This article was first published January 4, 2025, at fieldethos.com.
Better writers than I have told the tale of the whaling ship, the Essex, and the sperm whale that sunk her, including Herman Melville of Moby Dick fame. I won’t sully their reputations by adding my name to the list, except to share a few pertinent details that give shape to the story I want to tell here.
In 1820, the Essex was sailing the South Pacific some 1,000 miles west of the Galapagos Islands and on the trail of a pod of sperm whales when it was rammed not once but twice by a rogue bull and eventually sunk. Twenty sailors scrambled among the ship’s wreckage salvaging everything they could before seeking refuge in three of the ship’s whaleboats.
In the whaleboats, resources were assessed and calculations were made. The closest landmass was the Marquesas Islands, but those islands were reportedly inhabited by cannibals, so the sailors set their sights instead on the Society Islands, 1,300 kilometers farther away. Ironically, it was the sailors’ dread fear of cannibals that would drive them to cannibalism.
After the decision was made to sail for the Society Islands and a course was laid, the remaining crew had nothing to do but settle in and wait. And hope. And pray. Really, anything to occupy their minds and avoid thinking about the inevitable. What would happen when their limited rations ran out? Could enough fish be caught to sustain the surviving sailors? Could a seagull be caught if one happened to circle low enough? How long before the men were forced to face the fact that some of them were going to have to die in order for others to live? Whatever the answers were to those questions, it wouldn’t have taken long for eye contact in the whaleboat to become extremely uncomfortable.
Thankfully, there was a protocol in place to give sailors direction in such situations, a maritime code for cannibalism. The process was known as ‘the proper tradition of the sea’ or ‘the delicate question.’
The Delicate Question. The very phrase begs a question of its own. How was that Delicate Question posed, exactly? “Pardon me, sir, but would it trouble you overmuch if I murdered and consumed you?”
The maritime code for cannibalism dictated that the dead or dying were the first to be eaten, obviously, but after that, lots would be drawn to decide who was next. The process was entirely legal and justified by the life or death circumstances. That’s not to say that the rules were always followed, though. Lotteries were fixed. Or ignored altogether. Ship’s captains believed that rank had its privileges and often ignored the ‘proper tradition of the sea’ to save their own skin, sacrificing the lives of those considered expendable, slaves or passengers, to feed their sailors.
Sailors, as well as the general public, knew of and fully accepted this protocol of cannibalism as a means of survival. Not only was there was no guilt or shame attached to the act, there was actually a certain professional pride associated with a sailor surviving the worst of what the sea threw at him.
In the end, seven of the twenty sailors that survived the shipwreck answered the Delicate Question. In the proper tradition of the sea, their sacrifices allowed others to live.
Wright Outdoors 