Murder or Necessity? The Harrowing Tale of the Mignonette
The narrative unfolds with the harrowing tale of the Mignonette, a vessel lost at sea in July 1884, where survival instincts collide with moral imperatives. Aboard this ill-fated yacht, a mere four men are left to confront an unspeakable dilemma: if survival necessitates the death of one among them, does that act constitute murder? This episode delves into the extraordinary legal case of The Queen versus Dudley and Stevens, which arose from their desperate struggle against starvation. The case fundamentally challenged the boundaries of civilized law versus primal instincts, compelling society to grapple with the implications of necessity in extreme circumstances. As we traverse through this historical account, we shall reflect upon the profound moral questions it raises, questions that resonate through time and continue to provoke debate within the realms of law and ethics.
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The podcast delves into the harrowing narrative of the Mignonette, a British yacht that became the focal point of a landmark legal case in 1884. It explores the grim realities faced by Captain Tom Dudley and his crew after their vessel was lost at sea, forcing them into a dire struggle for survival. Stranded in the South Atlantic for twenty days, the crew endured extreme conditions, leading to the emergence of a moral quandary: if survival necessitated the sacrifice of one for the others, could it be classified as murder? This question not only haunted the men in their dingy lifeboat but also ignited a legal battle that would challenge the very foundations of Victorian law and morality. The episode intricately examines the tension between humanity's primal instinct to survive and the rigid confines of civil law, culminating in an unforgettable courtroom drama that would resonate through history.
Takeaways:
- In July of 1884, a yacht named Mignonette encountered dire circumstances while lost at sea.
- The crew of the Mignonette faced a harrowing moral dilemma regarding survival and sacrifice.
- The landmark legal case, Queen versus Dudley and Stevens, raised profound ethical questions about necessity and murder.
- The court's ruling established that necessity cannot justify the taking of an innocent life under English law.
- Public sentiment initially favored the survivors, viewing them as victims of fate rather than murderers.
- Ultimately, the case of the Mignonette became a pivotal moment in the discussion of law versus morality.
Transcript
Picture this.
Speaker A: It's July: Speaker A:Now the sun is is a hammer and their boat is little more than a large rowboat.
Speaker A:The salt has cracked their lips into a bloody mosaic.
Speaker A:There are four men in the boat, but only three are truly conscious.
Speaker A:And a question unspoken for days is finally given a voice.
Speaker A:A terrible, logical, monstrous question.
Speaker B:The question is, if the only way to live is for someone to die, is it still murder?
Speaker A:This is the story of a small British yacht, the Mignonette.
Speaker A: e of the South Atlantic, over: Speaker A:But this isn't just a story of survival against the odds.
Speaker A:It's the story of a landmark legal case that would pit our most basic instinct, the will to live, against the very definition of civilized law.
Speaker B:Welcome to history's greatest crimes.
Speaker B:I'm Elena.
Speaker A:And I'm Michael.
Speaker B:In today's episode, we will explore the harrowing journey of the ill fated ship the Mignonette and the trial that followed.
Speaker B:The Queen versus Dudley and Stevens.
Speaker A:It's a case that forced the proud, orderly society of Victorian England to stare into the abyss and confront a horror it preferred to leave in the shadows of the sea.
Speaker A:A case that asked, where does law end and necessity begin?
Speaker A: f Southampton, England in May: Speaker A:This is the absolute zenith of the British Empire.
Speaker A:Queen Victoria was on the throne in London and her empire covered almost 25% of the world.
Speaker B:1884 was also the year of the Berlin Conference which oversaw the colonization of Africa in which Great Britain played a large role.
Speaker B: on to African territories, by: Speaker B:The famous saying at the time was that, quote, the the sun never sets on the British Empire, end quote.
Speaker B:Which was true, since the sun was always shining on at least one British territory at any given time.
Speaker A:British maritime confidence was also at an all time high in the late 19th century.
