Neil Hanson - The Custom of the Sea

‘What?’ Liddicoat said. ‘Speak more clearly, please, Mr Brooks.’

‘No, sir, there was no conversation.’

‘But you knew he was going to be killed. Were you told to go forward or was there any sign made to you to go forward?’

‘No, sir.’

Tilly rapped his knuckles against the edge of the witness box. The noise made Brooks start and his eyes flickered towards him. ‘Did you by any act of yours try to prevent the lad being killed?’

‘No, sir.’

‘And after the boy was killed you shared his blood?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thank you, Mr Brooks,’ Tilly said. ‘That is all.’

‘Sir.’ Brooks hesitated, glancing towards Tom and Stephens in the dock. ‘I — I should like to add that but for the death of the boy I believe we would have died from hunger and thirst. And if the boy had died we should not have any blood from him, and of course it was something to drink that we wanted. I felt quite strong afterwards. In fact we all made use of the expression that we were quite different men.

‘I and the Captain fed on the body and so did Stephens occasionally but he had very little. We lived on it for four days and we ate a good deal — I should think quite half of the body before we were picked up, and I can say that we partook of it with quite as much relish as ordinary food.’ His voice trailed away. ‘That is all I have to say.’

Danckwerts was already on his feet, raising his voice to drown the buzz of conversation from the public. ‘That is the evidence I have to lay before you for the prosecution and I submit it will be your duty to commit the prisoners for trial.’

Liddicoat glanced towards the defence. ‘Mr Tilly?’

The lawyer stood up. ‘I am uncertain if Your Worships are still open to legal argument on the committal of the defendants, but this I must say at all events.’ He had been holding a sheaf of papers, but now paused, threw them on to the table behind him, and spoke without notes. ‘In former times, when the survivors of a shipwreck related how they had been driven by their unspeakable anguish to cannibalism, it was usually the custom of our grandsires to feel deep pity for them, to shelter and comfort them, to furnish them with money and in many other ways to let them know how thoroughly they understood the fearful distress they had happily come through, and how great was their compassion.

‘I know of no incident — though there are a thousand cases of manslaying and man-eating by famine-stricken seamen and passengers in our own marine annals — of men who had killed a shipmate and drunk his blood and eaten his flesh for the preservation of their own lives, having been cast into gaol on their arrival home and left to languish there until the judge and jury had decided their fate.

‘And why?’ He paused before answering his own question. ‘Not only because such tragical things were as frequent then as they are rare now, and because the necessity of them was accepted as a condition, the last indeed, but nevertheless a condition of man’s terrible and maddening strife with the remorseless deep, but because the whole world felt that deeds of this kind were outside the sphere of human jurisdiction.

‘The deprivation of instinct by exquisite suffering such as no healthy mind can bear to think of compels an action for which the doer, as part of the nature that incites him, must not and should not be arraigned.

‘Who amongst us who are judging Captain Dudley and his mate, who that shall judge them when they are brought up to their trial can in the smallest possible degree understand what it is to be exposed for twenty-four days in mid-ocean in a small boat without food or drink?

‘Think of it. These sailors are plain men like most of their kind. They can only depose in brief, unlettered terms what they have passed through. To tell the truth, the truth as it happened to them, they would need to be great artists capable of analysing and expressing their own lives as day after day passed, seizing upon and exhibiting all of those hundred subtle flights of fancy, of hope, of terror, of wild thoughts of maddening despair, of burning resolutions which went to swell some total of their time of agony.

‘Unless we know the sea, unless we know what exposure to nights of wet and days of scorching sunshine is, unless we know how thirst breeds madness and how madness robs the heart of its manhood and the soul of its divinity, how, I say, can we imagine what these men endured? What went before to bring them to the path of slaying Parker and how, not being able to imagine, shall we be capable of judging them?

‘The sailors will be with them, I’ll vouch. For it needs a sailor to know what will be the feelings of four men afloat in a little dinghy upon a heavy sea with nothing to divide amongst them as food but two tins of vegetables. Far out of the track of ships, presenting so small an object upon the heave of the surges of the dark blue ocean as to easily escape the observation of a vessel passing at a distance of a mile.

‘Yet this is but the beginning. Follow on, until you come to the sunken eyes, already repulsive with the fires of famine, to the gaunt and haggard faces, to the voices which can but whisper hoarsely as they seek to cast their accent the length of the boat, and to the boat herself that, as she sails softly along, throws out sweet, fountain-like rippling sounds of water to torture the thirsty wretches in her.

‘Her thwarts and insides dry and baked, and the sickening smell of paint rising with the heat from her blistered sides, yet only a week may have passed and more than a fortnight yet must elapse before those despairing, cadaverous, white-lipped men, should be lifted out of the jaws of death.

‘And for what? To be brought home and flung into prison.

‘Think of it. It is no question of imagination. A sailor will know how to trace these poor fellows, step by step, until the madness of Nature’s irrepressible cravings seizes them and humanity drops from them as a garment.

‘Is there no limit to endurance?’ He threw his arm out towards Tom and Stephens in the dock. ‘A healthy man dies hard. He cannot perish like a weaker man who comes quickly to privation. Nature insists upon the prolongation of the horrible struggle and his instincts leave him, whilst the clay of which he is formed still throbs with a dreadful vitality.

‘Let us in the name of the sailor, in the name of this country that owes him so much, let us be merciful in our judgement of Captain Dudley and his comrades. Twenty-four days in an open boat, at sea with a thousand horrors of mind and body to preface the dreadful deed. And then the companionship of the remains to follow, to abide with them under bright sunshine and to be with them for another, and yet another intolerable night, as darkness comes down with starlight enough to make a mutilated thing thrice horrible as it stares up white from the gloom in the bottom of the boat.

‘Think of it, I say, if the mind has power to bring true thought to bear on this most ghastly subject. Have they not suffered enough? Has memory failed them that penance must be imposed upon them in a prison cell and the expiation at the hands of a tribunal which, if it be not of Heaven, can never compass the significance of those weeks of anguish which forced them to the deed for which they are arraigned?’

He paused and wiped his eyes, as if moved by the power of his own oration. There was a deathly silence in the court, broken only by the sound of a woman sobbing. Then the people in the public seats began to applaud. Slow and hesitant at first, the sound grew in strength and volume. The police attempted to silence them, but men and women alike clapped their hands, stamped their feet on the wooden floor and raised their voices in shouts of support, the whole seafaring community finding its voice, united against outsiders in defence of its own.