Survival Cannibalism Goes On Trial
As the men stand trial for murder, England experiences a dark night of the soul.
ICYMI, we’re serializing Captain’s Dinner by Adam Cohen in four parts. If you missed Part One, start here, and if you missed Part Two, you’ll find it here.
Previously: After a miraculous rescue at sea, the crew of the Mignonette returns to England. When a local bureaucrat investigates the shipwreck, the men come clean about the death of Richard Parker, raising alarms with local law enforcement. Soon enough, the crew is jailed and charged with murder. Then, at the first hearing, there’s a shocking development: charges are dropped against Edwin Brooks, who resisted killing anyone in the lifeboat. But now, Brooks is the star witness for the prosecution…
Dudley and Stephens’s case was now headed to a grand jury on November 3, when the next Exeter Assize began. As that day of reckoning drew near, popular interest in the Mignonette saga remained intense. People from all walks of life continued to discuss it in their homes, on the streets, and in pubs. The press, which jumped on the story from the moment Dudley, Stephens, and Brooks set foot in Falmouth, still eagerly fanned the flames. The headlines were full of the one word the press could not get enough of: “The Mignonette Cannibalism Case,” “The Alleged Murder and Cannibalism,” and “The Charge of Cannibalism Against a Shipwrecked Crew.”
News stories were generally sympathetic to the men, but critics of Dudley and Stephens were starting to speak out, openly questioning Dudley’s judgment in embarking on such a difficult ocean voyage in a tiny yacht and faulting the pair for disregarding the custom of the sea. Among the largest and most influential groups speaking out were Victorian-era reformers. Motivated by a commitment to greater fairness and equality in society, they were on the lookout for instances of the powerful using their advantages to oppress the weak. To some reformers, the prosecution now underway was not simply a criminal case against two seafarers; it was a chance to put survival cannibalism itself on trial.
This perspective began to appear in the opinion pages of newspapers. One paper leading the charge was The Spectator, whose editors believed that it was “high time” to bring an end to “the hideous tradition of the sea which authorizes starving sailors to kill and eat their comrades,” the paper said. Sailors should be taught once and for all “that the special dangers of their profession furnish no excuse for a practice as directly opposed to human as it is to divine law.”
The prosecution would consider Dudley and Stephens’s case in two stages. First, a grand jury would decide whether there was a basis for prosecuting them, a crucial first step in bringing a serious criminal charge. If the grand jury found there was a basis, it would return a “true bill” of indictment. The case would then move on to a trial before a regular jury, formally known as a “petit jury.” The grand jury was drawn from male members of the landed gentry, while the petit jury would be less socially elevated, but still composed entirely of male property owners from the area. Essentially, the assize system was an elitist form of justice.
The presiding judge at the November assize was Sir John Walter Huddleston. He was known for having strong opinions about the cases before him, and for usually getting his way. British judges were, on the whole, more inclined than American ones to help juries decide cases. But even among British judges, Baron Huddleston stood out. He was, one commentator said, “what is called a strong Judge, taking a view of his own, and almost invariably leading the jury to the same opinion.”
At the grand jury proceeding, both sides had able counsel. Arthur Charles, Queen’s Counsel (QC), appeared for the Crown, while Arthur John Hammond Collins, QC, appeared for the defendants. Dudley and Stephens were only able to hire Collins, one of the most prominent barristers in the region, because of fundraising on their behalf.
Baron Huddleston began by telling the grand jury the facts of the case: the shipwreck, the time the men spent in the lifeboat, the killing of Parker, and the cannibalism. Baron Huddleston then explained the relevant law. This was standard, but Baron Huddleston was unusually direct in stating what he believed the facts and law added up to. “It seems clear,” he said, “that the taking away of the boy’s life was carefully considered and amounted to a case of deliberate homicide.”