Speaker A:It was a world of steam, steel and the firm belief that the British order could be imposed on any corner of the globe.
Speaker B:And in that world of global commerce, a wealthy Australian barrister made a personal order for a new yacht.
Speaker B:Jack Wundt, a tall man with a fashionable beard and flashing eyes, was a yachting enthusiast.
Speaker B:His contemporaries described him as flamboyant and ostentatious.
Speaker B:Apparently the selection of yachts in Australia wasn't good enough.
Speaker B:So Jack traveled to England to look for something suitable.
Speaker B:And while there, Jack purchased a 52 foot cruiser called the Mignonette.
Speaker A: years previously in: Speaker A:It was a handsome boat with a main mast and a small mizen mast aft.
Speaker A:The Mignonette's rig rose some 60ft above the deck and she carried a small dinghy that served as a lifeboat.
Speaker A:But at its core, the Mignonette was a pleasure craft.
Speaker A:Its very name seemed to signal that, as the name Mignonette came from the French for little darling.
Speaker A:This ship was built for sailing along the coast.
Speaker A:It was built for weekend regattas in the English Channel, not for the 15,000 mile voyage to Sydney, Australia.
Speaker B:The yacht was, by design, completely unsuited for the open ocean and the violent weather of the South Atlantic.
Speaker B:This was a known risk from Jack Want.
Speaker B:It was essentially a giant corner being cut.
Speaker A:The tragedy of the Mignonette began with a series of mundane human choices, all rooted in the economic realities of the Victorian era.
Speaker A:The owner, Jack Want, needed his boat moved.
Speaker A: And it was the late: Speaker B:Without question, a professional mariner would have likely recognized the immense risk of taking a coastal cruiser on such a colossal journey.
Speaker B:Yet a crew was found to sail the Mignonette from England to Australia.
Speaker A:The crew was led by Captain Tom Dudley, 31 years old.
Speaker A:He wasn't some swashbuckling adventurer from a novel.
Speaker A:He was a working professional, a family man, described in court records as a yachtsman of acknowledged skill and courage.
Speaker B:Captain Dudley was a short man with reddish hair and a bushy beard.
Speaker B:He made his life at sea at the early age of 10, sailing with various crews and ships and earning a reputation for courage and seamanship.
Speaker B:One newspaper described him as possessing the character of a bold and fearless man, much sought after by owners of yachts.
Speaker A:Outside of his sailing profession.
Speaker A:We also know that Captain Dudley had a wife named Philippa and three young children who would wait for him back in England.
Speaker A:Perhaps this voyage was an attempt for Captain Dudley to provide for them.
Speaker A:The terms of the contract between Tom Dudley and Jack Want were generous, and there was a possibility that in Sydney, Dudley would become the permanent captain of Jack want's new yacht.
Speaker B:Captain Dudley's small crew was made up of three other men.
Speaker B:There was Edwin Stevens, who was 37 at the time of sailing.
Speaker B:Like Dudley, Edwin Stevens went to sea at an early age and was considered a master sailor.
Speaker B:But Stevens career was a rocky one.
Speaker B:A few years before, something disastrous had happened while he was sailing on another ship and he had since had trouble finding work in England.
Speaker A:In addition to Captain Dudley and Edwin Stevens, there was also Edmund Brooks, aged 39 years old and also a veteran of the sea.
Speaker A:And then there was the cabin boy, Richard Parker.
Speaker A:He was just 17 years old.
Speaker A:Parker was an orphan, raised by his older sisters.
Speaker A:This was his very first deep sea voyage, a grand adventure for a boy with few other prospects.
Speaker A:His family later said he had joined the crew with the brightest hopes for the future.
Speaker A:Dreaming of a life at sea.
Speaker A:He was the most vulnerable person on the boat in every sense of the word.
Speaker B:So you had a ship on a journey that it was not built for, a capable but likely pressured captain and a crew that included a young, inexperienced boy seeking opportunity.
