The case of the two men belonging to the yacht
" Mignonette," who were accused at Falmouth of murdering and eating a boy named Parker in a boat on the high seas, came on before the Queen's Bench Division on Thursday. The case had been tried and a verdict given ; but the pre- siding Judge consented to refer a legal difficulty, supposed to arise from some obscure precedents, to the Court for Crown Cases Reserved. Five Judges, therefore, attended, and the prisoners' case was heard ; but it amounted to nothing except the plea that they acted in self-defence, which, as against the victim, they, certainly did not do. He was not starving them. The Court, therefore, unanimously adjudged them guilty of murder, and intimated that the sentence must be death, though they postponed the delivery of the sentence and of their reasons for it until next Tuesday. The argument for the prisoners was so weak, and the law so clear, that Mr. Baron Huddleston has been censured for not passing sentence at once ; but he was probably right. The conviction that such murders are justified by the law of self-defence, and are not, therefore, illegal, is so general among seafaring men, and has so infected naval literature, that a solemn judgment to the contrary, pro- nounced by more than one Judge, had become indispensable. How an idea so directly contrary, not only to morality and law, but to the comradeship of seafaring men, can ever have grown up, is inexplicable ; but of its existence there is, unhappily, no doubt. Even now, probably one person in three of all inhabitants of seaport towns would declare the sailors of the ' Mignonette' guilty only in not casting lots for the victim to be selected. Yet none of them would have raised a question as to Parker's right when thus attacked by the captain to shoot him in self-defence.
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