuller's story, a group ofcave explorers get trapped by a landslide.
They learn via radio that theywill starve before they can be rescued.

(33:07):
They decide to draw lots, killand eat one of their party to survive.
Fuller uses this scenario topresent the judgments of five different
fictional judges, eachrepresenting a different school of
legal philosophy.
From strict adherence to theletter of the law, to appeals to
natural law, to focusing onthe purpose of the law.

(33:28):
It takes the core dilemma ofthe mignonette and explodes it into
a permanent thoughtexperiment, a tool to teach generations
of lawyers how to think aboutthe very nature of justice.
The mignonette's principleshave been tested by modern events
as well.
The most famous Parallel isthe 1972 Andes flight disaster, where

(33:50):
a Uruguayan rugby team's planecrashed in the mountains.
The survivors, afterexhausting all of their food, resorted
to cannibalism of those whohad already died in the crash to
stay alive.
But here the line drawn by theMignonek court case becomes crystal.
There is a moral and legalchasm between postmortem cannibalism

(34:10):
for survival, eating thosealready dead, and the deliberate
killing of a living person.
However desperate thecircumstances, the absolute prohibition
on the act of killing aninnocent, the central pillar of the
Mignonette judgment holds firm.
In the end, we are left withthe four men in the boat.

(34:31):
We have Dudley and Stevens,who believed they were acting honorably
under an ancient brutal code,only to be made an example by a modernizing
world.
We have Edmund Brooks, thedissenter, the man who refused to
participate in the killing butstill partook of the results.
A figure of profound moral ambiguity.

(34:51):
And most importantly, we haveRichard Parker, the 17 year old orphan
who went to sea looking forhis future and he never found it.
He became a footnote in hisown story, the boy who was sacrificed.
But his death in the mosthorrific of circumstances gave birth
to a legal principle thatechoes in courtrooms and classrooms

(35:12):
to this day.
His personal tragedy wastransformed into an impersonal, unyielding
pillar of the law.
The case of the Mignonetterepresents society formally drawing
a line in the sand.
It is the moment the law, inall its majesty and coldness, declares
that there is no calculation,no utilitarian logic, no custom of

(35:35):
the sea, no defense ofnecessity that can justify the deliberate
taking of an innocent humanlife to save one's own.
In the eyes of the court, thelaw must be absolute.
But for the three men whosurvived, and for all of us who hear
this story more than a centurylater, the question in the face of

(35:56):
the abyss, when the rules ofcivilization are a thousand miles
away, baked away by the sunand washed away by the sea, is that
absolute line truly just?
Or is it just an ideal we tellourselves from the safety of the
shore?
That's all for us today.
Thanks for joining us onanother episode of History's Greatest
Crimes.

(36:16):
I'm Michael.
And I'm Alaina.
And until next time, stay curious.

(36:37):
Sa.

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Murder or Necessity? The Harrowing Tale of the Mignonette

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