Eat Thy Neighbour Page 5
Not surprisingly, the majority of cannibalistic occurrences in modern times have come about as a result of desperate hunger. When there is no other food available and the difference between living and dying is determined by a person’s ability to overcome the moral imprecations against consuming human flesh, morality usually flies out of the window. It may be that the thought of losing our thin veneer of civilisation frightens us as much as, if not more than, the act of cannibalism itself.
One of the earliest first-hand accounts of famine-induced cannibalism comes from medieval Egypt. In the years 1200–1, Egypt was stricken by a famine so massive that an observer named Abd Al-Latif – a physician living in Cairo – wrote that more than 500 people a day were dying in his city alone. Towns and villages everywhere were littered with the emaciated corpses of the dead. Eventually, driven mad by hunger, people were first reduced to eating the dead and later, to killing and eating each other, including their own children. Al-Latif wrote that he witnessed the bodies of children, gutted and dressed, hanging in public marketplaces, and claimed to have seen the roasted body of an infant being carried in a shopping basket. The authorities did their best to stem this wave of cannibalism; in the case of the roasted child, the parents were condemned to be burned. But when an individual is torn between the possibility of being caught and the certainty of starvation, the law holds little sway over their actions. Inevitably, when a society degenerates to this point, there are those who simply take advantage of the opportunity to indulge their perverse tastes regardless of need. Al-Latif claimed that even those who were rich enough to afford food often ate human flesh simply for the joy, or novelty, of it. In his account, Al-Latif recounts multiple instances where human heads and limbs were discovered simmering merrily away in some street-corner cauldron. Eventually, the practice of eating human flesh became so commonplace that some people continued even when the famine was over. As appalling as this seems, thirteenth-century Egypt was hardly an isolated case. At one point or another in the annals of recorded history, famine-induced cannibalism has been reliably documented in places as diverse as England, Ireland and Russia.
Worthy of note are famines that took place in the Ukraine in 1922 and in Russia between 1929 and 1931. Both were devastating on a scale impossible to imagine. Tens of thousands of peasants and townspeople went without food for months on end. Wallpaper was stripped from the walls and boiled for what nutritive value might be contained in the flour-based paste that held it to the walls. Even carpenters’ glue was made into soup; anything to kill the pain of a stomach slowly digesting its own lining. The most tragic and psychologically damaging aspect of these famines is that they were both artificially created. The Ukraine had always been one of the most fertile farming regions in the Russian states, but when the Ukrainian people backed the White Russian government against the forces of communism, the Bolsheviks punished them by taking everything they could produce – including the seed grain for the following year’s planting – to feed the Red Army. Similarly, the 1929–31 Russian famine was dictator Josef Stalin’s way of punishing those peasants who resisted collectivised farming. The legacy of this political terror has resulted in a continuing blasé attitude towards cannibalism that haunts the remnants of the Soviet Union to this day. We will look at this tragic phenomenon in greater depth in the final chapter of this book.
It could be argued that cannibalism takes place during times of famine because of the nature of famine itself. Generally speaking, the food supply dwindles slowly, disease weakens the population, theft and violence become rife and the general fabric of society slowly unravels. But what happens when a few individuals are suddenly trapped in an extreme situation, deprived of food and, possibly, of water? Will the group’s shared social structure and the threat of peer condemnation hold the brute instinct in check despite the threat of starvation, or will they, too, resort to cannibalism? The best-known examples of this type of survival cannibalism have been recorded in connection with disasters at sea and, in at least some well-documented cases, the strong will, indeed, resort to eating the weak in order to survive.
Among the best-known cases of cannibalism on the high seas is that of the French frigate Medusa, which foundered and sank in 1816 while on its way to Senegal. More than 150 survivors clung desperately to an intact section of the vessel’s hull for days, slowly dying from their wounds, starvation and thirst. Inevitably, order broke down and the survivors began fighting among themselves. Some were murdered, their blood and raw flesh then being devoured by their attackers. When the raft was finally picked up only fifteen remained alive.
While not wanting to belabour the point of sea-related tragedies, there is one other shipwreck which, because of its legal ramifications, bears examination. In 1884 the 32-foot, English-registered sailing yacht Mignonette was being delivered to new owners in Australia by a skeleton crew of four. As the craft passed around the Cape of Good Hope, it foundered in a terrible storm and the crewmen were forced to abandon ship and take refuge in the lifeboat. Without food or water, and tossed wildly on stormy water, it was all Captain Tom Dudley could do to keep his three crewmen from panicking.
By the fifth day the teenage cabin boy, Richard Parker, was near death. A novice sailor, he had drunk sea water before anyone could stop him and was suffering severe dehydration, stomach cramps and diarrhoea as a result. Ten days later, the boy still clung to life but the rest of the crew were in nearly as bad a shape as he was. The other men discussed the possibility of killing the boy and devouring his blood and flesh to keep themselves alive. Taking the responsibility on himself, Captain Dudley stabbed the boy in the neck, collected the blood and passed it around. His heart and liver were cut out and eaten immediately and the rest of the meat was eaten over the course of four days, after which his carcass was thrown overboard. After twenty-four days adrift, the three survivors were picked up by a German schooner and returned to England.
