because naval rules stated that, after a shipwreck, the seamen onboard were no longer entitled to wages, the castaways might have assumed that they were not subject to naval law on the island. Yet this bureaucratic reasoning, which the historian Glyndwr Williams called an “escape clause,” baldly ignored an addendum to the rule: if seamen were still able to procure supplies from a wreck, then they continued to be on the Navy’s payroll.
Fair?
