Thrilling Tales of the Sea – serie

In the nineteenth century true stories of cannibal tribes massacring white traders (and vice versa) and missionaries fed the morbid appetites of Europeans, North Americans and colonials. Accounts of cannibalism committed by seafarers on their dead shipmates quickened the pulses of landfolk even more, and pricked their moral disquiet. Acts of desperate men committing unspeakable atrocities. The warring frenzy of cannibal headhunters and their gruesome feasting. Such was the stuff of real-life ‘sixpenny romances’, rich in human butchery and garnished with treachery and terror. The more atrocious the at rocities, the more exotic the locations; the more sensational the narratives, the greater was the thrall of these thrilling tales of the sea.

Life at sea in the nineteenth century was demanding and perilous. Seamen had to be able to rely on those around them. This was easier said than done. The sea could be, and still is, a place of constant and unpredictable danger, whether by storm, shipboard disease or threat from the crew. Stories of unimaginable cruelties inflicted upon crews by savage officers and treacheries committed by mutinous crews were the soap operas of the day. People followed the trials in the newspapers, hanging hungrily on to each new piece of detail. Tales of suffering, hardship and treachery were thrilling to those on land but also replete with piteous infamy.

Seafaring before the twentieth century bristled with peril. The safe haven of your vessel might be destroyed by tempest or misadventure, your security scuttled. When you were cast away with only the resources of pluck, stamina, hope – and luck. Where you might end up on the expanse of endless sea facing the prospect of imminent dehydrated, starving death. Or on a safe but potentially forbidding – yet occasionally lush – outcrop of an isolated shore, amongst which perils abounded accounts of courage and companionship. These are narratives of castaways abandoned to fend for themselves, and the ordeals they endured and survived and in remembrance of the seafarers who did not.