Baron Huddleston knew that the necessity doctrine would be critical to Dudley and Stephens’s defense, and he addressed it head-on, dismissing the two main precedents the defendants were likely to rely on. He then went on to explain why the doctrine of self-defense also did not apply. It was true that the law sometimes permitted people to kill to prevent someone from killing them, but that had not been the case in the lifeboat, he said. Dudley and Stephens may have been in danger of dying of hunger and thirst, but Parker, “was not endangering their lives,” the judge pointed out.
Having covered both the facts and the law—with a strong dose of subjective moralizing—Baron Huddleston proceeded to firmly suggest to the grand jury what it should do. “The crime is murder, and you, therefore, ought to find a true bill for that offense against both the prisoners,” he said.
Baron Huddleston also called attention to the fact that English criminal law at the time had two sequential stages. In the first stage, which they were in now, judges and juries would decide whether Dudley and Stephens were guilty of murder, which almost invariably meant a sentence of death. If the men were indeed sentenced to death, there would be a second stage, in which the queen, on the advice of the home secretary, would decide whether they were deserving of mercy or should be sent to the gallows. This put the grand jurors in a bind if they were at all sympathetic to Dudley and Stephens. If they voted to convict, they would be starting a process that could end in the defendants’ deaths, as Baron Huddleston could not say for certain whether mercy would be granted.
In the end, the grand jurors did what Baron Huddleston wanted. They deliberated, and the same day the proceeding began, they returned a true bill against both Dudley and Stephens on a charge of murder. The next step would be a trial before a petit jury.
On Thursday, November 6, three days after the grand jury met, Dudley and Stephens’s trial began in a courtroom in Exeter Castle. The public’s interest was as intense in Exeter as it had been in Falmouth. The courtroom was packed when Baron Huddleston took his seat, and many more would-be spectators had been turned away.
It had now been two months since the men had landed at Falmouth. Their health seemed to have improved, but their mental state was harder to gauge. The Daily News found Dudley’s “cheerful” demeanor “in rather striking contrast to the general surrounding.” As for Stephens, the paper found that “there was more anxiety visible in his “deportment.” But appearances could be deceiving. The journalists in the courtroom could not see that Dudley was deeply fearful of how the prosecution would end and that he was quietly praying for the strength, as he said, “to bear that awful sentence.”
The trial began with a reading of the formal charges—that Dudley and Stephens “did feloniously kill and murder Richard Parker on the high seas.” When their names were called, each man stepped forward and resolutely declared, “Not guilty.” With that, the hearing was underway.
The case would be argued to a jury made up of twelve petit jurors, who could be expected to be more sympathetic to Dudley and Stephens than the grand jury, as they were closer in stature to the general public. The counsel for both sides, who had almost nothing to do before the grand jury, would now take a far more active role in presenting the facts and law of the case. Arthur Charles, the lead prosecutor, delivered the opening argument for the Crown. He began by conceding that the jurors would almost certainly feel “the deepest compassion and sympathy for” the defendants “in their appalling sufferings,” but he insisted that the jurors must not allow these sentiments to deter them from doing their duty. In the end, he said, the defendants would have an opportunity to ask the queen for mercy. He hoped, as Baron Huddleston had, that this would make the jurors feel more comfortable returning a guilty verdict.
The heart of the case, Charles said, was whether the killing of Parker constituted murder. Parker was killed by someone “of sound mind” with “malice aforethought,” he argued. He explained that malice aforethought meant not spite or evil, but deliberate and intentional action. There was clearly malice aforethought, Charles insisted, since Dudley had said in advance that a killing had become necessary and then “killed him with his own hand” after Stephens had agreed to hold Parker’s feet. Charles then argued that the killing could not be excused as self-defense, noting that Parker had never posed any threat to Dudley and Stephens.
In the defendants’ opening statement, Arthur John Hammond Collins began by asserting a necessity defense, but Baron Huddleston made it clear that he did not intend to allow the jury to find that a necessity defense applied in this case. Still, Collins forged ahead, ultimately persuading Huddleston to say that although he would firmly direct this jury not to accept a necessity defense, he would try to give a higher court the final word.
