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These days, if you’re hungry you just DoorDash a burrito and move on. But in Victorian times? Well, let’s just say it paid to keep an eye on the guy next to you. Yes, back then, when starvation set in, the line between roommate and rib eye got blurry. And to prove we’ve got the receipts…
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These days, if you're hungry, you just door-dash a burrito and move on
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But in Victorian times, well, let's just say it paid to keep an eye on the guy next to you
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Yes, back then, when starvation set in, the line between roommate and ribeye got blurry
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And to prove we've got the receipts, today we're taking a look at some cannibalism stories from the Victorian era
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In 1845, England was determined to find the fabled Northwest Passage, a shortcut between
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the Atlantic and Pacific that would make the nation rich and powerful, and anyone who traveled
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it very, very cold. To that end, they sent forth their best and brightest. And by brightest
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we mean men who thought, hey, let's explore the Arctic in wool coats and optimism
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sounded like a good idea. Two ships set sail carrying 128 men under the command of Sir John
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Franklin, a seasoned explorer and national hero. And those ships, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror
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were considered state-of-the-art, complete with heating, libraries, and thousands of cans of
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preserved meat. Long story short, by 1846, both ships were locked in ice off King William Island
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Temperatures dropped to negative 48 degrees Celsius. The men's skin blistered. Their gums bled from scurvy
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And at one point, it got so cold that taking off a mask could rip your beard clean off
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Imagine dying and waxing at the same time. Anyway, for years, Britain heard nothing
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39 rescue expeditions were sent out. But all they found were eerie traces
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Tin cans, snow goggles, buttons, and bones. Dozens of bones. many of them split open for marrow, because apparently, when the food runs out, so does the
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pretense of civilization. By the time rescuers pieced it together, every one of the crewmen was
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found dead from cold, starvation, scurvy, lead poisoning, or, you know, menu expansion
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Inuit witnesses later described mutilated bodies in cooking pots filled with, well
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not soup. Forensic scientists confirmed it a century later, knife marks on human bones
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proof that the greatest Arctic expedition in British history ended with a co-worker buffet
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In 1846, 87 pioneers, including the Donner family, set out from Illinois for California
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They had wagons. They had hope. They had absolutely no idea what was coming. Everything was going fine
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until they took a detour called the Hastings Cut-Off, a new shortcut promoted by a guy who
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had never actually taken it because even then dudes refused to ask for directions. The trail
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was rough slow and involved hacking wagons through the Wasatch Mountains and slogging across the salt flats It cost them precious weeks burned through supplies and put them dangerously behind schedule By the time they reached the
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Sierra Nevada, it was late October, and a massive blizzard trapped them near what's now Donner Lake
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And when we say trapped, we mean buried. Wagons were snowed under, livestock froze
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people started dying. For four months, they were stranded. Some families holed up in makeshift
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cabins. Others dug snow caves. They boiled hides into glue soup, gnawed on bones, chewed tree bark
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like sad beavers. Eventually, however, the food ran out, but the bodies didn't. The dead were eaten
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Some accounts even claim that people were killed for meat. A small band of the strongest set out
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on snowshoes in a last-ditch attempt for help. Two months later, rescuers finally reached the
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survivors, or what was left of them. Out of the original 87 people, just 46 had survived. Their
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ordeal became one of the most infamous survival stories in American history. It had everything
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bad decisions, bad weather, bad trail guides, and a new cooking style
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The Great Irish Famine killed over a million people, displaced millions more, and ruined
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potatoes for everyone emotionally. And just when you thought it couldn't get worse, it totally did
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While the famine is remembered for mass starvation, disease, and people boarding ships to America with
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little more than a prayer and a moldy turnip, there are also horrifying whispers of cannibalism
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Yes, in the most desperate corners of Ireland, some accounts say people turned to grave robbing
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Not for jewelry, but for leftovers. Cannibalism during the famine became a symbol of utter collapse
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a point where civilization no longer bothers with things like forks, dignity, or laws about eating Kevin
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Just like your uncle's fishing stories, however, some of these tales may be exaggerated
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Historians debate the prevalence, with some saying it was a rare, tragic occurrence
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and others arguing it was mostly anti-Irish propaganda spread by newspapers trying to sell papers and racism
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Regardless, the narrative stuck. Victorian authors painted the famine as gothic horror, complete with skeletal mothers
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brain-hungry children, and starving peasants gnawing at their own family tree. Was there really cannibalism? Hard to say
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but the sheer level of suffering was so unimaginable, it became easy for people to believe the unthinkable
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In the late 1800s, Ethiopia hit a streak of disaster so brutal
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it felt like someone dropkicked the Old Testament straight into East Africa
