The case began after a wealthy lawyer from Australia purchased a yacht named the Mignonette and hired Captain Dudley, an experienced seaman, to deliver it from England. Dudley set out from Southampton in May 1884 with three crew members. They hit a storm off the coast of Africa. The Mignonette was swamped by a massive wave that towered halfway up its masthead and destroyed the ship. The men barely escaped with their lives, and they did so in a lifeboat with almost no food or water.They drifted for over three weeks in that tiny boat, during which, among other misadventures, they had to fight off a shark that rammed them from below. When the captain decided they were in danger of dying of hunger and thirst, he slit the neck of the cabin boy, Richard Parker, an amiable 17-year-old orphan who had been excited to make his first real sea voyage. The captain said he chose Parker because the cabin boy was the weakest of the four, having drunk seawater that made him sick—but the truth was, it was almost always the cabin boys, or racial or national minorities, or others at the bottom of social hierarchies, who were chosen to be eaten. The three surviving men feasted on the boy’s body.
Source: The 1884 Cannibalism-at-Sea Case That Still Has Harvard Talking | Harvard Magazine