Crime, Punishment, and What Comes After
Inside the long afterlife of Queen v. Dudley and Stephens, from the crew's bitter endings to the enduring legacy of the court case.
ICYMI, we’re serializing Captain’s Dinner by Adam Cohen in four parts. Catch up on Part One, Part Two, and Part Three.
Previously: At trial, Judge Baron Huddleston takes the extraordinary step of using a “special verdict” to bypass the jury, placing the final decision in the hands of England’s legal elite. Despite widespread public sympathy for the starving sailors and their lawyers’ arguments about necessity, the Lord Chief Justice and his fellow justices decisively reject the defense. They find Dudley and Stephens guilty of willful murder and sentence them to death by hanging—though with a strong recommendation for mercy from the Crown . . .
Back in Holloway Prison, Dudley and Stephens awaited their fate. Their spirits were buoyed by the stream of letters and telegrams they were receiving from relatives, friends, and strangers, and by the reports they were receiving of petitions being filed on their behalf. By now, news of their death sentences had spread around the globe. In Australia, The Sydney Morning Herald reported the news in a story called “The Mignonette Affair,” while The New York Times put the sentencing of “The Mignonette Cannibals” on its front page.
On Friday, December 12, the home secretary, William Harcourt, reached his decision. He recommended that the queen commute Dudley’s and Stephens’s death sentences, but he stood up to members of the general public—and his own attorney general—who wanted the men to be set free immediately. He proposed that the men serve six months’ imprisonment without hard labor, with the time running from the day of their conviction, December 4.
It was a compromise that embodied the Victorian reform spirit. By calling for Dudley and Stephens to face serious punishment, Harcourt was sending the message that Victorian reformers hoped the case would deliver: that murder at sea in conjunction with survival cannibalism was still murder and would be punished as such—even if it was the captain doing it and the cabin boy being killed. At the same time, Harcourt’s bid to reduce Dudley’s and Stephens’s sentences to six months reflected another aspect of Victorian reform. The home secretary had spent his career urging understanding for criminals and delinquents, and he believed it was necessary to look at the underlying reasons a crime was committed. Once the castaways’ crime was clearly identified as murder and the message was sent to society that people in power could not kill weaker people in survival conditions, Harcourt could demonstrate the sort of sympathy that he and other Victorian reformers generally showed to convicted criminals.
The next morning, at Holloway Prison, Dudley and Stephens learned of Harcourt’s decision. The men were relieved that Harcourt was recommending mercy, but they had been hoping for more. A day earlier, Dudley had telegrammed his wife saying he expected to be free on Sunday; now, he had to send her another telegram saying that the home secretary was recommending six months’ imprisonment.
On December 15, Queen Victoria formally accepted Harcourt’s recommendation and reduced Dudley’s and Stephens’s sentences to six months’ imprisonment without hard labor. It is not clear how she made her decision or even how much time she spent on it. There is, one historian has noted, “no evidence that she took any interest” in Dudley and Stephens’s case at any point.
With that, the case of Queen v. Dudley and Stephens officially came to a close. All that remained was for the men to serve out their sentences—and so they did. Six months later, on May 20, 1885, Dudley and Stephens were released from Holloway Prison, a year and a day after the Mignonette set sail. Two days later, they requested new Board of Trade certificates to replace the ones they lost when the Mignonette went down. The board had so far refused to issue new ones, likely out of concern that the men could use them to flee while out on bail. Now that they had served their sentences, the board restored Dudley’s certificate as master and Stephens’s as mate. They could finally resume sailing and put the horrors of the past year behind them.
It was not long before Dudley, Stephens, and Brooks returned to obscurity. Brooks, who had played no role in killing Parker, had the easiest time of it. He had been free since September 18, when the charges against him were dropped and he became a witness for the Crown. His life soon returned to something resembling what it had been before the ill-fated voyage. Although he had considered moving to Australia before he boarded the Mignonette, Brooks spent the rest of his life in and around Southampton. He was said to have carried the events of the Mignonette lifeboat with him throughout his life. His friend Albert Bedford, who was related to Richard Parker’s family by marriage, recalled that when Brooks got drunk at night, he would yell loudly that he “didn’t do it.” Brooks died in 1919, almost exactly thirty-five years after the Mignonette sank.