Baron Huddleston then did something unexpected, even shocking. This was a jury trial, and the jury was supposed to reach a verdict of guilt or innocence. But Baron Huddleston had other plans. He announced that he wanted the jury to return a “special verdict,” an arcane procedure that had not been used in an English court in nearly a century. In a special verdict, the jury only made findings about the facts in a case. It was left to a judge or a panel of judges to decide whether the facts the jury found constituted a crime. Baron Huddleston had the legal authority to suggest using a special verdict, since the law still allowed it, but it was a highly unusual move.
There were likely two reasons Baron Huddleston took the extraordinary step of proceeding by special verdict. The first was that he did not trust the jury to reach the guilty verdict he was hoping for, due to the remarkable degree of popular support for the defendants. The second reason was likely the kind of ruling it would produce. A special verdict had the best chance of elevating the case from a mere criminal prosecution to one that produced a landmark decision. If he was hoping to create a nationwide rule that survival cannibalism was a crime, this was the best way to drive reform. Still, there was a real problem with the use of the special verdict: it deprived Dudley and Stephens of a jury trial—and it deprived the jury of its traditional role as the conscience of the community. But troubling as that idea was, there was a long tradition of concern about juries ignoring the law and reaching an incorrect verdict. The special verdict was a tool for protecting against jury verdicts that judges deemed to be erroneous.
Collins told Baron Huddleston that the defense would not consent to the use of a special verdict, but he would not argue against it. The prosecution also did not object. In the absence of any objections, Baron Huddleston proceeded with his plan.
The Crown could now start presenting evidence. Brooks was the first witness, and he repeated the star turn he had delivered in Falmouth. Once again, he provided evidence that could condemn his captain and first mate to death. At the same time, he said only positive things about Dudley and Stephens as men. Dudley was a “good skipper,” he said, and “a kind and good captain.”
In his cross-examination, Collins turned attention away from the killing, focusing instead on the grueling conditions the defendants had endured. Since the law barred Dudley and Stephens from testifying to the jury about the extreme conditions that drove them to kill Parker, Collins was getting Brooks to do it for them. Brooks’s testimony could help win the jurors’ sympathy for the defendants, but on one important point, Brooks did not help the defendants. He had previously said that Parker appeared to be dying, but now, he would not say that Parker would have been the first to die. With this response, Brooks cast significant doubt on Dudley’s selection of Parker as the natural choice, since the cabin boy was so close to death and would certainly be the first to die.
There was another reason Brooks’s description of Parker’s condition was important. Although the custom of the sea was not on trial, many members of the public wondered why Dudley and Stephens had not taken the more established and honorable route of drawing lots, and the jurors may have been wondering as well. Dudley had decided there was no need to draw lots, in large part because one of the four people in the boat was close to death. If Parker might not have been the first to die, Dudley’s decision not to draw lots was harder to defend.
Although the custom of the sea was not on trial, many members of the public wondered why Dudley and Stephens had not taken the more established and honorable route of drawing lots.
The remaining witnesses stuck closely to what they had already said in Falmouth. Then, the prosecutors entered physical materials into evidence, including Dudley’s penknife, which had a palpable impact on everyone in the courtroom. It “added to the horror . . . in the still court,” The Daily News reported, as the “spectators were called upon to imagine” how it had recently been used. At last, the prosecution rested.
The defense did not present any evidence. Dudley and Stephens had already spoken through their sworn statements, and they could not testify in person. The only other witness to the violent act at the center of the case, Brooks, had already been heard from. But the defense did have one more argument, and it was one with the potential to derail the entire prosecution.
Collins asserted that the court did not have jurisdiction to hear the case because Parker was not killed on a British ship. The Mignonette was a British ship, he acknowledged, but Parker was killed on the lifeboat, which he said was not a “ship” at all. Invoking the rule that crimes committed outside of Britain had to be prosecuted in the countries in which they occurred, Collins insisted the case did not belong in an English court. Baron Huddleston, for his part, was in no mood to see the whole case disappear. Did it not matter, he asked Collins, that the men on the lifeboat were English subjects? In the end, the claim that the court could not hear a case about a crime on a lifeboat was so unexpected that Baron Huddleston chose not to resolve it. He said he would reserve the jurisdictional issue for the court that heard the case next.
