They had all suffered terribly, but it was Pollard and Ramsdell—found clutching the bones of their dead companions—who had come the closest to complete psychic disintegration. Of the anguish each of these two experienced, Pollard’s was perhaps the greater. A year and a half earlier, his aunt had entrusted him with the care and protection of her oldest son, Owen. Pollard had not only presided over his cousin’s execution but had eaten his flesh, thus participating in what one historian of cannibalism at sea has called the taboo of “gastronomic incest.”
