Posted on 12/19/2020 4:53:04 PM PST by CheshireTheCat
On or very near this date in 1835,* a Limerick ship’s boy named Patrick O’Brien lost a casting of lots … then lost his life to feed his ravenous shipmates.
The spanking new 457-ton barque Francis Spaight was on the return leg of her second-ever run to Quebec to fetch timber back to her home port of Limerick. The ship was named for her owner, a big landowner and shipping magnate who had thriftily sent 216 passengers on the voyage’s first leg. As Spaight would explain to a state commission a decade later amid the Great Famine, replacing ballast with emigres on outbound voyages was pure profit. In a sort of microcosm of Ireland’s terrible economic machinery,** Spaight’s own commercial interests on land and sea dovetailed nicely in filling his hulls with Ireland’s surplus population. For example, when Spaight gained the 4,200-acre Tipperary estate of Derry Castle in 1844 he smoothly set about depopulating it** — as Ciaran O Murchada describes in The Great Famine: Ireland’s Agony 1845-1852:
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
A grisly tale. Wonder if it inspired W. S. Gilbert to write “The Yarn of the Nancy Bell” in 1866?
I don’t recall author Patrick O’Brian mentioning Patrick O’Brien.
Horrifying
What an excuse, to leave men with spouses and children off the menu. Those boys probably sent money home to their parents so had just as much right to claim they were also providers.
Do not do evil that good may come.
The draw of lots may have been fixed.
Would you rather eat an older, stringy bull or veal?
I feel certain I’d never do such things, especially to a child. But then I’m sure the men who murdered and ate each other were similarly certain before they were in this situation. None of us really knows how we’ll act in such life-and-death horrible conditions until we’re actually faced with them - that’s when the true character of people shows up. Until then it’s all just talk.
At least the Donner Party waited for someone to die on their own before they ate them.
I remember a Sci Fi novel, maybe Heinlein, that had a guy convince others to donate a leg to keep each other alive. He sawed off his leg first.
Two Miwok Indians, Salvador and Luis, part of The Forlorn Hope were shot and eaten.
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