Battered by a brutal storm in the South Atlantic in 1884, a British-flagged yacht called the Mignonette sank, but its captain and three other men escaped in a dinghy. About three weeks later, they were nearly dead from hunger and thirst. Facing certain death, the captain lunged at the seventeen-year-old cabin boy in the dinghy, slitting his throat with a penknife and killing him. The three men were rescued several days later by a passing German ship, having survived by eating much of the cabin boy, parts of whose body the Germans discovered in the boat.
