by Paul Collins
The crisis that was brewing among them found its first expression on the fourth night out.They had begun to ascend the Engineer Range, but got caught halfway up when darkness fell, having underestimated how arduous the climb would be in their exhausted state. Pearce describes the range as a ‘high barren hill. On ascending it we could not perceive a single tree, nothing but small sticks of decayed bush’. This tallies with the appearance of the Engineer Range now, a rather narrow ridge whose sides are covered with scrub.The men had to hack their way up the slope, which rises to a series of peaks almost 600 metres (1960 feet) in height. Pearce reports that they had great trouble getting a fire going that night to protect themselves from the cold air and the nocturnal dews. The scrub was probably green, wet and not very combustible.
That night profound doubt began to set in. ‘Some of them began to see their folly’, Pearce says, ‘and wished themselves [back] at Macquarie Harbour, although it was a place where they undoubtedly had to encounter numerous difficulties’. The Knopwood narrative says that they felt that ‘they had plunged themselves into greater miseries and hardships than ever could be experienced at that place [Sarah Island]’, and that they had ‘not the least prospect of ever arriving at any place from whence they might expect to find relief’. It is doubtful whether these are Pearce’s actual words; they sound more like a sanctimonious editorial gloss by Thomas Wells or whoever was the final compiler of the Knopwood manuscript. No doubt that night Greenhill had to use all his leadership skills to keep them focused on the fact that they had come this far and that freedom was still within their grasp.
The men’s relationships were now becoming very strained, with some of them feeling that they had reached the end of their tether. Most probably it was Brown and Kennerly who complained most, with some support from Dalton.They seem to have already formed a group on their own, probably because they were the oldest and therefore the slowest walkers, unable to keep up with the younger group that was setting the pace.The more motivated men – Greenhill, Travers, Pearce, Bodenham and Mather – were much stronger physically and they seemed to be more able to summon up the psychological resources to keep going.
‘On the fifth day’, Pearce says, ‘the weather still continuing to be very wet, the rain falling in torrents, made us very uncomfortable which enabled us to make but very little progress’. They were still either climbing the western face or beginning to descend the equally steep eastern face of the Engineer Range and were particularly exposed. Reflecting on their experience from his own knowledge of the bush, Terry Reid says that they would have been suffering from considerable mental stress. ‘These days we’ve got good clothing and all the necessities, including food and a fuel stove so we can light a fire. We’ve also got an understanding in the back of our mind that we can make it through the bush. They wouldn’t have had any of that. Take that level of stress and add it to their physical condition, the lack of food, not knowing exactly where they are, the fear of being pursued.’ All of this would have brought about a rapid deterioration in physical and psychological attitudes. Reid says that at times you have to get down on your hands and knees to crawl through the scrub and bauera, or you have to jump against it.
As soon as they found some good shelter on level ground on the fifth day, Pearce says they stopped ‘and remained in a very dejected state until the sixth evening’. Obviously, they were so exhausted that they turned this into a rest day. The flour from which they made bush damper and the salted beef they had stolen from Macquarie Harbour were totally inadequate. The damper would have given them some carbohydrates and the meat some protein, but not nearly enough. The escapees were using an enormous amount of energy on their trek and, because of their poor diet at Sarah Island, they probably had little in the way of reserve calories to begin with. For very active people a rule of thumb for daily calorie needs is to multiply body weight by twenty. Estimating the average body weight of the men at 130 pounds (59 kilos) and multiplying by 20, we get a daily requirement of 2600 calories. Pearce and the others were getting nothing like that at Macquarie Harbour, and obviously without some form of nourishment they were in grave danger of dying from starvation.
Exhaustion was one enemy, cold was another. Given the conditions they were in, it would have been a challenge for them to keep warm. Impending or mild hypothermia must have been a risk. Even today, bushwalking in Tasmania can sometimes produce fatalities through exposure and hypothermia if hikers are not properly equipped and aware of the dangers. The rain is so persistent that eventually it penetrates even the best quality Gore-Tex outerwear. Once your underclothes are wet through, the cold seeps right in.
Chilled to the inner core by a cold that is intensified by wet and windy conditions, a person with hypothermia experiences a gradual physical and mental collapse. It is an insidious process and the victim is usually the last to realise what is happening. Normal physiological functioning requires a core body temperature in excess of 37° Celsius (98.6° Fahrenheit). Once the temperature drops so low that the body loses heat faster than it produces it, intense shivering begins, the body’s way of trying to create warmth through a rapid succession of contractions and relaxations of the muscles. If the exposure continues, the person gradually loses the ability to maintain vital functions. As cold reaches the brain, physical coordination declines and the person begins to fall and slip often, speech becomes slurred and judgement impeded. The first signs of hypothermia are tiredness and a reluctance to keep moving, followed by shivering and exhaustion. In advanced cases coma and death can follow quickly. It is surprising that some of the escapees were not already suffering from hypothermia. Possibly the weather was warmer than usual for September, and probably the conditions they had already experienced at Macquarie Harbour had extended their bodies’ tolerance to intense cold.