Speaker B:The seeds of disaster were sewn long before they left the site of land.
Speaker A: ,: Speaker A:The plan was for the crew to sail first to the Madeira island off the coast of northwest Africa.
Speaker A:Then they would continue down the coast of Africa and around the southern tip of the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa.
Speaker A:At that point, they sail across the Indian Ocean, sticking close to the shoreline before rounding the northern coast of Australia and docking in Sydney.
Speaker A:In total, it would be 15,000 miles and the goal was to make it in at about four months.
Speaker B:The initial leg of the journey down the coast of Europe and Africa was long and arduous.
Speaker B:The small yacht was battered by the elements, a constant grinding test of the boat and the men.
Speaker B:This wasn't a pleasure cruise, it was a grueling delivery.
Speaker B:The vastness of the South Atlantic became a character in itself, immense, indifferent and isolating.
Speaker A:By early July, they had crossed the equator on the western side of Africa and were deep into the southern hemisphere.
Speaker A:They entered an infamous belt of latitude called the Roaring Forties.
Speaker A:As the name suggests, this area is located around 40 degrees south of the equator and it's known for its ferocious winds and mountainous seas.
Speaker B: ,: Speaker B:They were utterly alone, far from any established shipping lines and the sky began to darken.
Speaker B:The.
Speaker B: th of: Speaker B:It was a sudden, violent assault.
Speaker B:Captain Dudley being The competent sailor he was recognized the danger.
Speaker B:He ordered the crew to heave to a defensive maneuver where a vessel is essentially stalled and positioned to ride out the heavy waves bow first.
Speaker B:This was the correct textbook procedure.
Speaker B:He was not being reckless.
Speaker B:He was doing everything right.
Speaker A:But sometimes doing everything right isn't enough.
Speaker A:In the middle of the storm, a rogue wave, a wall of water of immense size and power, rose out of the churning sea.
Speaker A:It struck the Mignonette with catastrophic force.
Speaker B:Captain Dudley would later state in his deposition that the wave had broken clean over the ship, smashing the yacht's bulwarks, the low protective walls around the deck.
Speaker B:Seawater poured into the vessel.
Speaker B:In that single violent moment, Dudley knew, as he put it, that the ship was doomed.
Speaker B:They had less than five minutes before she would found her.
Speaker A:The scramble to abandon ship was frantic.
Speaker A:Their only hope was a flimsy 13 foot dinghy, little more than a rowboat.
Speaker A:It was a floating coffin in the middle of the South Atlantic.
Speaker A:In the chaos, they managed to get the dinghy into the water, but with almost no supplies.
Speaker B:Richard Parker tried to grab some fresh water before they abandoned ship, but he had to throw most of it overboard because lowering it into the dinghy would have been too risky.
Speaker B:As the captain, Dudley was the last man aboard the sinking ship.
Speaker B:He quickly grabbed the sextant and chronometer before leaving, which was smart because they would help in navigation.
Speaker B:He also tried to throw tins of food toward the dinghy, but only two 1 pound tins of turnips made it.
Speaker A:Stevens, Brooks and Parker called out to Dudley to come on.
Speaker A:Captain Dudley then got into the dinghy and within five minutes the Mignonette sank, sending three men and a boy out into the open sea with a total of two tins of turnips, no water, one oar and a few navigational tools.
Speaker B:That night, the four men did all they could to stay alive.
Speaker B:Captain Dudley described the awful scene, stating, it was a very bad sea, like a mountain at times, and water coming in faster than we could bail it out.
Speaker B:And night was coming on.
Speaker A:And if that wasn't stressful enough, later that night, the men watched as a large shark bumped against their small boat.
Speaker A:Dudley wrote in his journal that it made him fear that they would soon become dinner for some sea creature.
Speaker B:Quite frankly, their location was a death sentence.
Speaker B:They were a microscopic speck in an immense empty ocean.