After Stephens was released from prison, he went home to Southampton. In 1886, he returned to sea with his new Board of Trade certificate. His experiences on the Mignonette did not discourage him from undertaking long and arduous voyages. That year, he worked on the Sareca, a steam yacht bought by the Egyptian government, which he helped deliver to Alexandria. But he too was said to have remained deeply affected by the Mignonette traumas. Although he sailed for several more years, he reportedly fell into depression and alcoholism. On June 25, 1914, he died in Hull at the age of sixty-six, a poor and broken man.
Dudley had the shortest and most eventful life after the Mignonette. As soon as Dudley was released from prison, he and his wife, Philippa, prepared their family to make a fresh start in Australia. They traveled to Sydney in 1885 on the steamship Austral, completing the transoceanic journey the Mignonette had failed to. Dudley’s aunt handed over her business, and Dudley began making and selling sails and other boating supplies near the waterfront, under the name T. R. Dudley and Co. The company prospered, and by 1890, it had a staff of forty. The Dudley family also thrived. Philippa gave birth to three more children in Australia. One, a son, died young, but two daughters survived.
But the good times did not last. In the mid-1890s, a bubonic plague pandemic broke out in Asia. The plague was transmitted by fleas on rats, and when large numbers of dead rats began appearing near the Sydney waterfront in 1900, it was clear the disease had arrived in Australia. The city tried to contain the spread, advising people who lived and worked near the harbor on safe methods for disposing of rats and hiring a ratcatcher.
Dudley’s shop was located in a building near the waterfront. It had a defective sewer system, it turned out, which allowed rats to climb up through the drainpipes into the rooms where he and his family slept, bringing lethal fleas with them. On February 17, Dudley fell ill. He received medical care, but at the time, treatments for the bubonic plague were primitive and ineffective. Five days later, he was dead at the age of forty-six.
Dudley’s was the first official death of Sydney’s bubonic plague epidemic of 1900. It went on to take 103 lives in the first nine months of that year and 535 in a series of outbreaks that recurred through 1925. To combat transmission of the disease, there were strict rules about the burial of victims. Dudley’s body sat unattended for days, then was wrapped in sailcloth soaked in 5 percent sulfuric acid, placed in a watertight coffin with more acid, and wrapped again in acid-soaked sailcloth and a layer of asbestos cloth. The body was then taken by skiff to a cemetery in the city’s remote quarantine station and unceremoniously deposited in a grave of “unusual depth.”
As the city’s first official casualty, Dudley’s name was widely reported in the news. If there was any larger meaning to be gleaned from his inglorious end, any sense that the score had been evened for what he had done years earlier to his cabin boy, the press did not notice it. With his move to Australia, Dudley had managed to put the killing of Richard Parker and his murder conviction behind him. Virtually none of the news accounts of Dudley’s death mentioned his past life, and the official public health report referred to him simply as “Captain Dudley, a sailmaker.”
To some people, Queen v. Dudley and Stephens is above all a tragedy, with the doomed cabin boy at the center. Richard Parker is, in every way, the story’s innocent victim. He was an orphan who put his faith in his captain, and that faith was cruelly exploited. While Parker was sick, the adults around him schemed to kill him and use his body to save themselves. When he was murdered, after uttering the haunting words “What, me, Sir?” Parker became the embodiment of the price that some people are forced to pay for the schemes of others.
Other people see Dudley and Stephens as a dark comedy—and not just law students. Over the last century and a half, cannibalism jokes have found their way to even the most cultivated places. The highbrow Times Literary Supplement once published an essay on the case under the headline “Cabin Boy Cutlets.”
For lawyers, the trial of Dudley and Stephens has enduring significance because of its powerful impact on Anglo-American law. In England, the case overturned the long-standing tolerance for survival cannibalism at sea, a practice that had been accepted for centuries in the world of sailing and in literature—and by the legal system. It also helped turn English law against the necessity defense. Though it has not been completely eliminated, necessity is rarely invoked with any success. In a 1971 case, Lord Denning, one of England’s most respected judges, cited Dudley and Stephens to reject a defense of necessity. Sounding a lot like the lord chief justice, John Duke Coleridge, he said that if one were recognized, it would “open a door which no man could shut” and “would be an excuse for all kinds of wrongdoing.”
