On the Trail of the Cannibals
I Slept in a Prison Cell to Research a Murder
The archivists at the National Archives retrieved a box for me. Inside were the original documents—handwritten accounts describing the slitting of cabin boy Richard Parker’s neck and the eating of his flesh.
I held them carefully. The paper was ordinary, the handwriting neat Victorian script. But the words described something extraordinary: three starving men in a lifeboat, and the captain’s decision to kill the weakest among them to survive.
I felt what many writers report: there’s something about holding your characters’ handwritten words that makes you feel close to the events of your story. Except these weren’t characters. These were real men who did this thing, who confessed to it, and who faced the gallows for it.
This was the research for Captain’s Dinner—my first book whose events and primary sources were overseas. It meant many trips to England, on the trail of my cannibals.
To put myself in a historical mood suited to my story, the first time I visited London I stayed at a hostel called Clink 78, which—as the name hints—was located in an old prison attached to a courthouse where Charles Dickens once worked. To get the full effect, I booked a room in one of the prison cells, complete with a bunk bed and a metal door.
The cells locked, they told guests, but they promised not to lock anyone in.
Most of my research took place in the National Archives, in the Richmond section of London, a pleasant, suburban-feeling area perhaps best known to book lovers as the place where Virginia and Leonard Woolf set up household shortly after getting married. The National Archives’ extensive British history collection includes documents from Shakespeare’s life, records of historic moments in World War I—and the key documents from my cannibalism story.
The research was quite thrilling, as library research goes.
Doing research in an archive, there are always moments of discovery, large and small—when important aspects of the story fall into place, or when you come across a great detail that will help bring a narrative to life. I had one of the latter when I was poring through a big bound volume that contained the official “Agreement and Account of Crew” for the Mignonette.
In this form, which maritime regulators required for the protection of crew members, Captain Dudley had to specify what food he would be feeding the crew throughout the journey—including which days they would be given meat. I noticed at the bottom of the form that it said “substitutes at master’s option,” with “master” being a formal term for “captain.” Given what—or who—ended up on the menu, it was, looking back, a darkly ironic phrase. I included it in the book.
I also traveled to Oxford to research in the university’s famed Bodleian Libraries, which first opened to scholars in 1602. The Bodleian holds the papers of William Harcourt, one of my main characters, who made the decision to prosecute Dudley and Stephens and played a key role throughout.
There was a dispiriting moment when the librarian handed over the first box of papers and I saw how atrociously illegible Harcourt’s handwriting was—in an era when almost everything was written by hand. It would be a struggle to decipher them.
Fortunately, the Bodleian also had the many-volume handwritten journals of Harcourt’s 21-year-old son, Lewis, who served as his private secretary and had much better handwriting. Crisis averted.
While poring over documents in libraries, I also made a trip to Falmouth, the town on the southern coast of Cornwall, England, where Dudley and Stephens were brought when they were rescued—and where they were arrested and charged with murder.
Many of the sites where the story unfolded were still there. The Harbour Master’s office is still standing.
So is the Custom House, where Dudley and Stephens were first questioned about what happened in the lifeboat.
I looked for the police station jail where the men were held and slowly came to the realization that they might be hanged for killing the cabin boy. The station itself was gone, but there was a plaque explaining that the jail had once been located under this building.
Standing there, reading that plaque, the story stopped being dates and documents. These were men who stood in this exact spot, facing execution for a decision made in the most desperate circumstances imaginable. What would I have done? What would you?
Next week, I’ll share the first excerpt from Captain’s Dinner: what actually happened in that lifeboat during those twenty-four days at sea.
—Adam