During the voyage home, Captain Dudley wrote an accurate and detailed account of the experiences in the lifeboat, accepting any and all responsibility for his crew’s actions. The arrest of the three men on charges of murder was not a surprise; legal form must be followed no matter what the circumstances. Certainly there was complete understanding among the general populace of Falmouth, where they landed and were being held, that what they had done to Richard Parker was not a matter of choice, but of simple survival. A legal defence fund was even established to help defray their court costs and they had the good wishes of the local press. But the law took its course, the men were prosecuted, and the national press turned the whole thing into a circus, ladling out great dollops of macabre sensationalism for which the British press has become infamous.
The defence took the position that the laws governing civilised society, in this case the injunction against murder, were not always applicable in extreme situations. They also argued that after going so long without food and water the men were obviously not thinking clearly and could not be held responsible for their actions. And even if they were responsible, it was an accepted truism that the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the individual. It was a well-planned, well-presented argument with much legal precedence to back it up. The jury, however, thought otherwise.
In a part of their guilty verdict, the jury stated, ‘A man who, in order to escape death from hunger, kills another for the purpose of eating his flesh, is guilty of murder although at the time of the act he is in such circumstances that he believes, and has reasonable grounds for believing, that it affords him the only chance of saving his life.’ We can only assume that no one on the jury had ever been in similar circumstances. The judge was so distressed by the verdict that he appealed to the Crown to commute the sentence and Queen Victoria, in her wisdom, complied. After serving six months in prison the three men were released.
The sea is a vast and unpredictable place as, until relatively recently, was much of the earth’s land area. Before the advent of railways and reliable roads, a person could
become hopelessly lost only miles from home; and if you were hundreds – or thousands – of miles from home the situation could become desperate in a very short time. In 1846 a group of settlers, led by George Donner, set out from Utah towards the fertile hills of California. Included in the group were twenty-six men, fourteen women and forty-four children. Everything went well until mid-October when a severe blizzard trapped the group in a pass high in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Some of the group decided to make do where they were, converting their wagons into makeshift cabins, while another contingent determined to press on, eventually reaching an abandoned cabin 5 miles further along the trail. It was more than two months later when two members of the Donner party slogged their way to civilisation, obtained help, and returned for their stranded companions. Of the original eighty-four pioneers there were only seven survivors in addition to the two who went for the rescue party. Amazingly, although the Donner party had been divided by 5 miles of heavy snow, and suffered almost identical deprivation, both groups had ultimately resorted to eating their dead companions in an attempt to stay alive.
With the passing of the age of sail there are now few tragedies at sea and, with the exception of vast national parklands, modernised countries retain few areas sufficiently remote to be considered a wilderness. Does this mean that cannibalism in extremis has become a thing of the distant past? It would seem not.
On 13 October 1972 a Uruguayan Air Force plane, chartered by an amateur rugby team from Stella Maris College in Montevideo, Uruguay, crashed in the Andes mountains while on its way to Santiago, Chile. On board were fifteen team members and twenty-five friends and relatives. Although only ten people died in the crash itself, many of the survivors were wounded, some seriously. While there was the random selection of snacks and drinks you would expect to find on board, there was nothing like the amount of food needed to sustain thirty people for an indefinite period of time.
Despite intensive air searches no trace of the plane could be found and the survivors began to fear they would not live long enough for help to reach them. The details of their horrific experience have been well detailed and are not of primary importance here, but the moral dilemmas they had to overcome to justify the consumption of their dead companions are of specific interest. All the survivors were staunch Roman Catholics and nearly all of them flatly refused even to contemplate cannibalism. Roberto Canessa, a medical student, argued that the dead were no longer human beings, that their souls were with God and what was left behind was just the same as any other meat. He also pointed out that it was the survivors’ duty to their families, to God and to themselves to remain alive until they were rescued. Some agreed, but no one was willing to take the first step across the boundary into savagery. Finally, Canessa himself led the way. One of those who only reluctantly joined in the consumption of human flesh was Pedro Algorta, who justified what he was doing by comparing the act with Holy Communion, saying that Christ had sacrificed himself so that mankind could be saved and, in effect, their deceased companions were making a similar sacrifice. On 21 December, after seventy days stranded without food, the survivors were rescued by helicopter. No charges or public recriminations were ever levelled against the survivors.
The specific instances of cannibalism detailed above have all been concerned with societies or small groups of people trapped in an extreme and unusual situation in which they were forced to choose between eating human flesh or starving. Unlike the primitive, warlike societies encountered in the previous chapter, where violent conflict was an accepted part of the social structure and human flesh was just so much plundered booty, modern warfare can produce similar acts, but for entirely different reasons. The breakdown of acceptable behaviour, death and famine that visits war-torn countries can completely undermine social structures and, sometimes, lead people who normally abhor cannibalism to embrace flesh eating as either the only alternative to starvation, or out of an otherwise helpless desire to avenge themselves on a hated enemy. Obviously, when starvation was at the root of the phenomenon, it mattered little who was eaten. If, on the other hand, the motive was vengeance, it was the uniform, as much as the man inside it, that became the meal of choice.