Speaker B:The chances of a passing ship finding them were practically zero.
Speaker A:Surveying the scene, Captain Dudley directed his men to get down on their knees with him and pray.
Speaker A:This is where the True horror of the story began not with a sudden bang, but with a slow, grinding erosion of the human body in spirit.
Speaker B:And yet in those first days adrift at sea, they tried to maintain order.
Speaker B:And this is a critical point.
Speaker B:Their initial actions on that dinghy demonstrate a commitment to the established maritime discipline that they had lived their whole lives by their entire careers by.
Speaker A:Captain Dudley made a makeshift sale with their shirts, and they didn't tear into the turnips in a panic.
Speaker A:They made it two days before opening the first tin, and then they carefully rationed the two tins over the next week.
Speaker B:At one point, a rain shower came and the men were able to catch some fresh water.
Speaker B:They were even able to capture and cook a sea turtle.
Speaker B:Between the turnips and the turtle, the Captain and his three crewmen managed to survive 12 days fairly comfortably on the open sea until July 17th.
Speaker A:That brief period of success, that brief flicker of hope, only makes the subsequent decline even more poignant.
Speaker A:After the turtle was gone, there was nothing.
Speaker A:The psychological toll was immense.
Speaker A:The constant exposure to the sun and salt, the gnawing hunger and a thirst so profound it drove them to drink their own urine.
Speaker A:Their lips and tongues were parched and black, their feet and legs were swollen and their skin developed sores.
Speaker B:At one point they thought they saw a ship, a distant sail on the horizon.
Speaker B:But it was a false hope that appeared and then vanished, leaving them even more alone than they were before.
Speaker A:Captain Dudley wrote what he thought to be his farewell letter to his wife.
Speaker A:He said, I am sorry, dear, that I ever started on such a trip, but I was doing it for our best.
Speaker A:I should so like to be spared.
Speaker A:You would find I should live a Christian life for the rest of my days.
Speaker A:If this note ever reaches your hands, you know the last of your.
Speaker A:Tom.
Speaker B:By July 20, they had been without food for eight days and without any water save their own urine.
Speaker B:For six days.
Speaker B:They were skeletal.
Speaker B:Their bodies were covered in salt water sores.
Speaker B:They were on the absolute brink of death.
Speaker B:And it's at this point that Captain Dudley introduced an idea.
Speaker B:An idea born not of his own madness, but of a dark, unwritten and brutal tradition of the sea.
Speaker A:He brought up the custom of the sea.
Speaker A:This was not a myth.
Speaker A:It was a grim, informal code of survival that had existed among sailors for centuries.
Speaker A:The custom dictated that when a crew was faced with certain death from starvation, the on the open ocean and all other hope was lost, they could draw lots.
Speaker A:The loser of the lottery would be killed and his body would be used as food to Allow the others to survive.
Speaker A:Captain Dudley and his crew have been lost at Sea for 15 days on July 20.
Speaker A:And they were faced with a terrible choice.
Speaker A:Die together or sacrifice one so that the other three could live.
Speaker B:It wasn't an entirely unheard of practice.
Speaker B:There were precedents.
Speaker B: In: Speaker B:The William Brown sank after hitting an iceberg.
Speaker B:And sailors in one of the lifeboats threw passengers overboard to lighten the load, arguing it was necessary for the survival of the rest.
Speaker B:The case that followed, United States vs Holmes, resulted in a conviction for manslaughter.
Speaker B:But it acknowledged the terrible pressures of the situation.
Speaker B:Dudley was not inventing this concept.
Speaker B:He was invoking a ghost that haunted the maritime world.
Speaker A:But just as they began to contemplate how they would choose who to sacrifice, it seemed like fate made the decision for them.
Speaker A:17 year old Richard Parker, delirious with a raging thirst that no one could truly imagine, did something that experienced sailors knew was a death sentence.
Speaker A:He began to drink seawater.
Speaker B:To a modern person, that might seem like a desperate but understandable act.
