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A custom of the sea is a custom said to be practiced by the officers and crew of ships and boats in the open sea, as distinguished from maritime law, which is a distinct and coherent body of law governing maritime questions and offenses.
R v Dudley and Stephens (1884) 14 QBD 273, DC is a leading English criminal case which established a precedent throughout the common law world that necessity is not a defence to a charge of murder. The case concerned survival cannibalism following a shipwreck, and its purported justification on the basis of a custom of the sea.
May 24, 2021 · Cannibalism at sea: the starving Victorian sailors who ate a cabin boy. When, in 1884, the starving crew of the ill-fated yacht Mignonette sacrificed a man in order to survive, the horrific killing became immortalised in legal history, relates Carl Thompson. Published: May 24, 2021 at 9:54 AM.
Cannibalism and the Late-Victorian Adventure Novel: The Queen v. Dudley and Stephens. Andrea Hibbard. Abstract. This article reads the 1884 trial of The Queen v. Dudley and Stephens about the “custom of the sea” (cannibalism) alongside popular adventure novels of the same decade by R. L. Stevenson and H. Rider Haggard.
- Andrea Hibbard
- 2019
Four shipwrecked men, lost at sea on a small rowboat with no food or water became the perfect legal storm and, ultimately, a watershed moment on how far man can go with justifying murder of one for the sake of many in the name of necessity.
At least among the seafaring population of southwestern England, the attitude was that "[i]f properly conducted, cannibalism was legitimated by a custom of the sea; . . . survivors who had followed the custom could have a certain professional pride in a job well done; there was nothing to hide" (pp. 144-45).
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Was survival cannibalism justified after a shipwreck?
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What happened in the 1890s in maritime hunger cannibalism?
As every English lawyer will tell you, the leading case on ne-cessity as a defense involved two starving castaways, Dudley and Stephens, who saved their lives by killing the ship's cabin boy and eating him.
