Cannibalism, which recieved its name only when Columbus landed in the Carribean, is connected with seafaring throughout history. Already Odysseus, during his zick-zacking across the Mediterrenean, had to experience how members of his crew were torn apart and eaten alive. But cyclops didn't do it out of necessity or distress, but from lust and greed, and thereby became the ancestor to those cruel wild people that started to shock and fascinate the minds of the old world during the time of the big discoveries. One of the greatest discoverers of them all, the most famous Captain Cook was killed and eaten in Hawaii. This gave the man-eater a function, by seperating civilisation from barbary: "He who eats a man, is no man." But the disgust has a janus' head, especially in studies and salons around the capitals of Europe, because the same wild people also became the ideal for mankind in its primary principle. This way the view to relativity  towards our own society was opened. Already in 1580 Michel de Montaigne demanded in his essays (I, 30, Des Cannibales) that it is "more barbaric to delect oneselve at the terminal pains of a living man than to eat him dead; more barbaric to tear an all-feeling body on the torturer's bank, to roast him bit by bit, let him be bitten and eaten by dogs and pigs [...] and, what is even worse, all under the disguise of true belief and piousness, than to roast him and eat him after he has died.

Cannibalism from necessity therefore was morally less reprehensible and was tolerated; in the early 19th century this measure amongst shipwrecked seafarers, was so common, that survivors regularly had to asservate that the hadn't taken to this means as it was commonly suspected of all half-starved shiprecked seamen. Moreover no lawbook in the civilised world had a paragraph about eating a deceased member of your own species, more so since all of those nations were obeying to a ritus - in more or less figurative amounts - that was metaphysical cannibalism focused on the founder of their religion.

Probabl the best documented case of cannibalism at sea occured in 1710 on the english merchant ship Nottingham Hill in front of the coast of Maine were it ran onto a riff. After three weeks of misery the carpenter died and one seaman suggested to eat the body. "After long and intense thought and discussion about the sinfulness of such acting on the one hand and the absolute necessity of it on the other hand", wrote captain John Dean, "beliefs, conscience and so on had to bow down to the irrefutable arguments of our hungry stomachs." But not always did seaman in comparable situation stake to the most ultimate measures. When the brigg Polly on her journey from Boston to the Carribbean was demasted by a storm and the ship ran halfways full of water and drifted rudderless through the Atlantic for 191 days, none of the dead were eaten. Nevertheless they kept their more lucky colleagues alive, because the survivors cut them into pieces, fixed their body parts onto hooks and this way were able to catch enough sharks to remain alive until they were found.

The situation became morally more complex if there was no dead body available for eating. For the first time in the early 17th century a historical case is documented, in which seven Englishmen were driven from the shore of St. Kitts in the Antilles out onto the open sea and drifted there for two weeks, when one of the shipwrecked had the idea to decide by drawing lots, who should be eaten. By all means the lot fell onto the men who made the suggestion and after a second lot decided who the henchman would be, he was killed an eaten.

Probably the most famous of all shipwrecks that included cannibalism is the one of the brigg Medusa, which was documented by two survivors, Henri Savigny and Alexandre Correard, in their famous book and also in an important painting by Theodore Gericault (pictured above). Of the 370 people on board of the Medusa about 150 climbed onto a self-fabricated raft. After spending several night hip-deep in the water and fierce and deadly fights between different parts of the shipwrecked, cases of madness and hallucinations, mutiny and murder, hunger drove the shipwrecked to cut pieces of deceased seaman and eat them. Also the two authors of the documenting book partook of the gruesome meal. All in all they spent more than two weeks on the raft untill finally 15 survivors (of the 150!) were rescued. The rest had died some way or other.

Usually thirst is a bigger problem than hunger, therefore victims were usually first drained of their blood so as not to spoil any of the precious fluid. Next organs with high amounts of liquid in them that also don't keep well - liver, heart or spleen - were eaten. Body parts that had strong links to the human being were thrown away, such as head, feet or hands, also parts of the skin with tatoos on them. The muscle-meat without blood the extremities keep better and could be airdried and ease the most heavy pain of hunger for a few days to come.

On the morning of February 23rd of 1821 the crew of the Dauphin discovered a drifting boat near the Chilean coast. In the boat they discovered two odd looking and gaunt men, who were sitting in a heap of bones, who were "sucking the bones of their colleagues from which they let go only unwillingly." 94 days before a white whale rammed their ship, the whalecatcher Essex, somewhere near the equator and sinked it. At the moment of rescue nobody knew that the fate of the Essex would find its way into literature later on. Edgar Allen Poe got inspiration from this tale of cannibalism for his Arthur Gordon Pym and Hermann Melville, who travelled the sea with a son of one of the survivors of the Essex, worked the attack of the white whale into his great, cosmological novel Moby Dick

But more than this, the custom of the sea, as it was called, was a theme for ballads and sea shantys, of popular novels and of course the sailor's yarn spun in seaside pubs and at night in the lower decks of ships.