Speaker B:To a 19th century sailor, it was suicide.
Speaker B:They knew that drinking salt water did not quench thirst.
Speaker B:It accelerated dehydration, which caused violent illness and led to a rapid agonizing death.
Speaker B:Parker's desperate act sealed his fate in the eyes of the other men.
Speaker B:He was now in their minds, already dying.
Speaker A:This was the pivotal moment.
Speaker A:Captain Dudley saw Parker now lapsing into a coma from seawater poisoning.
Speaker A:And his grim calculus shifted.
Speaker B:Dudley apparently asked Stevens, quote, what is to be done?
Speaker B:I believe the boy is dying.
Speaker B:You have a wife and five children.
Speaker B:And I have a wife and three children.
Speaker B:Human flesh has been eaten before, end quote.
Speaker B:He argued that it was their only chance for any of them to survive.
Speaker A:Edmund Brooks flatly refused.
Speaker A:He would have no part in it.
Speaker A:Edwin Stevens was deeply distressed and hesitant.
Speaker A:But Dudley's logic eventually swayed him.
Speaker A:Parker was the logical choice.
Speaker A:He was the weakest.
Speaker A:He had no wife or children waiting for him and most importantly, he was already dying.
Speaker A:To Dudley, this was not murder.
Speaker A:It was a pragmatic, if terrible choice.
Speaker A:It was a form of triage.
Speaker A:Sacrificing the one who could not be saved to rescue the ones who could.
Speaker B:This is the absolute core of the moral and legal dilemma.
Speaker B:The custom of the sea, for all its brutality, had one element that gave it a veneer of fairness.
Speaker B:The lottery.
Speaker B:The drawing of lots was an appeal to fate.
Speaker B:A quasi democratic process that gave every man, regardless of his station or health, an equal chance of living or dying.
Speaker B:It removed the burden of choice from the survivors.
Speaker A:But Dudley's decision making process transformed the concept of the custom of the sea.
Speaker A:Although he initially suggested drawing lots, once Richard Parker took a turn for the worse, the captain made the choice for everyone.
Speaker A:His justification was a utilitarian calculation based on his own criteria of who was the most valuable and who was the most expendable.
Speaker A:He appointed himself judge, jury and executioner.
Speaker A:This is the detail that the law would seize later upon.
Speaker A:Even by the brutal standards of this unwritten code, what he was proposing was a perversion of that custom.
Speaker B:Now, to their credit, they waited another five days to do something.
Speaker B:On or about July 25, the 20th day adrift, the moment came.
Speaker B:The court records describe it with a chilling, clinical detachment.
Speaker A:I agree.
Speaker A:Elena Dudley, a religious man, said a prayer for the boy's soul.
Speaker A:Then, as the official record of the trial states, Dudley, with the assent of Stevens, went to the boy who was lying at the bottom of the boat quite helpless, and did not resist nor make any sign of consciousness.
Speaker A:Dudley put a knife into his throat, killing him then and there.
Speaker A:End quote.
Speaker B:Over the next few hours, they dismembered the body.
Speaker B:Brooks later described the scene as a horrible sight and no mistake.
Speaker B:End quote.
Speaker A:Similarly, when Captain Dudley talked about it, he said, I can assure you I shall never forget the sight of my two companions over that ghastly meal.
Speaker B:And for the next four days, the three remaining men survived on the body of Richard Parker.
Speaker B:According to the trial notes, Captain Dudley was quite convinced that it had saved their lives.
Speaker A:On Tuesday, July 29, 24 days after the shipwreck, a sail appeared on the horizon.
Speaker A:This time it was real.
Speaker A:It was the 442 ton German sailing barque Montezuma, which was on a return voyage from Chile.
Speaker B:When the ship came close enough, the captain of the bark, a German, spoke to them in his native tongue and sent two of his crew down to help the three men in their dinghy.
