For hundreds of years, maritime survival carried an unwritten, recognized code known across the world's oceans as the 'Custom of the Sea.' When a shipwreck left sailors adrift in open lifeboats without food or water, maritime tradition permitted the crew to select a victim through a random drawing of lots. The selected victim would be killed to provide sustenance for the remaining survivors, and the person who drew the lot to act as executioner would perform the deed.
Unbelievably, this grisly ritual was viewed not as murder, but as a tragic necessity governed by basic fairness. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, returning survivors who confessed to practicing the Custom of the Sea were rarely prosecuted upon returning to port. Courts and maritime communities viewed the extreme desperation of shipwreck survival as falling outside ordinary statutory criminal jurisdiction.
In cases like the 1820 sinking of the whaleship Essex or the 1836 wreck of the Francis Spaight, lot-drawing was treated as a legitimate, egalitarian self-preservation contract negotiated under catastrophic duress. This legal ambiguity endured until the landmark 1884 English court case Regina v. Dudley and Stephens.
Following the wreck of the yacht Mignonette, Captain Thomas Dudley and Edwin Stephens killed and ate the weakened 17-year-old cabin boy, Richard Parker, without drawing lots. The High Court of Justice eliminated the defense of necessity in murder charges, ruling that no person could sacrifice an innocent life to save their own. The ruling effectively outlawed the Custom of the Sea, permanently establishing that statutory law extended to the furthest reaches of the ocean.