Desperate Passage

more complex moral calculus involving a single sacrifice for the good of all. In 1759 the Dolphin was dismasted by a storm while sailing from the Canary Islands to New York. There were only eight people aboard, and they drifted aimlessly for more than five months. They ate their supplies, then their dog, the ship's cat, even their shoes. Finally, they decided that one member of the group should be killed and eaten, so that the others might live. They cast lots to pick both the victim and the executioner. A Spanish passenger lost the draw and was shot through the head. The others ate his bowels first and then consumed the rest of the body.

One of the most famous maritime catastrophes of the nineteenth century resulted in a similar decision by survivors of the Nantucket whaleship Essex, which had been attacked and sunk by a whale, the prey turned hunter. The crew was forced into the whaleboats and bobbed on the sea for weeks. As men starved to death, the others resorted to cannibalizing the remains. When that food source ran out, the four men in one of the boats decided to cast lots to decide who would be killed and eaten, believing that otherwise they would all die. The loser was a sailor named Owen Coffin, eighteen years old and the cousin of the captain, who was also in the boat. Coffin accepted his fate and gave the others a message to be delivered to his mother. Sixteen-year-old Charles Rams-dell, who was Coffin's close friend, drew the lot as the executioner. He refused his duty for a time, but finally relented. Coffin laid his head upon the gunwale, and Ramsdell shot his friend.

As a rule, such events rarely produced feelings of shame among the participants or scorn among the public. Survivors often made no attempt to conceal the evidence of their desperation. Rescuers found partially butchered bodies in lifeboats even when the remains might easily have been thrown overboard. In one extraordinary case, survivors trapped on a derelict signaled to a passing ship by waving the hands and feet of a man they had butchered and eaten. Whether the deaths were natural or the result of a lottery, cannibalism was simply, in the decorous phrase of the day, 'the custom of the sea'—a horror defensible under the circumstances, much as men's behavior might be different in wartime than in peace. Surviving cannibals could go on to distinguished careers. The captain of the Nottingham Galley—the man who oversaw the consumption of his ship's carpenter —was later made the British consul in Flanders. The captain of the Essex was given command of another whaleship and later in life became the night watchman on Nantucket Island, charged with ensuring the safety of the community's young people by enforcing the nightly curfew.

Even when survivors admitted that no lottery was conducted before a killing, little punishment was meted out. In 1884 the British ship Mignonette sank in the Atlantic amid heavy seas, forcing the captain and three crew members into a dinghy. When the youngest member of the crew became violently ill and appeared to be dying, the captain took a penknife and cut the boy's throat. The survivors drank his blood and, over the next few days, ate his flesh. When they were rescued, the captain freely said that one man had been killed and eaten, and later he even demonstrated the technique to the authorities back in England. In a breach with tradition, the captain and one crew member were charged with murder, perhaps because they had conducted no lottery, perhaps because cannibalism by sailors was viewed by some as a relic from a bygone age. Still, most public sentiment hailed the men as heroes for having done what was necessary. The dead man's father forgave them, and they were granted bail, which was unusual for a capital case. After they were convicted, Queen Victoria commuted their sentences to just six months in prison. Shortly after their release, the British government restored their maritime credentials, and at least one of the men returned to a career at sea.

The case of the Mignonette came almost forty years after the travails of the Donner Party, but the emigrants heading west in 1846 may have known about earlier examples of cannibalism's long seafaring history. Then as now, shocking tales were a staple of journalism, and some examples had become famous around the world. Many cases had been recounted in books and poems and even songs. The Donner Party included literate, curious people, and it's entirely conceivable they were aware of the macabre imperative that had long been the sailor's last resort.

***

AS THE SNOWSHOE PARTY WALKED AWAY from the Truckee Lake cabins, the Breens—and perhaps a few of the others remaining behind—gathered outside to watch them go. If they braved the cold and stayed there long enough, they saw their comrades shrink until they were nothing more than a line of trudging dark spots, miniaturized against the daunting mountain escarpment up which they began to climb. Although the emigrants didn't use the term at the time, the group eventually came to be known by a poetic nickname that captured the moment's utter desperation, the idea that either this small band would succeed or everyone would die. The snowshoers, it was said, were 'the Forlorn Hope.'