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They called it Kifu Ken or Evil Days which is a really gentle way of saying biblical hellscape It all started when a cattle virus stowed away in Italian imported livestock Isn colonialism grand It wiped out 90 of Ethiopia cattle and no cows meant no food no farming no transport
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no trade, no nothing. Then came droughts, locusts, army worms, cholera, smallpox, and of course, a dash of civil war
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to really round out the suffering stew. By the end, one-third of the population was dead
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And yes, in that desperation, cannibalism happened. Back in Europe, readers devoured the reports like true crime newsletters
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Ethiopia's suffering became Victorian entertainment. The OG Doomscroll. Morbid tales of famine-fed cannibalism were spun into moral parables
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Don't sin, eat your girl, and never trust imported goats. But this wasn't metaphor
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it was a man-made disaster, worsened by imperial indifference, poor infrastructure, and zero global
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aid. Because here's the thing, when systems break, morality doesn't politely wait in line
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it crumbles. And it's not because people are evil, it's because hunger doesn't care about ethics
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In other words, emergency food systems are important to keep around and properly funded
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And while we're on the subject of colonial fallout, let's talk about John Williams
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No, not the guy who wrote the Star Wars theme. A British missionary who, along with fellow missionary James Harris, was literally eaten for his sins in 1839
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The two men sailed to Aramango Island, part of what is now Vanuatu
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armed with Bibles, ego, and absolutely no understanding of boundaries. They were there to save souls, but the locals remembered a very different kind of foreign visit
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one that involved European traders abusing and exploiting them. So when John and James came ashore with their sanctified sales pitch, the islanders were like
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oh, hell no. We've seen this movie before, and in a move that would horrify the Victorians
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and deeply satisfy your inner justice gremlin, they totally killed and ate those dudes
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William's remains were shipped to Samoa like a cursed Amazon return, and his wife later had a memorial built for him
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probably the only tombstone in Britain that doubles as a Yelp warning for tropical islands
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Back in Europe, the incident fueled the myth of the cannibal islands
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giving colonizers the perfect excuse to ramp up civilizing missions, by which we mean more land grabs and cultural erasure
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In 1884, the Minionette, a yacht sailing from England to Australia, was shipwrecked in the
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South Atlantic. The four-man crew escaped in a lifeboat, with no food, no water, and no plan
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except, we got this! After 16 days of baking in the sun and sipping seawater like it was a cocktail
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the men were to put it lightly not thriving And so they did what any Victorian maritime horror story demands they ate the cabin boy His name was Richard Parker and he was sick weak and 17 years old He didn volunteer
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but Dudley and Stevens killed him, with Brooks apparently playing the I'm not touching this card
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It was survival cannibalism, a long unspoken rule that if things get bad enough, you eat the weakest
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Morally horrifying? Absolutely. But legally justified? Until then, kinda. But once the men were rescued and returned to England
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the courts were like, excuse us, you did what? Thus began the legendary legal case, R. V. Dudley and Stevens
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the moment British law decided to draw a hard line in the water
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Their defense? We had to. It was necessary. The court's response? Necessity is not a defense for murder, my dudes
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Dudley and Stevens received a death sentence, but it was quickly commuted to six months in prison, which we imagine they were pretty jazzed about
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Still, the case set a landmark legal precedent that you can't just kill someone because you're hungry
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In 1837, the Portuguese schooner Aragante was caught hauling over 330 enslaved Africans, most of them children, across the Atlantic
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despite Portugal officially outlawing the slave trade a year earlier. When the British Navy captured the vessel near Cuba
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the freed survivors told a story so grotesque, even hardened abolitionists blinked twice
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According to multiple testimonies, the crew of the Aragante didn't just abuse their captives
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They killed one, cooked his flesh, and forced the others to eat it
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Oh, and for themselves? The crew allegedly reserved the heart and liver
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because nothing says supremacy like eating organ meat. To be clear, this wasn't starvation-induced survival cannibalism
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This was terror as a weapon, a show of dominance so dehumanizing
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it made the Atlantic smell even worse than usual. The enslaved survivors reported these stories when they reached Jamaica
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Their accounts were detailed, consistent, and horrifying. But colonial justice had a simple way of resolving the matter
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They deemed the white crew believable, and the African children, well, not so much. The Jamaican authorities did the colonial equivalent
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of a shrug, and no one was charged. Justice didn't just look the other way. It walked out
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locked the door, and lit a cigar. Ironically, throughout the entire slave trade, European
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colonizers loved to frame Africans as cannibalistic savages. It was a go-to justification for conquest
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Look at these people. They need saving. But in the Aragante case, the script flipped. It was the
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white crew doing the eating, and suddenly nobody wanted to talk about it. Historian Manuel Barcia
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called this an alarming reversal, a moment when the mask slipped, revealing that barbarism wasn't
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in the so-called uncivilized, but in their captors. Maybe the ship should have been called
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the Christian White Aragante