Eat Thy Neighbour (7 page)

On 13 October 1972 a Uruguayan Air Force plane, chartered by an amateur rugby team from Stella Maris College in Montevideo, Uruguay, crashed in the Andes mountains while on its way to Santiago, Chile. On board were fifteen team members and twenty-five friends and relatives. Although only ten people died in the crash itself, many of the survivors were wounded, some seriously. While there was the random selection of snacks and drinks you would expect to find on board, there was nothing like the amount of food needed to sustain thirty people for an indefinite period of time.

Despite intensive air searches no trace of the plane could be found and the survivors began to fear they would not live long enough for help to reach them. The details of their horrific experience have been well detailed and are not of primary
importance here, but the moral dilemmas they had to overcome to justify the consumption of their dead companions are of specific interest. All the survivors were staunch Roman Catholics and nearly all of them flatly refused even to contemplate cannibalism. Roberto Canessa, a medical student, argued that the dead were no longer human beings, that their souls were with God and what was left behind was just the same as any other meat. He also pointed out that it was the survivors’ duty to their families, to God and to themselves to remain alive until they were rescued. Some agreed, but no one was willing to take the first step across the boundary into savagery. Finally, Canessa himself led the way. One of those who only reluctantly joined in the consumption of human flesh was Pedro Algorta, who justified what he was doing by comparing the act with Holy Communion, saying that Christ had sacrificed himself so that mankind could be saved and, in effect, their deceased companions were making a similar sacrifice. On 21 December, after seventy days stranded without food, the survivors were rescued by helicopter. No charges or public recriminations were ever levelled against the survivors.

The specific instances of cannibalism detailed above have all been concerned with societies or small groups of people trapped in an extreme and unusual situation in which they were forced to choose between eating human flesh or starving. Unlike the primitive, warlike societies encountered in the previous chapter, where violent conflict was an accepted part of the social structure and human flesh was just so much plundered booty, modern warfare can produce similar acts, but for entirely different reasons. The breakdown of acceptable behaviour, death and famine that visits war-torn countries can completely undermine social structures and, sometimes, lead people who normally abhor cannibalism to embrace flesh eating as either the only alternative to starvation, or out of an otherwise helpless desire to avenge themselves on a hated enemy. Obviously, when
starvation was at the root of the phenomenon, it mattered little who was eaten. If, on the other hand, the motive was vengeance, it was the uniform, as much as the man inside it, that became the meal of choice.

An enlightening vengeful account comes from ninth-century Spain. When an invading army of North-African Moslems defeated a Spanish army at Elvira, near Granada, in the year 890, the Arab commander ordered the massacre of nearly 12,000 Spanish prisoners. Later, as so often happens in war, the Moorish commander was himself killed in a Spanish counter-attack. When his body was hauled into Elvira, the furious widows and orphans of the town tore it limb from limb and devoured it.

During the First Crusade (1095–9) the combined armies of Christian Europe invaded the Holy Land in an attempt to wrest control of Jerusalem from the Moslems. An auxiliary contingent of European cannibals, led by a Norman nobleman, was attached to the Crusaders and used primarily to terrorise the Moslems, who believed that their bodies must remain intact after death if they were to reach heaven. In this instance, we might say that cannibalism was a means of humiliating the enemy even before they were defeated.

As late as the sixteenth century, the Uscochi tribe of the Balkans routinely ate their defeated Turkish enemies, steadfastly insisting it was only done to insult them. Similar claims have been made on behalf of Walachian Prince Vlad, or Dracula (best known as the inspiration for the mythical blood-drinking count), who lived in the same area and at the same time as the Uscochi. Even Sioux war-chief Rain-in-the-Face claimed to have cut out Colonel George Custer’s liver after the Battle of Little Big Horn and eaten a slice of it, again insisting it was not done as an offering to the spirits; he just hated Custer.

The scant amount of historical evidence for cannibalism in Japan is hardly surprising; Japan was closed to outsiders until
1864 and what we know of Japanese culture prior to that period is still pretty much what the Japanese want us to know. There is, however, ample evidence of semi-institutionalised cannibalism among the Japanese military during the Second World War. Whether this behaviour was brought about because the Japanese still believed all non-Japanese were less than human, or simply a result of the appalling conditions under which Imperial Japanese troops were forced to live and fight is unclear. Some of the tales that follow, however, offer a disturbing glimpse of the possible answer.

The first documented evidence of cannibalistic behaviour among Japanese troops came hard on the heels of their invasion of New Guinea in January 1942. At Temple’s Cross and Buna-Gona beach, Allied soldiers repeatedly found bodies of their fallen comrades scattered around Japanese campsites, their arms and legs missing and the charred remains of human flesh and bone scattered around the fire.