The impact in the United States has been even more pronounced. American law had expressly accepted the necessity defense before 1884, but the rule changed as American courts began to follow Dudley and Stephens, especially in homicide cases. In 1931, Benjamin Cardozo, a great scholar and Supreme Court justice, wrote that “where two or more are overtaken by a common disaster, there is no right on the part of one to save the lives of some by the killing of another.” In 2012, a criminal law professor wrote that the “traditional position” in American law—followed by most, though not all, courts—is that “the necessity defense is barred in all intent to kill homicide prosecutions, no matter how extreme the circumstances, and even if the killing of an innocent person would save a greater number of innocent lives.” He attributed the adoption of this rule in significant part to “the influence of D & S”—that is, the Dudley and Stephens case.
The case stands as an almost perfect real-world experiment about one of the great fault lines in philosophy: the debate between utilitarianism and rights-based moral theories.
The reason Dudley and Stephens has remained an object of fascination for close to a century and a half, though, is not its pathos, its humor, or even its impact on the law of homicide, significant though all those things are. It is, rather, that the case stands as an almost perfect real-world experiment about one of the great fault lines in philosophy: the debate between utilitarianism and rights-based moral theories. As moral philosophy professor Michael Sandel has been telling Harvard undergraduates for many years, each side in Dudley and Stephens represents one of these worldviews. On Dudley’s side, he notes, are those who believe the killing of Parker is morally justified on the basis of providing “the greatest good for the greatest number.” On the side of the Crown’s prosecutors, he says, are those who believe it is “categorically wrong” because “murder is murder—it’s always wrong.” Dudley and Stephens delivered a powerful argument against not just cannibalism, but against cold-blooded cost-benefit analysis.
The decision in Dudley and Stephens came about because of the concerted efforts of three great Victorian-era reformers. When they learned about the events in the Mignonette lifeboat, they saw not only a human tragedy and a criminal act but a chance to bring an end to a practice they abhorred. Beyond that, they saw an opportunity to rewrite the laws of society in a more ethical and humane way.
Sir John Walter Huddleston, the trial judge, believed that the killing of Parker was murder, and he was seemingly intent on handling the prosecution of Dudley and Stephens in a way that not only led to a conviction but established a national legal standard. William Harcourt, the home secretary, insisted that the killing of Parker be prosecuted as murder. When the defendants were convicted, he stood up to public pressure and insisted that there should be real punishment, to make clear that cannibalism at sea was a real crime.
But it was the lord chief justice, the author of the decision in the case, who decided what the case would stand for. His opinion is one of the great refutations of the use of the necessity defense to a charge of murder—but it is also something more. It is, more broadly, a powerful rejection of utilitarian thinking. Lord Coleridge’s written words have reverberated down through the ages. There will always be people who believe it is “necessary” to kill someone else—that taking away one life will result in saving the lives of others. But the lord chief justice saw through the self-serving logic of Dudley’s utilitarian calculation.
Lord Coleridge’s opinion in Dudley and Stephens changed the law of cannibalism at sea forever. That was a historic transformation and the end of an era, but it was not enormously important compared to other problems in Victorian England, and indeed it was fading in significance as the Age of Sail drew to a close and shipwrecks became increasingly rare. Although cannibalism was a subject of considerable popular fascination, it was not a societal problem on a large scale, like abusive factory working conditions or the oppression of women.
But Lord Coleridge was a reformer, in the best mold of the Victorian era, and he wanted the Dudley and Stephens opinion to be a force for societal progress beyond the narrow issue of cannibalism at sea. He was taking aim at the necessity defense, and at all the utilitarian calculations that people make about why it is “necessary” to do evil things that serve their own interests.
The significance of Dudley and Stephens is very different now from what it was in 1884. Today, the case stands as a soaring legal tower at one end of a great philosophical divide, because it represents the principle that human rights are critically important and lives should not be sacrificed based on utilitarian calculations. But the decision’s lessons are far from merely academic. They speak powerfully to the real world, especially today.
