Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History(41)
In 2004, the official reports made right after the war by the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) were released.24 They revealed that approximately 2,000 Leningraders had been arrested for cannibalism during the siege (many of them executed on the spot). In most instances, these were normal people driven by impossible conditions to commit unspeakable acts. Cut off from food and fuel and surrounded by the bodies of the dead, preserved by the arctic temperatures, Leningrad’s starving citizens faced the same difficult decisions encountered by other disaster survivors, that is: Should they consume the dead or die themselves? According to an array of independent accounts as well as those from the NKVD, many of them chose to live.
On December 26, 1846, only ten days after leaving the Truckee Lake Camp, the members of The Forlorn Hope were lost deep in the frozen High Sierras. Only a third of the way into their nightmarish trek, they reportedly decided that without resorting to cannibalism they would all die. At first the hikers discussed eating the bodies of anyone who died, but soon they began to debate more desperate measures: drawing straws with the loser sacrificed so that the others might survive.
It was a procedure that had become known to seafarers as “the custom of the sea,” a measure that provided (at least in theory) some rules for officers and their men should they find themselves cast adrift on the open ocean. Sailors drew straws, with the short straw giving up his life so that the rest might eat. In some descriptions, the person drawing the next shortest straw would act as the executioner. Although heroic in concept and theoretically fair in design, modified versions of “the custom of the sea” were sometimes less than heroic and anything but fair.
In perhaps the most famous case, in 1765, a storm demasted the American sloop Peggy, leaving her adrift in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. On board were the captain, his crew of nine, and an African slave. They had been en route to New York from the Azores with a hold full of wine and brandy. After a month, they had nothing to eat but plenty to drink, a fact driven home when the spooked captain of a potential rescue vessel took one look at the Peggy’s ragged-looking crew of drunks and promptly sailed away. The Peggy’s captain, perhaps fearing for his own life, remained in his cabin, armed with a pistol.
Soon after the alcohol-thwarted rescue, the Peggy’s first mate appeared below decks, informing his captain that the men had already eaten the ship’s cat, their uniform buttons, and a leather bilge pump. They had decided to draw lots, with the loser served up as dinner. The captain waved the mate away with a loaded pistol but the man returned moments later to report on the lottery results. By an incredible coincidence, the slave had drawn the short straw. Although the “poor Ethiopian” begged for his life, the captain was unable to prevent the man’s murder, later writing that as they prepared to cook the body, one sailor rushed in, tore away the slave’s liver, and ate it raw.
Three days later the line jumper was said to have gone insane and died. Then, in a demonstration that the crew of the Peggy had lost none of its well-honed survival skills, they tossed their mate’s body overboard, fearful of the harmful effects of consuming a crazy man. Soon another round of straw-drawing took place, but this time the most popular and competent sailor drew the stubby stick (in this case an inked slip of paper). After making a final request that he be killed quickly, the man’s drunken shipmates acted accordingly and gave him a 12-hour reprieve, during which the doomed man reportedly went deaf and lost the remainder of his mind. Just before the Peggy’s second homicide/buffet was set to commence, a rescue ship was spotted. Now, though, the crew feigned sobriety long enough that they were actually rescued (although they nearly forgot the evening’s main course, whom they had locked below deck). In an appropriately downbeat end to the story, the reprieved man reportedly never recovered his hearing or his sanity.
Lost in the Sierra Nevada mountains with no food, the members of The Forlorn Hope also drew lots to determine who would be killed to provide food for the others. Patrick Dolan, a 35-year-old bachelor from Dublin, was the loser. At this point, though, no one had the heart, or possibly the strength, to carry out the killing. Someone suggested that two of the men fight it out with pistols “until one or both was slain” but this proposal was also rejected. Two days later, and before they could reconsider their options, a snowstorm rendered these choices unnecessary. Three of the group members, including Patrick Dolan, died during the night.
The next morning, according to historian Jesse Quinn Thornton, after one of The Forlorn Hope survivors was able to light a fire, “his miserable companions cut the flesh from the arms and legs of Patrick Dolan, and roasted and ate it, averting their faces from each other and weeping.” Parts of the other corpses were eaten over the next few days, but it wasn’t long before the survivors ran out of food again.
By now the survivors of The Forlorn Hope were exhibiting another symptom of starvation: They were bickering amongst themselves. A 30-year-old carpenter, William Foster, reportedly suggested that they kill and eat three of the women (presumably not his own wife), but when this idea failed to take hold he proposed that they shoot their Indian companions, Luis and Salvador, instead. The two men registered their votes by slipping away from the camp. Foster and the others eventually came upon them somewhere along the trail and there are several versions of what happened next.
In most accounts, Foster murdered the men, about whom little is known except that they had risked their lives on multiple occasions to save the stranded pioneers. In another version, Salvador was already dead when the hikers discovered them and Luis died an hour later. But however these men died, there is agreement on what happened next. According to John Sinclair, the alcalde (municipal magistrate) of Sacramento, who later presided over hearings related to the tragedy, “Being nearly out of provisions, and knowing not how far they might be from the settlements, they took their flesh likewise.” Foster, who survived the whole ordeal, was never prosecuted, nor did he garner much blame for the incident. Most descriptions of the murders portray Foster’s actions as being those of a decent man deranged by starvation.