An enlightening vengeful account comes from ninth-century Spain. When an invading army of North-African Moslems defeated a Spanish army at Elvira, near Granada, in the year 890, the Arab commander ordered the massacre of nearly 12,000 Spanish prisoners. Later, as so often happens in war, the Moorish commander was himself killed in a Spanish counter-attack. When his body was hauled into Elvira, the furious widows and orphans of the town tore it limb from limb and devoured it.
During the First Crusade (1095–9) the combined armies of Christian Europe invaded the Holy Land in an attempt to wrest control of Jerusalem from the Moslems. An auxiliary contingent of European cannibals, led by a Norman nobleman, was attached to the Crusaders and used primarily to terrorise the Moslems, who believed that their bodies must remain intact after death if they were to reach heaven. In this instance, we might say that cannibalism was a means of humiliating the enemy even before they were defeated.
As late as the sixteenth century, the Uscochi tribe of the Balkans routinely ate their defeated Turkish enemies, steadfastly insisting it was only done to insult them. Similar claims have been made on behalf of Walachian Prince Vlad, or Dracula (best known as the inspiration for the mythical blood-drinking count), who lived in the same area and at the same time as the Uscochi. Even Sioux war-chief Rain-in-the-Face claimed to have cut out Colonel George Custer’s liver after the Battle of Little Big Horn and eaten a slice of it, again insisting it was not done as an offering to the spirits; he just hated Custer.
The scant amount of historical evidence for cannibalism in Japan is hardly surprising; Japan was closed to outsiders until 1864 and what we know of Japanese culture prior to that period is still pretty much what the Japanese want us to know. There is, however, ample evidence of semi-institutionalised cannibalism among the Japanese military during the Second World War. Whether this behaviour was brought about because the Japanese still believed all non-Japanese were less than human, or simply a result of the appalling conditions under which Imperial Japanese troops were forced to live and fight is unclear. Some of the tales that follow, however, offer a disturbing glimpse of the possible answer.
The first documented evidence of cannibalistic behaviour among Japanese troops came hard on the heels of their invasion of New Guinea in January 1942. At Temple’s Cross and Buna-Gona beach, Allied soldiers repeatedly found bodies of their fallen comrades scattered around Japanese campsites, their arms and legs missing and the charred remains of human flesh and bone scattered around the fire.
In 1945, Havildar Chandgi Ram, of the British Indian Army, testified that he had witnessed the Japanese downing of an American plane on 12 November 1944. According to Ram’s testimony, ‘About half an hour from the time of the forced landing, the [Japanese] beheaded the pilot . . . some of the Japanese cut flesh from his arms, legs, hips and buttocks and carried it off to their quarters . . . They cut it in small pieces and fried it.’
As the Japanese forces were steadily driven back from one island to another by Allied forces, they were cut off from their supply lines and frequently resorted to cannibalising their enemies, and each other, to stay alive. Still, there is ample evidence that the practice was carried out when there was no necessity. One Japanese soldier who surrendered to Australian forces early in 1945 claimed that he deserted after being ordered by his superior officer to report to the cookhouse to be slaughtered.
Another, incontestable instance of cannibalism came to light when an official order was discovered at an abandoned Japanese campsite. Here is the text of that order:
Order Regarding Eating Flesh of American Flyers
I. The battalion wants to eat the flesh of the American aviator, Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Hall.
II. First Lieutenant Kanamuri will see to rationing the flesh.
III. Cadet Sakabe (Medica
l Corps) will attend the execution and have the liver and gall bladder removed.
Signed: Battalion Commander Major Matoba,
9am, March 9, 1945.
Major Matoba was later captured by Allied troops and admitted to the incident, adding this titbit of information: ‘I ordered Surgeon Teraki to hurry up and remove the liver because I wanted to take it to the admiral’s head-quarters . . . I had it sliced and dried . . . later on we all ate the liver at a party.’
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It seems obvious, by now, that there are a vast variety of reasons why individuals and societies engage in the practice of cannibalism and in many of these instances there are stringent rules as to who may be eaten and for what reasons. To the person being consumed, the reasons are probably irrelevant, but to the consumer, they may be all-important.
In the first instance we examined acts of cannibalism in our ancient, prehistoric past as evidenced in the archaeological record. We cannot be entirely certain of the motivations for these acts, though we can conjecture that protein deficiencies, famine or religious ritual practices may have been at work. From there we examined cases of cannibalism which were part of a cultural norm. When one is a member of a culture where cannibalism lies at the centre of social or religious practices, all of that society are expected to eat people – but only those approved for consumption. Next we addressed the idea of cannibalism for survival, where flesh eating has been practised by individuals from cultures that normally condemn cannibalism, and yet their actions are understandable, forgivable or carried out under such extreme situations as to place them beyond the normal social restraints.