Neil Hanson - The Custom of the Sea

In addition to the admission charge, booklets and photographs were available, with each freak selling their own pictures and keeping half the proceeds. Accumulating such souvenir photographs and cartes de visite was a Victorian obsession. As well as the rigidly posed formal family portraits, pictures of music-hall celebrities, military figures, like General Gordon and Sir Garnet Wolseley, and freak-show oddities were collected, catalogued and pasted into elaborate albums.

The freaks were posed in front of painted backdrops — jungles, stormy oceans, burning deserts — and the curiosity value of the attraction was enhanced either by the use of suitable props or by tampering with the negative. Midgets were seated in oversize chairs, the clothes of giants or fat ladies would be padded, and extra hair would be added to the pictures of bearded ladies or children.

The phenomenal success of the museums of curiosities contributed to their downfall. Other attractions — street fairs, circuses, carnivals and amusement parks — all began using freak stalls alongside the big top or the ferris wheel as sideshows to the main event.

The increasing competition from music halls and the emerging cinemas signalled the terminal decline of the live freak show, but as late as the 1930s a few travelling shows were still operating in more remote rural areas. Inanimate freaks and curiosities continue to be displayed to this day.

Live freak shows struck some as disgusting and exploitative, but though there were undoubtedly cruel and corrupt operators, most freaks professed themselves happy with their lot, and glad to be able to earn the only living open to them. In most cases they shared accommodation with the ‘normal’ show staff, winning an acceptance and equality of treatment that would not have been available to them in the rest of Victorian society.

Cannibals had been standard freak-show fare for half a century before the Mignonette’s sinking, but the attractions had almost always been exotic, primitive peoples. Mrs Fraser, who survived the sinking of the Stirling Castle off the Queensland coast, was an exception, an exhibit in a London freak show in 1837 whose tales of life amongst ‘the cannibal savages’ of Australia were recounted in a popular broadsheet.

In the eighteenth century, South Sea islanders were regarded as ‘noble savages’ of Rousseau’s description, and the experience of early voyagers like Captain Cook made the islands appear earthly paradises. Cook had tried to bring back a Tahitian from his first voyage, but he died during the voyage home. His second produced a live, tattooed Polynesian, Mai, who was put on display when Cook returned to England.

By the early nineteenth century, tales — sometimes true, but often lurid penny-dreadful accounts of the savagery and cannibalism of primitive peoples — had led to a sea change in public attitudes. The noble savage was now widely regarded as a sub-human species of brute creation. Hottentots were described as ‘The most primitive people on earth’, and South African bushmen as ‘earthmen [who] burrow in the ground’.

The Illustrated London News cautioned that ‘By burrowing, the reader must not understand that they dig and hide under the surface like rabbits, but that they scratch hollows in the ground to shield them in a measure from the wind.’

Showmen showed no such inhibitions, referring to ‘A colony that resembles a gigantic warren of rabbits. They eat poisonous as well as innoxious serpents… separate the head from the body with a knife or for want of that, bite it off.’

Black Africans and South Sea islanders, especially Fijians, were routinely described as ‘cannibals’. Not all were what they seemed. On one occasion a Zulu cannibal was recognized by two women visitors: ‘He ain’t no Zulu, that’s Bill Jackson. He worked over there at Camden, in the dock.’

Of P. T. Barnum’s ‘Four Fijian cannibals’ exhibited in 1872, one was from Virginia and two more had been living in California for some years. None of that prevented Barnum from issuing a press release when one of them died of natural causes, claiming the other three had been interrupted while making a meal of him.

Even when showmen finally conceded that there were no longer any cannibals in Fiji, they still continued to present bogus attractions as ‘the sons and daughters of cannibals’.

Tales of natives feasting on human flesh in remote and exotic parts of the globe brought a vicarious thrill to Victorian drawing rooms, but both the tattooed skin and the professed flesh-eating culture of the cannibals displayed by the showmen were regarded as clear evidence of the degenerate, primitive and backward nature of societies so alien to the Victorian ideals of decency, morality and duty.

British seamen — white Anglo-Saxons — showing the same stigmata of the tattooing needle, and the same willingness to consume human flesh in extremity, were an uncomfortable reminder that the distance between primitive peoples and English civilization might not be as great as the Victorian upper classes liked to think.

This, even more than the steady encroachment of government regulation over the shipping trade, was the driving force in attempts to outlaw the most abhorrent of all the seafaring practices: the custom of the sea.

The judge chosen to hear the case of Regina versus Dudley and Stephens at the Exeter Assizes was the Baron Huddleston, a haughty and flamboyant character who suited the colour of his gloves to the case before him — white for routine thefts and felonies, lavender for breach-of-promise suits and black for murder cases.

He had acquired a well-deserved reputation for browbeating jurors into verdicts that tallied with his own conclusions and also had some knowledge of the seafaring world from a spell as Judge Advocate of the Fleet and Counsel to the Admiralty. Although, according to his obituary in The Times , ‘He knew less of the lines of a ship than of the points of the horse, he yet managed to hold his own against the skilled mercantile lawyers of his day.’

As the paper also noted, ‘The judge, whose charm of manner and skill in conversation made him afterwards particularly acceptable in distinguished society, began his ascent in not the most fashionable or promising surroundings.’

Born in 1817, the son of a merchant captain, Huddleston grew up in the West Country, but when his father retired from the sea he returned to his native Ireland. The future judge matriculated at, but never graduated from, Trinity College, Dublin.

He began his legal career as an usher but was admitted as a student at Gray’s Inn on 18 April 1836, and called to the bar in the summer of 1839, becoming a barrister of the Central Criminal Court and,

a diligent attendant at the Old Bailey. A friendly turnkey went up and down the corridors of Newgate touting for dock briefs on behalf of Mr Huddleston. He was admirable in the conduct of a cause, dangerous in cross-examination, and above all things, skilful in presenting his points to the jury.

Huddleston showed an early fondness for good living and the pleasures of society and, as The Times acidly noted,

It will be a surprise to many to learn that in this early period in his career his speciality lay in the argument of Poor Law cases. Society indeed played a large part in his later life and did not leave him that leisure for study which a judge who is satisfactorily to dispose of legal arguments requires. He was fond of exercising the remarkable powers of genial and fascinating address which he undoubtedly possessed, whether or not at heart he was more amiable or less selfish than the majority of successful men.

He was able to make use of the full range of his talents as a counsel in the divorce court, ‘repeatedly impressing upon a common jury the precise significance of French words of endearment, pronounced probably on purpose, with the most English of accents’.