As closing arguments began, Collins addressed the jurors first. He proceeded to mount a necessity defense, though he was not merely making the usual necessity defense, that the defendants had chosen the lesser of two evils by killing one person rather than allowing four people to die. Instead, Collins took his argument in a harsher direction, insisting that Dudley and Stephens had a right to save themselves because they were more likely to survive the ordeal. “In a case such as this is, if necessity is paramount, the weakest at the time must go to the wall and the weakest must fall for the protection of the others,” Collins said. The weakest person in the lifeboat, he reasoned, was Parker, “a boy of 17 or 18 years of age . . . who, unfortunately for him,” had ignored the advice of men who “knew better” and drank seawater, making himself sick.
Charles rejected Collins’s contention that in extreme circumstances, “the weakest must go to the wall.” He did not question its morality. He simply said he did not believe it to be “the law of England.” The killing of Parker, he said, had all of the elements of murder without any lawful excuse. He did not have to elaborate on why the necessity defense was invalid in this case, he said, because Baron Huddleston had already done so. That allowed Charles to end his brief remarks by saying, simply, “I leave the case to my Lord.”
Baron Huddleston produced a draft special verdict he had prepared in advance. He told the jury, “Be kind enough to follow me in the facts that I have prepared and give your consent to each paragraph as I read them to you.” When they were done, the findings of fact would be sent on to the court that ultimately decided the case. The judge invited both sides to make suggestions as they went along.
The document remained largely as Baron Huddleston had written it, though the jurors did raise concerns about word choices in a few paragraphs. When the document was complete, Baron Huddleston released Dudley and Stephens on bail pending a verdict of guilt or innocence to be handed down by a judge or judges yet to be named. Once again, the two men had a patron who offered to put up their bail. They were freed as soon as the proceeding ended.
On December 4, the case resumed. Once again, a throng of spectators showed up to witness proceedings in a case that The Times had declared to be unique in the history of English criminal law. Presiding over the case was the lord chief justice himself, joined by Baron Huddleston, along with justices Charles Edward Pollock, William Grove, and George Denman.
If Baron Huddleston had been trying to take the decision away from the jurors of Exeter and put it in the hands of England’s legal elite, there was no one better suited for the role than the lord chief justice, John Duke Coleridge, 1st Baron Coleridge. Lord Coleridge had one of the most august pedigrees in all of English law. His father had been a barrister and judge, and his great-uncle was the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and knew a few things about being thirsty at sea. Like Baron Huddleston, Coleridge was a member of the Liberal Party and an outspoken progressive. A man of strong ideals, he might well want to send a message to the nation that “seafaring men,” in the words of The Times, should not feel “that the cabin boy may always be consumed if provisions run short.”
Sir Henry James, the attorney general, headed up the prosecution. He argued that the defendants’ acts could only be viewed as murder. There were a limited number of instances in which the law countenanced taking a life, he said, and he proceeded to list them. One was an executioner carrying out a death sentence, and another was a soldier killing an enemy combatant—but Dudley and Stephens were not executioners or soldiers. A third circumstance, the attorney general said, was self-defense. While English law recognized a right to self-defense, it applied only to killing a person who was posing a threat—which Parker was not doing.
Now the attorney general could turn to necessity. The matter was simple, he argued: English law did not recognize dire necessity as a legitimate excuse for taking a life. Dudley and Stephens killed Parker for one reason only, the attorney general said: to use him as food. But English law did not allow people to steal food when they were hungry. If Parker had possessed food and Dudley and Stephens took his food, they would have committed theft, and if they had killed him to take his food, they would have been guilty of murder. Why should it be less of a crime, he asked, if the defendants “kill the boy . . . in order to obtain the food of which the body was composed?”