Mostly they were the younger people, men and women in their late teens and twenties. Among the women, the oldest was about twenty-three. Several were parents forced into a cruel dilemma: stay with the children and watch them die, or abandon them for now so that they might be saved later. William Eddy left his wife and both his children, and could never forget the look on his wife's face as he departed. William and Sarah Foster left their toddler son. Two women—Amanda McCutchan and Harriet Pike—left children behind even though the fathers were no longer present, William McCutchan having gone ahead to California and William Pike having been accidentally shot and killed. Others at the lake camp promised to care for the children. The oldest snowshoer—the only one who might be counted as old—was fifty-seven-year-old Franklin Graves, who divided his family, taking along his two grown daughters and a son-in-law but leaving behind his wife and seven other children.

In all, the Forlorn Hope included seventeen people: ten men, five women, and two of the Murphy boys, thirteen-year-old Lemuel and ten-year-old William. They had only fourteen pairs of snowshoes, so one of the men and the two Murphy brothers planned to tag along at the rear of the column, hoping those in front would mash down the snow and create a firm walking surface. Limited to what their weakened bodies could carry, they each took a blanket or quilt but no extra clothing or tents. Among them, they had one rifle, a few pistols, and a hatchet.

For food, they took a little dried beef and some coffee and sugar. By strict rationing, they hoped to make the supplies last six days.

***

THE SNOW WAS EIGHT FEET DEEP at the lake, deeper as they climbed the mountain pass, deeper still in the drifts, and it soon became apparent that the lack of snowshoes ensured a hopeless lagging. The one adult with regular shoes, Charles Burger, who was always known as 'Dutch Charley,' turned back the first day along with William Murphy. They picked their way back down to the lake and eventually reached the cabins, cold and exhausted but safe.

The others climbed onward. The lake dropped away, a cobalt mirror plummeting to the floor of a great basin circled by a jagged crown of white spires. Hands rose against the glare as eyes peered down toward the water, five hundred feet below, then eight hundred, then finally a thousand, as though they had been magically whisked to the observation deck of a modern skyscraper. Smoke floated from the cabins in lazy curls, a visible reminder of the comrades whose hopes they carried.

They had entered a mountain realm about which they knew little. Snow covered everything. It deepened invisibly beneath their feet, like water under the ice of a frozen lake, until they were walking in the sky, reaching out to touch tree branches that would have soared above their heads in summertime. Drifts rose up like cliffs, tall enough to cover the church steeples back home. Walking near the back of the file, Mary Ann Graves gazed at her companions up ahead and was reminded of 'some Norwegian fur company among the icebergs.' By night, they built fires on platforms of green logs, so the flames would not melt the surrounding snow and sink them all slowly into a pit.

The reached the pass on the second day—Graves remembered it as 'a very slavish day's travel'—and were met with a vista so stunning that it pierced their exhaustion. 'The scenery was too grand for me to pass without notice,' Graves wrote. 'Well do I remember a remark one of the company made here, that we were about as near heaven as we could get.'

The next day they encountered a heavy snowstorm, 'wind blowing cold and furiously,' according to Eddy, who was apparently keeping a journal, a document that has not survived but that two men claimed later to have seen. One of them was James Reed, who eventually published what he said was a 'synopsis' of Eddy's journal, which may be close to a verbatim reproduction. The pithy entries certainly read as though they were jotted down in the midst of the journey, when there was little time for writing. On the 19th, for example, three days out from the cabins, Eddy noted merely, 'Storm continued; feet commenced freezing.'

They were completely unprotected from the elements, struggling along day after day in clothes of wool and cotton that were either soaked with sweat and snow or frozen stiff as boards. They were in difficult, steep terrain