Life gets cushier all the time. Every month or so the wired world
crosses another threshold of ease, and now we don''t even have to
stir from our mouse pads to get sorbet and videos: Point and click
at someone further down the food chain and the fruits of privilege
will appear.
But in the land of plenty and the age of comfort, sometimes
it''s hard to get our rocks off, and that''s where the suffering of
others comes in handy. The past four years have seen a boom in
danger porn. Around the time that even Grandma got e-mail, the
public developed a taste for painful accounts of physical ordeals
heroically endured by someone else. Danger-porn voyeurs peep from a
safe remove as proxies battle "The Perfect Storm" or launch
themselves "Into Thin Air." The more strenuous the travail, the
more alien it is from our cosseted lives, the more titillating it
seems.
The safest distance is the distant past -- rife with bummers,
free of vaccines and anti-lock brakes. Two new contenders for the
danger-porn canon raid the 19th century for twin ordeals so
impeccably awful and so damn gross that the movie versions were
probably cast before the book contracts were dry. "The Custom of
the Sea" and "In the Heart of the Sea" are, as the former''s
subtitle proclaims, "shocking" true tales of "shipwreck, murder,
and the last taboo." Both books tell a story of terrified, starving
sailors who, adrift in open boats, are forced to kill and eat
their
companions.
Survival cannibalism was once so common that it was "The Custom
of the Sea." Neil Hanson''s book of that name recounts the most
notorious instance of this custom in British maritime history. Off
the coast of Africa in 1884, a freak wave crushed andsank the
Mignonette, an unseaworthy yacht bound for Australia. Three crew
members survived in a dinghy for four weeks by killing and
devouring a 17-year-old cabin boy, Richard Parker. Rescued by a
German steamer, the men of the Mignonette returned to a sympathetic
British public and a government determined to prosecute.
With appropriate penny-dreadful gusto, Hanson exploits every
blood-drinking, marrow-sucking, human-jerky-curing moment. The
Mignonette''s captain, Tom Dudley, a former ship''s cook, did the
butchering: "He reached into the still warm chest cavity and pulled
out the heart and liver ... The three men ate them ravenously,
squabbling over the pieces like dogs." Trial transcripts and
contemporary newspapers aid Hanson''s poignant re-creation of the
crew''s emotional voyage from horror to elation to a second round
of torture courtesy of Queen Victoria''s courts.
What lifts "Custom" above the tabloid, however, is Hanson''s
evocation of context. He relates the history of maritime
cannibalism in one sleek chapter. He makes a strong case that the
Mignonette and the 560 other British vessels that sank that year
were victims of greed: Their owners had no incentive to keep them
seaworthy because lost ships meant big insurance paydays and no
wages owed to the sailors. The Mignonette disaster had a still
larger social significance because the show trial of the survivors
was the Crown''s attempt to end the custom of the sea forever.
"In the Heart of the Sea" has no such significance to justify
it, but it does have a higher body count. Nathaniel Philbrick''s
book centers on the 1820 death match between Nantucket, Mass.,
whale hunter Essex and a really big whale, which the Essex
lost.Twenty men in three small craft escaped and wandered the
Pacific; three months later there were two boats and men left.
Rescuers found bug-eyed stick figures hunkered over a pile of human
ribs, with finger bones stashed in their pockets.
Had Philbrick needed a reason to revisit this gorefest beyond
the mere gnarly fun of it, he might''ve chosen metaphor. Never
before had a whale rammed a ship, and it was as if a lone titan
were finally protesting a holocaust: The Essex was hunting west of
Chile because Nantucket''s whalers had scoured the Atlantic clean.
Metaphor, however, was taken -- the 85-foot bull that sank the
Essex inspired "Moby-Dick." Philbrick grasps instead at historical
context -- and misses. Issues handled ably by Hanson elude him. For
example, Hanson notes that in eating the cabin boy, the Mignonette
trio followed a second custom of the sea. Though tradition required
drawing lots, over the centuries the short straw seemed to have a
strange attraction to women, boys and blacks. On the Essex, a third
of the crew was black, and not one black sailor survived --
but Philbrick never mentions the long record of rigged contests or
fully engages the possibility of bias.
Unlike the case of the Mignonette, the Essex case is notable
only for sheer calamity. It didn''t spark a shift in the whale
trade or set a legal precedent. Philbrick masks this lack of
meaning with a lot of talk about Nantucket. His asides about local
quirks and lingo turn from irrelevant to annoying, but as a loyal
islander Philbrick keeps them coming. Why should we care that in
1997 some kids from Newburyport cut up a beached whale? Just
because Newburyport "was where many of Nantucket''s first
settlershad come from"?
As danger porn, Hanson''s "Custom" has the kind of edifying
art-film trappings that make you forget you''re a voyeur.
Philbrick''s book works best if you skip to the dirty parts.
--Mark Schone Salon.com April 13, 2000