A man of strong ideals, Coleridge might well want to send a message to the nation that “seafaring men,” in the words of The Times, should not feel “that the cabin boy may always be consumed if provisions run short.”
The lord chief justice then asked Collins to speak for the defense, and to limit his argument to the charge of murder. Collins began by invoking the necessity defense, despite Baron Huddleston’s insistence at the Exeter Assize that English law did not allow it. “If to save their lives, it is necessary to kill one, they are not guilty of the crime of homicide,” Collins told the court. He proceeded to cite cases and legal scholars in support of a necessity defense, going back to Henry de Bracton in the 1200s. But Lord Coleridge rejected the idea that saving one’s own life was the highest obligation and could justify taking someone else’s life. In his view, such reasoning could be used to excuse far too many immoral actions. Its logical extension, Lord Coleridge said, was that “no act, however base, however wicked, is punishable, if a man can save his life by doing it.”
With the central legal argument clearly not going his way, Collins once again raised the jurisdictional issue he had brought up in Exeter, asserting that the court did not have the authority to hear the case. Baron Pollock insisted that since the men were “upon on the high seas as British sailors, they [were] amenable to the British law.”
After a lunch break, Lord Coleridge returned with a bold announcement. He had conferred with the other justices, and they had agreed that “the convictions should be affirmed.” He said the court would explain its reasoning in writing later.
The announcement was a bombshell—and inaccurate. The court could not “affirm” Dudley’s and Stephens’s convictions, since they had not yet been convicted of a crime. The Exeter jury had ruled only on the facts. With Lord Coleridge’s announcement, the court had actually just decided for the first time that Dudley and Stephens were murderers.
It was a powerful moment, and a great blow to Dudley and Stephens. Just three months earlier, when the men arrived in Falmouth, they had been so convinced of their right to kill Parker that they freely talked about it to everyone they encountered. The centuries of tradition that they had relied on as a justification for killing and eating Parker had been stripped away in a few words from a powerful judge. Now the act of killing Parker had led to murder convictions—and in a few days’ time, the convictions would presumably be followed by death sentences, the mandated punishment for murder.
The importance of the moment was underscored when the attorney general asked what should be done with the defendants in the interim. The lord chief justice replied, “I think that they must remain in the custody of the Court now.” The lenient treatment the men had been receiving since mid-September, when they were released on bail, had come to an end. Now they were being treated like ordinary criminal defendants, and they had to wonder, as they were taken away to London’s Holloway Prison, whether they would ever be free men again.
On Tuesday, December 9, the court reconvened to deliver its legal opinion and sentence Dudley and Stephens. Despite a steady rain, a crowd had assembled at the entrance to the Royal Courts of Justice’s public gallery. The governor of Holloway Prison delivered Dudley and Stephens to the courtroom at a little after 10:00 a.m. At 10:20 a.m., the public gallery doors opened, and the seats filled quickly with a group of spectators.
Dudley once again appeared to be in better spirits than the occasion warranted, but his smile masked considerable anxiety and fear. A recent visitor to the prison reported that he was “dreadfully harassed by the suspense.” Stephens, as usual, was more obviously perturbed. The tension showed on his face. His “bold forehead” was “knit,” the Essex Standard noted, “showing a seriousness and anxiety that earned for him considerable compassion.”
At 10:40 a.m., the justices filed in, wearing wigs and black robes, and sat at five individual desks. The skies were darkening outside, giving the proceeding an ominous feeling. The room was silent, and Dudley and Stephens rose to stand before the justices. The lord chief justice began to speak, offering sympathetic words. It was clear that “the prisoners were subjected to terrible temptation,” he said, “to sufferings which might break down the bodily power of the strongest man, and try the conscience of the best.”