Dudley and Stephens’s main holding, about the need to defend individual rights in the face of utilitarian calculations, is an important moral and legal touchstone. Dictators have, throughout history, sought to justify atrocities through hedonic calculus. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin insisted that their concentration camps, planned starvations, and other forms of mass murder were a step on the way toward building a better world. There will always be tyrants who argue that the dead bodies piling up will promote the greatest good for the greatest number. Dudley and Stephens represents a firm rebuke to all of them.
These days, though, utilitarian thinking is just as likely to be found in more mundane places. Today’s Dudleys and Stephenses are liable to be corporate policymakers and faceless bureaucrats who crisply phase out individual lives with mathematical models and computer code. The killing can be done not with a penknife to the neck but with an iPad Pro.
Utilitarianism, it must be said, is not always a bad guide in setting public policy and making private choices. A strong case can be made for taking into account how many people will live or die, in the aggregate, when we set highway speed limits or ban an effective but dangerous pesticide. It makes sense to try to save as many lives as possible in the abstract—and, yes, to promote the greatest good for the greatest number. But utilitarianism becomes more problematic when there are identifiable victims who can be named in advance and when the utilitarian calculations collide with basic human rights.
One area where skepticism about utilitarianism is important is medicine. In health care, utilitarianism is often the default method of making decisions—we generally want to approve drugs that save lives and to prohibit hospital practices that cost them. But as Lord Coleridge explained, there are other considerations that must be taken into account, ones that can and often should override mere utilitarianism. This ethical tension made a notable appearance at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when there was a shortage of ventilators in England. The British Medical Association, the doctors’ trade union, declared that health professionals might have to remove ventilators from patients who were “stable or even improving” but had a “worse prognosis than other patients who required the same resources.” It was a purely utilitarian calculus: Take the ventilator away from the patient whose life it might be saving and give it to a stronger patient with a better chance of surviving.
There will always be tyrants who argue that the dead bodies piling up will promote the greatest good for the greatest number. Dudley and Stephens represents a firm rebuke to all of them.
John Harris, a professor emeritus of applied philosophy at the University of Manchester, wrote a scathing response in the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. The policy was “shockingly callous,” he said, and it was also “almost certainly . . . unethical.” As Harris explained, a patient who was “stable or even improving” was presumably benefiting from the ventilator. If a doctor took it away and gave it to another patient, the first patient could die. Patients in the health care system “rightly expect to be treated and are entitled to the best of their doctors’ and that system’s abilities,” Harris said. “They do not expect to be abandoned by those doctors in favor of other patients with a higher survival probability.”
The policy was not just immoral, Harris said; it was illegal. In explaining why, he reached back 136 years to the lord chief justice’s ruling in Dudley and Stephens. And he entitled his essay “Why Kill the Cabin Boy?” Harris understood that the essential issue in the hospital and the lifeboat was the same: Someone had decided that if they could just end a particular person’s life (or put it at heightened risk of ending), better things would result.
There are many more such examples in medicine. But the approach of the court in Dudley and Stephens bolsters the argument that no one should be rushed to die because a bureaucrat has decided the value of keeping them alive is not worth the cost. In these scenarios, and many more, it argues that people have individual rights that should not be calculated away.
The area in which Dudley and Stephens and its championing of individual rights may be most needed in the days ahead is in the brave new world that artificial intelligence is ushering in. This will be a highly contested realm because the rules for machine behavior must be thought through in advance, and there is as yet no agreement on what they should be. It is easy to fall by default into utilitarianism. There is a superficial appeal to the idea that the best thing to do is to produce machines coded to produce the greatest good for the greatest number. But the problem with any such hedonic calculations is that they overlook the importance of individual rights. A utilitarian designing a self-driving car would likely program it to minimize the loss of life when it gets into a dangerous situation. So if a car carrying four passengers is forced to quickly decide whether to crash into a wall and kill the four people in the car or swerve and run over a single pedestrian, it would kill the one pedestrian. The car designer would, like Dudley in the lifeboat, insist that losing one life was better than losing four.