Speaker B:The captain later described the survivors as little more than skeletons, their voices weak and hollow.
Speaker B:They were rescued from the very edge of death.
Speaker A:And here the story takes another shocking turn.
Speaker A:Their honesty.
Speaker A:When the Montezuma eventually landed them in England, Captain Dudley did not try to hide what had happened.
Speaker A:There was no conspiracy of silence.
Speaker B:He walked into the harbor master's office and made a full, unvarnished statement to the authorities, detailing every event, including the killing of Richard Parker.
Speaker B:And he even presented the penknife that he had used.
Speaker A:This is not the action of a man with a guilty conscience.
Speaker A:This is the action of a man who genuinely believed he had done no wrong.
Speaker A:In his mind, he had acted under the jurisdiction of a different, more ancient law, the unwritten law of the sea.
Speaker A:He expected sympathy, perhaps even praise for saving the lives of his crewmates.
Speaker B:And initially, that's exactly what he got.
Speaker B:Public opinion was overwhelmingly on the side of the survivors.
Speaker B:The press portrayed them as heroes who had endured an unspeakable ordeal and had made an impossible choice.
Speaker B:A relief fund was set up for them and their families, and money poured in from a sympathetic public who saw them not as murderers, but as victims of fate.
Speaker A:It was a similar response to what the survivors of the American donner party experienced 40 years earlier.
Speaker A: In: Speaker A:The survivors of that ordeal were objects of horror and pity.
Speaker A:But there was no landmark trial for them.
Speaker A:There was no prosecutions for murder.
Speaker A:The event was largely seen as a tragedy beyond the reach of the law, a horror of the untamed western frontier, where the rules of civilization simply didn't apply.
Speaker B:But the British establishment saw things very differently.
Speaker B:The Victorian state was obsessed with order, progress, and the absolute supremacy of codified law.
Speaker B:The idea that there was some anarchic, unwritten custom that could supersede English law, even in the middle of the ocean, was intolerable to them.
Speaker B:They needed to make an example of Dudley and Stevens.
Speaker A:This impulse to impose a single universal legal standard was a hallmark of that era.
Speaker A:It was a project of state building.
Speaker A:The state was asserting its monopoly on justice, declaring that no circumstances, however extreme, could place a British subject beyond the reach of the Queen's law.
Speaker A:To achieve this, they offered the seaman, Edmund Brooks immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony against the other two.
Speaker B:The trial began in this English city of Exeter, but the authorities quickly realized they had a problem.
Speaker B:The judge, Baron Huddleston, knew that a local jury, swept up in the public sympathy for the sailors, would almost certainly acquit them.
Speaker B:When Dudley, Stevens and Brooks made bail and were released, the townspeople arranged a special benefit to raise money for them.
Speaker B:The dinghy with its blood stains was exhibited in the town.
Speaker B:Newspaper editorials were favorable toward the men.
Speaker B:One stated, it is utterly impossible that men can endure the tortures of 19 days of starvation, the exquisite agony of a long, continuing thirst, the anguish of mind, the prospect of excruciating death without the mind becoming, in a measure, at least, deranged.
Speaker B:Newspapers also printed the captain's letter to his wife that he had written when he thought he would die at sea.
Speaker A:So it was likely that the captain and his crew would not be charged with anything for their crime of cannibalism at sea.
Speaker A:But an acquittal would be a disaster for the establishment, as it would implicitly validate the custom of the sea.
Speaker A:So the judge and prosecution orchestrated a brilliant and controversial legal maneuver called a special verdict.
Speaker B:Just as an aside, the trial judge, Baron Huddleston, was an interesting individual.
Speaker B:He was apparently in the habit of wearing gloves in court.
Speaker B:Black gloves for murder, lavender for breach of promise, and white for conventional cases.
Speaker B:But back to Barron's special verdict.
Speaker B:What was that, Michael?
Speaker A:A special verdict was a procedure commonly used at the time to ensure that the case would be reviewed by a higher court.