Lord Coleridge then pivoted to giving his own interpretation of the crime at the heart of the case. “This,” he said, “is clear, that the prisoners put to death a weak and unoffending boy upon the chance of preserving their own lives by feeding upon his flesh and blood after he was killed, and with the certainty of depriving him of any possible chance of survival.” They were convinced from the beginning, Lord Coleridge said, that Parker’s killing was murder. The defense had offered two main arguments why the killing of Parker was not murder, and the lord chief justice now resoundingly rejected each of them. One was self-defense, and Lord Coleridge did not spend much time on it.
Lord Coleridge had more to say about the defendants’ main legal argument: the necessity defense. Dudley and Stephens’s necessity defense was based on their conviction that one had an absolute duty to save one’s own life, the lord chief justice said—and he himself did not believe there was any such necessity. “To preserve one’s life is, generally speaking, a duty,” he said, “but it may be the plainest and the highest duty to sacrifice it,” as when a soldier dies to protect women and children or a captain gives his life in his duty to save his crew and passengers.
He did not directly address the utilitarian argument that the killing of Parker was justified because a larger number of lives were saved, but his reasoning implicitly rejected such calculations. He did not believe individuals, even ones in dire circumstances, should be able to take the law into their own hands and decide that killing someone produced a greater net good than not killing someone. There would be an “awful danger,” he said, to allowing calculations of this sort. “Who is to be the judge of this sort of necessity?” he asked. “By what measure is the comparative value of lives to be measured? Is it to be strength, or intellect, or what?” To Lord Coleridge, a society operating by such rules was not merely misguided—it was immoral, because it allowed evil deeds to be committed and excused.
The defense’s arguments had now been decisively rejected by Britain’s highest-ranking judge. All that remained was for the lord chief justice to decide what should be done with Dudley and Stephens.
Lord Coleridge was now ready to pronounce the legal judgment of the court. “The prisoners’ act in this case was wilful murder,” he said, and “the facts as stated in the verdict are no legal justification of the homicide.” The five judges were unanimous in their decision.
Dudley and Stephens were ordered to rise, and a court master said, “You stand convicted of the crime of murder.” He asked if either of them had “anything to say why the Court should not give judgment of death according to law?”
Dudley, speaking so softly he almost could not be heard, said, “What I have to say my Lord is this. I hope you will take into consideration the extreme difficulties I was in when the deed was committed,” adding that he hoped to “have the mercy of the court.” Stephens added simply, “I also say the same, my Lords.”
Lord Coleridge allowed the seriousness of the moment to register, and then he addressed Dudley and Stephens directly. “You have been each of you convicted of the crime of willful murder, but you have been recommended most earnestly to the mercy of the Crown.” This was no small bit of largess for two convicted murderers. A unanimous recommendation for mercy from the lord chief justice and his four fellow justices could be expected to carry enormous weight with the home secretary and the queen.
But having endorsed mercy from the Crown, the lord chief justice offered none of his own. “The sentence of the Court upon you,” he said, “is that you be taken to the prison whence you came and from thence on a day appropriate that you be taken to a place of execution; that you be there hanged by the neck until your bodies be dead; and that your bodies, when dead, be buried within the precincts of the prison.”
With their duties now fully discharged, the justices left the courtroom. Moments later, two Holloway Prison guards ushered Dudley and Stephens away. With that, the Gloucester Citizen said, “a most solemn scene came to a close.” From there, the men were transported back to Holloway. Publicly, Dudley and Stephens did a good job of hiding their distress. One reporter on the scene observed that they “bore themselves up wonderfully well, and presented a perfectly composed exterior.”
If there was any consolation for Dudley and Stephens on that grim day, it was that there was no danger they would be executed before the queen could consider their appeal. Home Secretary Sir William Harcourt had directed in a handwritten note that their sentences would be paused until word arrived of “the Queen’s pleasure.” And so, back in Holloway Prison, the men awaited their fate. Would it be mercy, or would it be the gallows?
Adapted from CAPTAIN’S DINNER, by Adam Cohen, published by Authors Equity. Copyright © 2025 by Adam Cohen.