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Stumpage Reports
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Monday, August 18, 2003 :::
There Is No Cannibalism in the British Navy: or, People Eating Weird Things
I like reading true books about people in tense situations such as being stuck in the arctic, drifting in the ocean in a small boat, or in a P.O.W. camp. No holocaust or Japanese P.O.W. camp books for me though, thats a little too tense. People stuck in these situations have to eat some strange things (sharks, snakes, each other). Here is a selection of people eating weird things from my collection of books about people in tense situations:
At breakfast each had a piece of seal or half a penguin breast. Luncheon consisted of one biscuit on three days a week, nut-food on Thursday, bits of blubber from which most of the oil had been extracted for lamps, on two days a week, and nothing on the remaining day. Supper was almost invariably seal and penguin, cut up very finely and fried with a little seal-blubber.
South, by Ernest Shackleton
We now first commenced to satisfy the immediate cravings of nature from the heart, which we eagerly devoured, and then eat sparingly of a few pieces of flesh; after which, we hung up the remainder, cut in thin strips about the boat, to dry in the sun: we made a fire and roasted some of it, to serve us during the next day. In this manner did we dispose of our fellow-sufferer.
Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex, by Owen Chase.
In a room of hut 112 half a dozen cooks were mixing �fudge,� the concentrated escape food. It was the recipe of David Lubbock, a naval type, and was a compound of sugar, cocoa, Bemax, condensed milk, raisins, oats, glucose, margarine, chocolate, and dried biscuits. The beaten mixture looked like old glue � Lubbock had worked it out that one four-ounce tin held enough calories to last a man two days. The difficulty was getting it down past the ribs, where it tended to stick tenaciously.
The Great Escape, by Paul Brickhill.
I found a definition for �hunger� when I was sent on a rare errand without a guard to take an empty pan to the cookhouse, and as I was walking through the main hall I saw a single grain of rice on a cell doorstep. I went over and picked it up and ate it.
The Railway Man, by Eric Lomax.
The snake lay eventually on my sack a yard or two away from the dying fire. We squatted round it but nobody seemed in a hurry to start carving it up. We looked at one another. Kolemonos spoke. �I am bloody hungry.� He reached forward. We all went for it at the same time. Paluchowicz, the man without teeth, stretched his hand out to me for the knife. We ate. It was not long before the snake was reduced to a skeleton. The flesh was close-packed and filling. I had thought the taste might be powerful, even noxious. It was in fact mild, almost tasteless. It had no odour. I was faintly reminded of boiled, unseasoned fish. �I wish I had thought of snakes earlier,� said Mister Smith.
The Long Walk, by Slavomir Rawicz.
After getting the raw liver down, I looked into the shark�s stomach. There were two herring there, one whole and one bitten in two at about the center of the body. I have never in my life tasted better fish than that was. The herring must have been worked a little already by the shark�s digestive juices, for it tasted as if it had been cooked. This was a royal banquet. We ate all the other organs that appeared at all edible, which was everything the we could chew into condition for swallowing.
The Raft, by Robert Trumbull.
::: posted by tom at 1:16 PM
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