Speaker A:Instead of asking the jury for a simple verdict of guilty or not guilty, the judge asked them only to rule on the facts of the case.
Speaker A:He essentially said to them, your job is not to decide if this was murder.
Speaker A:It is murder.
Speaker A:Instead, your job is only to confirm the story.
Speaker A:End quote.
Speaker B:So the jury was asked to affirm a set of facts.
Speaker B:Did Dudley and Stevens kill Richard Parker?
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker B:Did they do it without his consent?
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker B:At the time of the killing, was the dinghy more than a thousand miles from land?
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker B:Was there any reasonable prospect of rescue?
Speaker B:No.
Speaker B:And finally, was it the case that unless they fed upon the boy, they would all have died of starvation?
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker A:By getting the jury to agree to these facts, Baron Huddleston took the final judgment out of their hands.
Speaker A:The case was then moved to the Queen's Bench Division in London, where a panel of five senior judges would look at the jury's factual findings and answer the ultimate legal question.
Speaker A:Do these facts, as stated, constitute the crime of murder under English law?
Speaker A:It was a masterful way to bypass public sentiment and ensure that the case would be decided on pure legal principle.
Speaker B:The case came before the most senior judges in the land.
Speaker B: dgment, delivered on December: Speaker B:They acknowledged the horrific circumstances, what they called the awful temptation the men faced.
Speaker B:But their ruling was unequivocal.
Speaker A:The judges said, we are often compelled to set up standards we cannot reach ourselves and to lay down rules which we could not ourselves satisfy.
Speaker A:They admitted that the law often demands an almost superhuman level of conduct.
Speaker A:They acknowledged that he and the other judges in the same situation might have done the same thing as Dudley and Stevens.
Speaker B:But the judges argued that the law cannot admit temptation, as an excuse to do so would be to create a slippery Slope, who would be the judge of necessity?
Speaker B:Would the strong always be justified in killing the weak?
Speaker B:The court ruled that there is no defense of necessity for the taking of an innocent life.
Speaker B:And then came the most famous line of the judgment, a line that has echoed for over a century.
Speaker B:To preserve one's life is generally a duty, but it may be the plainest and the highest duty to sacrifice it.
Speaker A:The court was establishing a moral absolute.
Speaker A:It was saying that the duty to one's community, the duty to protect the innocent and the duty to uphold the sanctity of life can in some circumstances outweigh the instinct for self preservation.
Speaker A:They found Dudley and Stevens guilty of murder.
Speaker B:The mandatory sentence for murder was death by hanging.
Speaker B:And so the two sailors were formally sentenced to be executed.
Speaker B:But this was largely for show.
Speaker B:The court and the Crown had what they wanted, the legal precedent they had established once and for all that the custom of the sea was illegal and that necessity was not a defense for murder.
Speaker A:The public outcry was immense.
Speaker A:The sentence was seen as monstrously unjust.
Speaker A:But the system had a release valve.
Speaker A:Within weeks, the acting on the advice of Parliament, Queen Victoria exercised what was known as the Royal Prerogative of Mercy.
Speaker A:She commuted Dudley and Stephen's sentences from death to just six months in prison.
Speaker B:This outcome reveals the sophisticated compromise at the heart of the case.
Speaker B:First, the law with a capital L made its absolute and flexible statement of principle.
Speaker B:The murder of an innocent person would always be murder, regardless of the circumstances.
Speaker B:But then mercy in the form of the executive branch stepped in to acknowledge the human reality of the situation and prevent a patently unjust punishment.
Speaker A:This two part system, an impossibly high standard set by the courts, softened by executive clemency, preserved the sanctity of the law while acknowledging the freedom frailty of humanity.
Speaker A:In a way, it's a legal fiction.
Speaker A:The law pretends we can all be saints and then the government quietly pardons us for being human.