Viewed through the frame of the Dudley and Stephens ruling, the flaw in this logic is readily apparent. The pedestrian is not in the car and has not assumed the risks that driving in an autonomous car entails. By what right does a self-driving car coder decide that the pedestrian’s life will be sacrificed to save four people who have chosen to travel in a driverless car?
Some ethicists argue that the companies that set the algorithms for self-driving cars should move “beyond harm minimization.” They call for rules that would prevent self-driving cars from swerving onto sidewalks where they would violate the rights of “uninvolved” people. In this view, uninvolved people have the same right as Richard Parker should have had: to not lose their lives because someone else decided that killing them would save more lives and thereby serve the greater good.
Utilitarianism will always be with us, and as the world grows more complicated and more decisions are made for us by nameless policymakers and computer coders—and by artificial intelligence—we are likely to see more of it. Dudley and Stephens provides a model for pushing back. As Harris recognized at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is always available to resist other people’s calculations of what produces the most “good” and to insist on saving the cabin boy.
People who read the lord chief justice’s opinion in Dudley and Stephens sometimes say that it is very much a product of its time, and it is. It was written in 1884, and that shows in its florid language and dated attitudes, but in its most important elements, it represents the best of the Victorian era. The lord chief justice wrote his opinion at the height of an age that achieved a great deal of social and legal reform. Victorian reformers fought to lift up those at the bottom of society, and they worked to establish a set of legal rights that would protect people from being oppressed by those with more power. The ruling in Dudley and Stephens did both of these things. Rather than siding with the strong, the ruling established a national standard protecting the interests of the young, sick, unsuspecting cabin boy, the weakest person in the lifeboat.
In standing up for Parker, the lord chief justice was coming to the defense of everyone at the bottom of a social hierarchy. He was striking a blow for every enslaved person, every Black man, every fourteen-year-old boy, and every Spaniard or dark-skinned Italian on a ship of Englishmen over the centuries who had been told that a decision had been made, and they would be the one to be sacrificed.
The fundamental principle underlying it all was the Victorian reformers’ commitment to what would today be called human rights. Lord Coleridge believed Parker had the right to his own life—to live it and to keep living it as long as he was able to. And he believed it was a crime for Dudley and Stephens to take it away from him based on their self-serving calculations. One thing that can be said about life is that, contrary to the assumptions Dudley was willing to make when he decided it was time to kill his cabin boy, there is no way of knowing how things will turn out. After all, all four of the men might have been picked up the next day by a passing ship. Justice Cardozo expressed this idea more eloquently in a book about law and literature. “Who shall know,” Cardozo asked, “when the masts and sails of rescue may emerge out of the fog?”
And so it was with Parker as Dudley moved toward him and brought a knife up to his throat. Dudley’s actions reduced Parker to a thing to be bargained away in a cost-benefit analysis—no longer a shipmate or a young friend to be aided through their shared ordeal but merely food to keep him and two other men alive. Parker saw himself differently, as a human being who wanted to survive and might still. Sick though he was, the seventeen-year-old Parker never wavered in his will to live. He “expressed hope every day,” Stephens recalled, “that we should see a ship.” Had he lived just a few more days, he would have.
It was that hope of staying alive to live a full life that Dudley and Stephens stole from him. They did it by self-interested calculations and an appeal to necessity. In the view of the progressive reformers of the Victorian era—as in the view of human-rights champions in our own time—no matter how low people are on the economic or social hierarchy, no matter how young, or how hungry, or how sick, their lives belong to them and them alone. They have the right, until they breathe their last breath, to stare out into the fog undisturbed, searching for a mast and a sail.
Adapted from CAPTAIN’S DINNER, by Adam Cohen, published by Authors Equity. Copyright © 2025 by Adam Cohen.
I am genuinely fascinated by this story. Its horrors, its moral tensions, and the hard choices these men faced linger long after the final page. The relevance to our own time is impossible to miss. The writing is superb, which comes as no surprise. Thank you. -- Dudley's pen & ink sketch of this ship during the same year when it sank is especially grand at the end.