I may be related to a Tollesbury Cannibal: I am definitely related to a Tollesbury Pirate

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I don't know what your family's like, but it looks like I've got a cannibal and a pirate in mine.

In June I made the worrying discovery that I may be related to one of the Tollesbury Cannibals. He was Thomas Dudley, the captain of the the yacht Mignonette, which foundered on her maiden voyage from that Essex village to Australia in 1884.

The crew took to an open boat and killed and partly consumed the 17-year-old cabin boy. After they were rescued, two of the survivors, including Dudley, were tried for murder and the third gave evidence against them. Dudley was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death, but the service was commuted and he served just six months in prison.

My reason for thinking we are related is that Dudley's mother was a Susannah Carter from Tollesbury, and my mother's mother was also a Carter from Tollesbury. This, incidentally, also suggests the possibility that I may be related to the snooker player Ali Carter, who grew up in the village.

The Tollesbury Pirates were a group of five fishermen from Tollesbury and Mersea Island who found themselves charged with piracy after a clash with fishermen from Burnham-on-Crouch. The latter, the Pirates thought, were damaging the oyster beds at the mouth of the River Blackwater.

As, according to an article in The Essex Family Historian, the judge began proceedings by saying of the case, "it seems to me a very great waste of time", it was perhaps no great surprise when they were all acquitted. The verdict was greeted with applause from the Tollesbury and Mersea fishermen who had packed the caught.

One of the acquitted men was Stephen Appleton and I remember meeting an Appleton relation in Tollesbury when in was a little boy. [Later. After a little online research, I believe she was Stephen's granddaughter.] Appletons married into both the Carter family and the Gurton family - that was my grandmother's mother's maiden name - so I have no doubt that I am related to him.

Incidentally, my Gurton great-grandmother may have been brought up as one of the Peculiar People, but I think that's enough family peculiarity for now.

I may be related to one of the Tollesbury Cannibals

When Lord Bonkers was putting together a crew for the narrow boat Flower of Rutland five summers ago, he wrote:

Finally, we have a Well-Behaved Orphan as cabin boy so that (as is traditional) we have someone to eat in case of emergency - not that there is much meat on him if I am honest.

Where did Bonkers - where did I - get the idea that it is traditional for sailors to eat the cabin boy in extremis?

I suspect it was from a folk memory this case:

In 1884, the yacht Mignonette, on passage from Tollesbury, in Essex, to Sydney, Australia, met heavy weather in the South Atlantic. Caught by an enormous breaking wave, the yacht foundered, and her professional crew (which was delivering the boat to its new Australian owner) took to the 13-foot dinghy, where they drifted for three weeks on the empty ocean under a hot and cloudless sky. 

On the 24th day of their ordeal, the cabin boy, Richard Parker, 17 years old, accepted his fate as the first to go, and the captain did the deed. The survivors dined gratefully on the boy's remains.

That post from a Yachting & Boating World forum goes on to say that a German ship eventually rescued the three survivors and took them back to England. There, two were tried for murder and that trial was a sensation of the day:

The captain and mate of the Mignonette were found guilty of murder, sentenced to death, and then granted a royal pardon. It seems the sympathy of the court (and British public opinion) was with them, but a guilty verdict was required to prove that the long arm of the law can extend far out to sea.

This is not wholly correct: a paper about the case from the Saint Louis University Law Journal says:

The Home Office decided that the sentence should be commuted to six months imprisonment, but 'not at hard labour.'

I came across this case for the first time yesterday when I opened The Invention of Essex: The Making of an English County by Tim Brooks in Waterstones and looked up Tollesbury in the index, to be confronted with the entry 'Tollesbury Cannibals'.

Tollesbury, because one of my grandmothers (my mother's mother, who died just before I was born) came from there. Her maiden name was Carter.

The captain of the Mignonette on her voyage to Australia was Thomas Dudley. He had been born at Tollesbury, the home village of his mother, who died when he was six years old.

Her name? Susannah Carter.

******

I went back to Waterstones today, only to find that someone had bought the book.

You can hear Tim Brooks talking about Essex in a recent edition of Matthew Sweet's BBC Radio 3 programme Free Thinking.

Incidentally, there were also Tollesbury Pirates in the 19th century. It looks like I'm related to one of them too.