On the first full day of the carpenter’s death, John Deane instructed the stronger members of the crew to remove the corpse and place it a safe distance from the tent. Deane left the tent to look for food and supplies. He found another piece of hide attached to another piece of the main yard. He picked the hide up and bit into it, testing its suitability as food. It was tough and his teeth couldn’t make any kind of purchase on the rough material. Around noon he returned to his men. The body of the carpenter was still in the tent. The men hadn’t lifted a finger to shift it. When Deane asked why, the men complained that they were too weak.
Deane was incensed but tried to contain his anger. He searched around for some rope. He gave the rope to the men and ordered them to tie it around the carpenter’s body. Deane took hold of the rope and tried to drag the corpse out of the tent. He was weaker than he thought and found the labour difficult. He was joined by a few other members of the crew but their combined efforts were feeble. They dragged the body a few steps outside the tent and then gave up.
John Deane returned to the tent exhausted. He wanted to sleep but there was something wrong with the crew. There was an intensity among them and an alertness present that had been absent in recent days. Charles Whitworth needed to talk to Deane in front of the men. He told Deane that the crew wanted to eat the body of the carpenter.
While Deane had been out foraging, the crew had discussed what to do with the carpenter’s body. They had elected Whitworth as their spokesman because he was a gentleman and more likely to persuade the captain to consent to their request. John Deane said nothing. He was appalled. The crew pleaded with him to let them eat the carpenter’s body. When Deane finally spoke, it was to organise a conference of sorts that would debate and discuss all the moral permutations of what they were proposing to do.
Deane did his best to hide his exhaustion. He listened to arguments and counter-arguments. There was the dual consideration of legality and theology. What they were doing might be illegal, unnatural and sinful; a crime against the law of the land, nature and God himself. Weighed against that was the necessity to survive. Nobody really knew if the Swede had been successful in his endeavours or whether he was in fact dead. If he was successful, the crew couldn’t guarantee that they could sustain their existence long enough on infrequent meals of raw mussel and patches of hide for a rescue party to reach them before they starved to death. Deane listened to all the arguments and decided to put it to the vote.
The decision to eat the dead body was by no means a completely unanimous one. Despite their hunger, Christopher Langman and two others were strongly opposed to cannibalism on religious grounds. But the majority voted ‘yes’ and Deane gave his consent to butcher and eat the dead body of the carpenter. The majority were ecstatic.
Deane tried to reassure Langman and his allies. Nobody had killed the carpenter. The need to survive was arguably the greater moral imperative. To eat his corpse was only wrong if the crew had been complicit in ending his life for that purpose. That had not been the case. They had tried to keep him alive as long as possible. No sin had been committed. Langman was not convinced and Deane, despite being an apologist for cannibalism in those moments, almost certainly retained some degree of doubt. But once the decision had been made, he committed to the practicalities of what they were about to do. Deane reasoned that, despite the levels of hunger, the reality of eating raw human flesh might be more difficult for the men than they had anticipated. He decided that human flesh needed to look like animal meat. It would be an easier adjustment for the men to make when the time came. In order to do this, any physical semblance of humanity in the carpenter’s corpse would have to be cut away and dumped into the sea. What was left would be quartered, dried and divided into rations, which Deane would control. The majority agreed but the question remained as to which of the crew would help with the butchering.
None of the crew would consent to help butcher the body. When Deane wanted to know why, the crew complained that it was too cold to work, or that they were sickened by the actual mechanics of butchery and couldn’t do it, despite an academic willingness to join in. Deane was angry and offered no assistance. The crew begged him to butcher the corpse. Deane eventually agreed. He managed to persuade one member of the crew to join him and the bloody work began.
Deane and his companion cut off the carpenter’s head, hands and feet. They skinned him. They extracted his bowels. They threw the sundered body parts and rejected internal organs into the sea. They cut strips of flesh from the carcass and washed them in salt water. By the time the sun had set, they had their first ration of the new meal.
Deane brought the strips of meat back to the tent. He leavened the meal with rockweed and distributed the ration among the men. Christopher Langman and the other two dissenters refused to touch the meat. The rest of the crew devoured the flesh with great enthusiasm. John Deane’s first taste of human flesh was a gristly piece of meat from the carpenter’s breast. He could barely keep it down.
The following morning Langman and his two companions gave in and received their ration. John Deane took to calling the rations ‘beef’ in his belief that the men might still need some form of semantic bridge to help them make the adjustment to eating human flesh. He needn’t have concerned himself. The men took to their new diet with a gusto that disturbed their captain. Two days later, Deane had real cause for alarm. Once the men had tasted the carpenter’s flesh they craved more of it. Deane had taken advantage of the crew’s general level of physical incapacity and his own superior constitution. He had moved the supply of flesh further away from camp, to a sharp and difficult part of the island, hard for anybody but Deane to get to. He controlled the men’s rations despite their demands for more.
Deane feared that cannibalism would accelerate the chances of ulcerated and mortified skin. These fears ran concurrent with increased concerns about the state of his own torn fingers. But it was the new meat’s effect on the men’s characters and personalities that really alarmed him. The men were wilder. Their eyes blazed. They argued more than they had done. They refused orders. There was a brutish air about them. The once unifying institution of corporate prayer dissolved among the men as a previously binding and comforting discipline. The men swore and blasphemed openly. There was a greater burden on Deane to protect and ration the supply of flesh. He feared that once it was exhausted, the stronger men would kill the weaker men and eat their remains. In those moments John Deane regretted not having given the entire body of the carpenter to the sea.
On New Year’s Day the men were a sorry mess of ulcerations, numbness, gangrenous wounds and broken spirits. Charles Whitworth was now lame in both feet. Men couldn’t feel their fingers. Their physical inertia was interrupted by violent spasms. Blasphemy had increased among some, while others feared that these last miserable moments of their freezing existence were about to be supplanted by an eternity burning in the fires of hell. John Deane was nearly finished. He had some strength left but his faith was at its lowest ebb. He was tired of caring for these men.
On the morning of 2 January John Deane left the tent. He was the first to do so that morning. He looked out across the sea. There was a shallop on the water. The shallop was equidistant between the island and the mainland. The shallop was sailing toward Boon Island. John Deane shouted, ‘A sail! A sail!’ The men left the tent as best they could, their mood altered in a matter of moments from despair to joy.
As the crew of the shallop sailed their vessel nearer to Boon Island, John Deane became more visible to them. He waved his arms to get their attention. He walked across the island signalling the best place to weigh anchor. The crew of the shallop saw Deane clearly enough but didn’t comprehend his meaning. The shallop dropped anchor south-west of the island, 100 yards away, remaining in its position until noon. The sea at present was too dangerous to risk coming any closer. Deane’s men struggled to master their own mood, fearing another deferment.