Expedition Cannibals

Sometimes the food can run out,
When you're far away from home,
At the Donner Party's cook out,
There were teeth marks on their bones,
The Erebus and Terror,
Found themselves stuck in the ice,
Seamen had to eat each other,
And that wasn't very nice.

[chorus]
Expedition Cannibals,
The heroes we don't celebrate,
Because we're so uncomfortable,
With all the people that they ate,
They just did what they had to do,
In order to survive,
I wonder if you'd do it too,
To keep yourself alive?

The Jamestown settlers' diet,
Had to change in 1610,
And they weren't too scared to try it,
Being most resourceful men,
Napoleon in Russia,
Told his army to retreat,
But surviving through that winter,
Needed fresh supplies of meat.

[chorus]

Paul Flatters' desert junket,
Floundered way before Sudan,
Though the French tried to debunk it,
They know man survived on man,
A Uruguayan Airplane,
Went down in the Argentine,
It's survivors had to explain,
Unconventional cuisine.

[chorus]

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Interesting, and a sad reality in some bad circumstances ... this is a famous CDN story about a having to make that choice of eating another to live. Sad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5f6_sjSBrbI

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Yes, it's a terrible call to have to make and one that many of us have asked ourselves about as a hypothetical. Vaguely knew about Hartwell but not the Stompin' Tom song, thanks for sharing!

I was reading about the Erebus & Terror's doomed N/W passage mission about the time the TV Drama series aired. I just wrote down "Expedition Cannibals, the heroes we don't celebrate" thinking about how it might have been if some of the crew had actually made it home, they would have been hailed as heroes in their time but maybe re-assessed later.

A bit of research later and there are a great many documented cases (with varying degrees of evidence). We just don't like to talk about it.

Unsurprisingly there are a lot of nautical tales and equally it was on my mind when I wrote a lyric called "The Loss of the Packet" which was framed by this. Or at least the idea of it.

Then recently someone played me a rather jolly piano part they were working on as a jingle and I sort of imagined someone like Eric Idle doing a very upbeat but rather tasteless song on the theme and it sort of came together.

The theme is still about the awful choice in the worst circumstances... but I suppose I quite like to laugh at things that disturb me. I have no idea if that is healthy or not.

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I Like the the lyric Im familiar with most of the referenced and yeah I used them on this fine Metal jam by Al and Mika
[wl]245728[/wl]

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Yes an interesting subject, the thought of cannibalism is very uncomfortable. But I think there are two types, the cannibalism that is pure evil and deranged such as Hannibal Lector types, or those who eat their enemies as an act of horror and domination, but then there is those who eat dead people in order to survive, such as what happened on the Andes flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguayan_Air_Force_Flight_571 . But hey, great subject, and cool lyrics!!

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Hi TeeGee, thanks for your thoughts.

Yes, it's the ones that are driven to it as a last resort that are the subject here - that Airplane was the very one referred to in the second half of the final verse.

There is a dual theme as well though which is that we celebrate pioneers and explorers for the most part but the reputations of those who resort to eating people (even as the only way to survive) suffer pretty badly. Understandable perhaps as the "ultimate taboo" but it does make you wonder what you yourself may do in extremis.

Those that indulge by choice are another matter, the fact that Thomas Harris made Lecter a cannibal was clearly a huge part of his establishment as one of fiction's ultimate monsters. I guess that dominance over a victim is a clear theme running through examples of those that have indulged ritually (as part of a scociety where it was not taboo) or more contemporary examples where we assume for the most part that the perpetrator was deranged in some way.

If you ask most people "What were Burke and Hare hung for?" they tend to reply "Body Snatching" or "Grave Robbing" when in fact the most serious crime they committed was murder. Similarly I think for instances of wholly intentional cannibalism THAT becomes the focus and sometimes we lose sight of the fact that in most cases the perpetrator also killed the victim and is first and foremost a murderer.

All of which leads us back to our explorers because now we have to think of a starving group in a lifeboat where none of the survivors has actually died. Now the choices are even worse.

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