Making a sheltered camp with a fire on the sixth day also probably halted the advancing effects of hypothermia, but the eight were exhausted and hungry. Their rest day seemed to do them little good psychologically, however, because that evening ‘We were all disputing who should get wood for the fire. Some brought it and made fires for themselves. Kennerly made some tinder this night and put it by as he had some intention of returning to the [Sarah Island] settlement’. This also seems to be the night when Kennerly suddenly said, in what may have been a sick joke, that ‘he was so hungry he could eat a piece of a man’. It was the first mention of cannibalism.
They were now ravenously hungry, not having eaten for a couple of days since their meagre rations ran out. Without sustenance they would die and, as we have seen, their knowledge of bush skills was negligible. Although it is hard to tell from Pearce’s account, Kennerly’s comment was most likely incidental. And indeed he did not participate in the subsequent cannibalism. But they all heard it and it articulated what the ex-mariner, Bob Greenhill, had been thinking. He was already asking himself if the time had not arrived to initiate ‘the custom of the sea’. Greenhill was a strong-minded man, and probably something of a bully, and it was he who was to carry out most of the killings. His intimate friend, Matthew Travers, supported him and together they usually cowed the others into submission. Pearce, although short in stature, was as strong physically as Greenhill and Travers, or maybe even stronger, but he couldn’t navigate and he didn’t have the psychological stability to be a leader.
As Pearce reports it, they were about seven days into their desperate journey when they began to talk seriously about cannibalism. They had spent a couple of days negotiating the escarpment of the Engineer Range and were probably somewhere in the scrub and rainforest country near its south-eastern base, moving eastward toward the Franklin River. Pearce says that on ‘the seventh morning the elements had a promising appearance’, and as they set out, ‘four of us happened to be in front of the others’. The four were Pearce, Greenhill, Travers and Mather. Bodenham must have dropped back with the older men. As they struggled through the bush they began to discuss Kennerly’s comment. Pearce says, most likely qui
te truthfully, that it was ‘Greenhill [who] . . . first . . . introduced the subject of killing one of their companions and eating him’. He suggested that eating a man was perhaps the only option they had left. Greenhill said, according to Pearce, ‘that he had seen the like done before, and that it tasted very much like pork’.
Mather replied that ‘It would be murder to do it.’
Greenhill retorted, ‘I’ll warrant you, I will eat the first part myself, but you all must lend a hand that we all may be guilty of the crime.’
The unspeakable had been articulated.
It is significant that it was the ex-mariner who initiated this discussion, for it was not unknown for shipwrecked sailors to resort to cannibalism. The term ‘the custom of the sea’, originating in the seventeenth century, referred to the practice of drawing lots in situations of starvation to see who would be sacrificed to save others. Just a year and ten months before the Pearce party escaped from Macquarie Harbour, the Nantucket-based whale ship Essex had been attacked and sunk by a massive and boisterous sperm whale in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, just over 3220 kilometres (2000 miles) almost due west of the Galapagos Islands. The twenty-one officers and crew took to the boats, and after ninety days two whaleboats containing eight survivors were picked up near the coast of Chile. In one boat two emaciated men sat sucking the marrow from the bones of their dead comrades as the rescue ship came alongside.The survivors had drawn lots to see who would be killed, and they did not hesitate to eat the bodies of the dead.
Later there would be the story of the yacht Mignonette, which sank off the coast of West Africa in 1884 after being hit by a 12-metre (40-foot) rogue wave in a storm. It left the four English crewmen adrift in the mid-Atlantic in a small dinghy for over two weeks.They were all starving and the captain announced that they would have recourse to the time-honoured custom. One of the four, a cabin-boy, was already delirious and close to death. Eventually they decided that the captain would kill him and they would all eat him. Three days later they were rescued, but when they got back to England they were charged with murder. The English legal establishment was determined to stamp out this type of customary law, and in a test case the captain was put on trial and condemned to the mandatory death sentence, although this was commuted to six months’ imprisonment ‘without hard labour’. The English Chief Justice, John Duke Coleridge, ruled in convoluted legalese that ‘the temptation to the act which existed here was not what the law has ever called necessity . . . The absolute divorce of law from morality would be of fatal consequence; and such a divorce would follow if the temptation to murder in this case were to be held by law an absolute defence of it’. It is safe to assume that Lord Chief Justice Coleridge had never been lost at sea in an open boat without food or water.
But cannibalism was not confined to shipwrecks. The most famous case of it in United States history is that of the George Donner party, a group of ten unrelated families and sixteen other individuals, eighty-seven people in total, headed for California, who were trapped in the high Sierra Nevada, south-west of Reno, by the early snow of the winter of 1846–47. About half of the survivors resorted to cannibalism, although there was no direct killing of anyone for the purpose of eating them. They simply ate the bodies of those who had died. Cannibalism is thus something that even ‘normal’ people will resort to in extreme situations. What was particularly interesting in the Donner case was that the women had much better survival rates than the men.The reasons for this are twofold: first, women are generally smaller and so they need less food to support their basic metabolism. Second, women have a higher proportion of body fat and a lower basal metabolism than men, giving them better heat insulation against cold. Using less energy than men because of smaller body weight, these fat reserves sustain them longer against hunger.
