Adam Cohen: "They did not regret killing the cabin boy and eating him"

BarcelonaIn 1884, there was a trial in England that changed the history of law. The defendants were Captain Thomas Dudley and officer Edwin Stephens, who, after having been shipwrecked and adrift for weeks in the middle of the Atlantic, decided that the only option to survive was to kill the cabin boy Richard Parker and eat him. Adam Cohen, a Harvard law graduate and journalist for the New York Times and Time, reconstructs the story and the trial in The Captain's Dinner (Arpa, 2026).

The story he tells is fascinating. It recalls The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Poe, but the difference is that here, the castaways do not draw lots: they kill the youngest and most vulnerable to drink his blood and eat him. Why didn't they leave it to chance?

— The tradition at the time of the shipwrecked vessel, the Mignonette, was to do it by chance. They called it the "custom of the sea". Some people thought that by doing it this way they left it in God's hands. However, we should not romanticize it either because, even when they held draws, there were always manipulations. So, it always ended up being one of the weakest people on the boat who died, often a child, a slave... Therefore, regardless of how it happened, it ended up being a hierarchical issue. The captain was master under God [Master under the mandate of God, which means he was the highest human authority and above him there was only the divine]. He was the one who had to eat, because at that time there was not much awareness of individual rights or lower classes. But there is another more practical reason: you had to execute it. The most powerful person on the ship surely had more powerful allies, was stronger, and could be more difficult to subdue and kill. On the other hand, it was easy to kill a boy like Richard Parker, who was the youngest and, in this case, also the weakest because he was ill. Therefore, he was an easy victim.

The book explains step by step everything that happened on the ship. The captain and the two sailors who survived explained it afterwards in great detail. They even went so far as to say that after having drunk the blood they felt really much better. They made no attempt to hide or conceal anything. Did they have no regrets or feel guilty?

— Not only did they kill an innocent child, but it was a child with whom the captain had an almost paternal relationship. Parker was an orphan and the captain told him: "Come to sea with me, I will bring some books and teach you how to read". It is very difficult to imagine being capable of doing such a thing. But the survival instinct was activated. The captain and the others were so close to death, they had not eaten or drunk for so long, that they were in real panic of dying imminently. I suppose that in these circumstances, for some people, a kind of law of the jungle is imposed: kill or be killed. They did not regret killing the cabin boy and eating him, the custom of the sea justified them: if you suffered a shipwreck and had no food or water, one could kill someone. My feeling about the captain is that he was even proud of it; not of killing, but of the heroism of having survived and being able to return home with a great story to tell.

In his book he talks about different types of cannibalism, such as ritual cannibalism or survival cannibalism. Do you think it was easy to distinguish in that Victorian society?

— Well, I think yes and no. It was in the sense that there were certain types of cannibalism that they considered barbaric and horrible, especially what reached them from the colonies and the empire. Stories arrived from Africa and their reaction was to consider it an uncivilized thing that had to be eradicated by evangelizing people and teaching them morality. For them, that cannibalism was pure evil. However, there was an acceptance of survival cannibalism.

It is very interesting when you point out that the townspeople supported the captain and his decision, but the judge did not. What changed for them to sentence Captain Dudley?

— The popular view was very empathetic towards Dudley and Stevens because, especially the working classes, they could perfectly imagine themselves in that same extreme situation. But something changed in the upper classes, among judges, columnists, lawyers, and members of the government. If this had been permitted for centuries, why in 1884 was the criterion changed and it was considered murder? Since the 1830s, there were reformers changing all areas of British society: expanding the right to vote to the middle class, defending the rights of women, children, and factory workers... To these reformers, it seemed barbaric to allow someone to be able to kill their companion to drink their blood; and they were horrified by the hierarchical nature of the process, where the victim almost always ended up being the weakest. Furthermore, in Victorian England, there was an idealization of the pure and innocent child that we see in works like Alice in Wonderland or Oliver Twist. That in a shipwreck the very child who should have been protected was sacrificed deeply offended the Home Secretary and the judges.

Beyond law schools, the case has a presence in popular culture, in music, and in books. You yourself mention that at a party, someone had dressed up in tribute to this case. Why does it continue to fascinate so much?

— Yes, in law schools it is a very popular case, which is precisely where I learned about it. At a party, a university classmate came dressed as a captain with pieces of meat around his neck, which impressed me a lot. The story attracts people naturally, but also, the moral lesson is of absolute current relevance. Deep down, it raises the classic debate of Western philosophy: the confrontation between the utilitarian vision—which seeks to obtain the maximum global benefit for the greatest number of people, considering it acceptable to sacrifice one life if three are saved by it—and the vision based on individual rights, which maintains that murder is intrinsically immoral and that the young man had an inalienable right to his own life.