Speaker B:After their release, Dudley and Stevens lived out their lives in relative obscurity, forever marked by the case.
Speaker B:Dudley eventually immigrated to Australia, which I think is personally crazy considering the trauma he went through before.
Speaker B:But that's what he did.
Speaker B: he lived there quietly until: Speaker A:Stevens lived a quiet life in Southampton.
Speaker A:He continued to support himself through odd jobs, but local reports suggest that he continued to be consumed by his trauma and went mad over time.
Speaker B:They were men who believed they had acted honorably under an ancient coat, only to find that the world had changed around them.
Speaker A:That's right, Elena.
Speaker A:The shadow of the Mignonette is incredibly long.
Speaker A:If you walk into any first year law school class in the United States or Canada, Australia or the UK today, you will almost certainly encounter the Queen versus Dudley and Stevens.
Speaker A:It has become the ultimate introduction to the fundamental conflict between positive law, the law that is written, and natural morality.
Speaker B:And it has an even more famous intellectual descendant.
Speaker B: In: Speaker B:It's a fictional case, but it's directly inspired by the Mignonette.
Speaker B:In Fuller's story, a group of cave explorers get trapped by a landslide.
Speaker B:They learn via radio that they will starve before they can be rescued.
Speaker B:They decide to draw lots, kill and eat one of their party to survive.
Speaker A:Fuller uses this scenario to present the judgments of five different fictional judges, each representing a different school of legal philosophy.
Speaker A:From strict adherence to the letter of the law, to appeals to natural law, to focusing on the purpose of the law.
Speaker A:It takes the core dilemma of the mignonette and explodes it into a permanent thought experiment, a tool to teach generations of lawyers how to think about the very nature of justice.
Speaker B:The mignonette's principles have been tested by modern events as well.
Speaker B: e most famous Parallel is the: Speaker B:The survivors, after exhausting all of their food, resorted to cannibalism of those who had already died in the crash to stay alive.
Speaker A:But here the line drawn by the Mignonek court case becomes crystal.
Speaker A:There is a moral and legal chasm between postmortem cannibalism for survival, eating those already dead, and the deliberate killing of a living person.
Speaker A:However desperate the circumstances, the absolute prohibition on the act of killing an innocent, the central pillar of the Mignonette judgment holds firm.
Speaker B:In the end, we are left with the four men in the boat.
Speaker B:We have Dudley and Stevens, who believed they were acting honorably under an ancient brutal code, only to be made an example by a modernizing world.
Speaker B:We have Edmund Brooks, the dissenter, the man who refused to participate in the killing but still partook of the results.
Speaker B:A figure of profound moral ambiguity.
Speaker A:And most importantly, we have Richard Parker, the 17 year old orphan who went to sea looking for his future and he never found it.
Speaker A:He became a footnote in his own story, the boy who was sacrificed.
Speaker B:But his death in the most horrific of circumstances gave birth to a legal principle that echoes in courtrooms and classrooms to this day.
Speaker B:His personal tragedy was transformed into an impersonal, unyielding pillar of the law.
Speaker A:The case of the Mignonette represents society formally drawing a line in the sand.
Speaker A:It is the moment the law, in all its majesty and coldness, declares that there is no calculation, no utilitarian logic, no custom of the sea, no defense of necessity that can justify the deliberate taking of an innocent human life to save one's own.
Speaker A:In the eyes of the court, the law must be absolute.
Speaker B:But for the three men who survived, and for all of us who hear this story more than a century later, the question in the face of the abyss, when the rules of civilization are a thousand miles away, baked away by the sun and washed away by the sea, is that absolute line truly just?
Speaker B:Or is it just an ideal we tell ourselves from the safety of the shore?
Speaker A:That's all for us today.
Speaker A:Thanks for joining us on another episode of History's Greatest Crimes.
Speaker A:I'm Michael.
Speaker B:And I'm Alaina.
Speaker A:And until next time, stay curious.
Speaker A:Sa.