While survival cannibalism can be distinguished from ritual cannibalism, as found, for instance, in pre-European Mesoamerica, the distinction should not be pushed too far. Dr Tom Waite of Adelaide University argued that cannibalism was very common in nature and also among humans, especially hunter-gatherers, for whom it was a common practice, ‘albeit disguised by various religious or cultural justifications . . . A study in 1974 of pay-back warfare and cannibalism among small isolated groups of Papua New Guineans showed that it contributed 10 per cent of the protein to the diet of people living where game was in chronically short supply’.
There is no strict parallel between these cases and the behaviour of our escapees. By the standards of other situations, they resorted to cannibalism very quickly. There was also seemingly a lot less compunction about it, perhaps because starvation affected them speedily. Pearce also talked constantly about the cold and especially its effects at night. The body temperature of a starving person drops considerably and they have poor circulation, leading to a dangerous interaction between hunger and the threat of hypothermia. Other symptoms of starvation are similar to hypothermia: a tendency to fall over and to trip resulting from a loss of a sense of balance, an inability to walk in a straight line, and a proneness to bump into other people or surrounding objects, leading to bruises, cuts and abrasions. Blackouts and fainting are other characteristic symptoms. Starving people experience severe emotional and psychological effects as well, becoming apathetic, dull, depressed and discouraged, and lacking in empathy for the needs and sufferings of others, having become increasingly focused on their personal need for food. Irritability and a tendency to explode with frustration and anger also characterise very hungry people.
Pearce, Greenhill, Travers and Mather had a brief discussion about the rights and wrongs of cannibalism. Pearce says bluntly: ‘We then consulted who should fall’. According to his account, it was Greenhill who took the lead in nominating the victim: he said it should be Dalton.
Why Dalton? Because, Greenhill argued,‘He had volunteered to be a flogger’. Whether Dalton had volunteered for this duty or not we don’t know, but the others clearly believed it was true, so he was quickly chosen as the first victim.
Pearce vividly describes what happened very early the next morning, well before dawn, on their eighth day out from Macquarie Harbour, in a rainforest somewhere near the western bank of the Franklin River: ‘When we stopped at night, Dalton, Brown and Kennerly had a fire by themselves and a little break-wind. About three o’clock in the morning, Dalton was asleep. Greenhill got up, took an axe and struck him on the head with it, which killed him as he never spoke afterwards. Travers took a knife, cut his throat with it, and bled him. We then dragged the body to a distance, cut off his clothes, tore his insides out and cut off his head.Then Mather,Travers and Greenhill put his heart and liver on the fire to broil, but took them off and cut them before they were right hot. They asked the rest would they have any, but we would not eat any that night. Next morning the body was cut up and divided into equal parts, which we took and proceeded on our journey a little after sun rise’.
There is so much detail in this account that it is unlikely to have been a fabrication. With Travers, Mather, Bodenham and Pearce looking on, Greenhill killed Dalton, as he had said he would. Brown and Kennerly were probably asleep at the time like Dalton, and were too surprised to do anything to defend the Irish ex-soldier. They were also now outnumbered five to two. Pearce cooperated in the killing of his mate without any compunction.
Travers bled and butchered the body with a professional hand, no doubt drawing on his background of slaughtering and butchering sheep in the back country of New Norfolk. It was Mather, Travers and Greenhill who were the first to overcome their repulsion about eating human flesh. They offered to share pieces with the others, who refused. The next morning Bodenham and Pearce also overcame the taboo against cannibalism, but it was too much for the older men, Kennerly and Brown, for Dalton had become something of a mate, sharing a fire with them. They must have realised that one or the other of them would be the next victim, and they decided to flee. There was nowhere to go except back to Macquarie Harbour.
The next
morning, after the uncooked portions of Dalton’s body had been cut up and divided, the party prepared to set out. Pearce says that ‘About this time there was a man appointed to go in front every day, who had nothing to carry, but was to clear the road for the others’. His role was to chop a way through the scrub. No doubt strengthened by the protein derived from human flesh, the five stronger men set out on the next stage of the journey with some gusto. Pearce says that ‘Kennerly and Brown said they would carry the tin pots and a little tomahawk, which were given them. We had not got more than a quarter of a mile . . . till they were missing. We stopped and “cooeed” and got no answer; nor could we see anything of them’.
The two older men had quickly retreated in the opposite direction and had begun the journey back to Macquarie Harbour. Although they had no food except their portions of Dalton’s flesh, they made it all the way back to Sarah Island, arriving there on 12 October, twenty-two days after the initial escape and about thirteen days after fleeing the scene of Dalton’s murder and dismemberment. The official report says they ‘were in a state of the greatest exhaustion’, but neither suitable food for starving men nor adequate medical care would have been available for them at Sarah Island. Brown died on 15 October, and Kennerly on 19 October 1822. It seems certain that they had mentioned neither the murder of Dalton nor the cannibalism to Cuthbertson. They were no doubt fearful of the legal consequences for themselves if they confessed to being present at a murder and a cannibalistic feast, even if they did not take part.