In 1945, Havildar Chandgi Ram, of the British Indian Army, testified that he had witnessed the Japanese downing of an American plane on 12 November 1944. According to Ram’s testimony, ‘About half an hour from the time of the forced landing, the [Japanese] beheaded the pilot . . . some of the Japanese cut flesh from his arms, legs, hips and buttocks and carried it off to their quarters . . . They cut it in small pieces and fried it.’

As the Japanese forces were steadily driven back from one island to another by Allied forces, they were cut off from their supply lines and frequently resorted to cannibalising their enemies, and each other, to stay alive. Still, there is ample evidence that the practice was carried out when there was no necessity. One Japanese soldier who surrendered to Australian forces early in 1945 claimed that he deserted after being ordered by his superior officer to report to the cookhouse to be slaughtered.

Another, incontestable instance of cannibalism came to light when an official order was discovered at an abandoned Japanese campsite. Here is the text of that order:

Order Regarding Eating Flesh of American Flyers

I. The battalion wants to eat the flesh of the American aviator, Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Hall.

II. First Lieutenant Kanamuri will see to rationing the flesh.

III. Cadet Sakabe (Medical Corps) will attend the execution and have the liver and gall bladder removed.

Signed
: Battalion Commander Major Matoba,

9am, March 9, 1945.

Major Matoba was later captured by Allied troops and admitted to the incident, adding this titbit of information: ‘I ordered Surgeon Teraki to hurry up and remove the liver because I wanted to take it to the admiral’s headquarters . . . I had it sliced and dried . . . later on we all ate the liver at a party.’

*

It seems obvious, by now, that there are a vast variety of reasons why individuals and societies engage in the practice of cannibalism and in many of these instances there are stringent rules as to who may be eaten and for what reasons. To the person being consumed, the reasons are probably irrelevant, but to the consumer, they may be all-important.

In the first instance we examined acts of cannibalism in our ancient, prehistoric past as evidenced in the archaeological record. We cannot be entirely certain of the motivations for these acts, though we can conjecture that protein deficiencies, famine or religious ritual practices may have been at work. From there we examined cases of cannibalism which were
part of a cultural norm. When one is a member of a culture where cannibalism lies at the centre of social or religious practices, all of that society are expected to eat people – but only those approved for consumption. Next we addressed the idea of cannibalism for survival, where flesh eating has been practised by individuals from cultures that normally condemn cannibalism, and yet their actions are understandable, forgivable or carried out under such extreme situations as to place them beyond the normal social restraints.

In all these cases we find situations – be they cultural, religious or desperate in nature – whereby we in the ‘civilised’ western world find the action of eating one’s neighbours understandable, if not acceptable. The remainder of this book, however, deals with a different sort of cannibalism. This is an aberrant cannibalism performed by individuals who are members of societies which flatly condemn the practice. These are not cases of desperation, or of an acceptable ideological or religious belief. These are the acts of sociopaths, psychopaths and diseased minds . . . and these deviants will be our close companions for the remainder of this book.

PART TWO

C
ASE
S
TUDIES OF
T
ABOO
B
REAKERS

Five

Keeping it in the Family: Sawney Beane (c. 1400–35)

L
ife in Scotland has always been hard. Its climate is bleak, windswept and cold in the winter and its infertile soil too often results in crop failure. Throughout the Middle Ages life for the Scots was frequently worsened by the military adventures of the English who burned farms and villages and dispersed the people in an endless attempt to subjugate them. The overall result of such a harsh life inevitably led to an unstable society where violence and suspicion were endemic at the best of times; at the worst times murder – both random and institutionalised – and, on occasion, even cannibalism, were accepted as simply another of life’s grim realities.

If Scotland was poor in most respects its people developed a rich tradition of storytelling. Scottish legends are still among the greatest folkloric treasures in the English language. One of the most famous of these stories is that of Sawney Beane (also spelled Sawny Bean) and his cannibal clan.

Most historians dispute the existence of Beane and his tribe, and it must be admitted that no records have ever been found to support the story. A part of the problem lies in the fact that, although the general story remains the same, its place in time has shifted from the early fifteenth century (during the reign of James I) to the end of the sixteenth century under James VI, who later became James I of England.

There is little doubt, however, that from time to time there were cases of cannibalism in the more desolate and remote reaches of Scotland. In his
Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland
, first published in 1570, Raphael Holinshed tells of a cannibal named Tristicloke who, according to the chronicler, ‘spared not to steal children, and to kill women, on whose flesh he fed’. Although he gave no specific location for the tale, Holinshed dated Tristicloke’s story to 1341. Later in the same decade as Holinshed published his
Chronicles
, Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie published a
History and Chronicles of Scotland
, telling a similar story of flesh eating, but dating his incident to 1460.

The first confirmed, written version of the story of Sawney Beane dates from Captain Charles Johnson’s book
A General and True History of the Lives and Sections of the Most Famous Highwaymen, Murderers, Street-Robbers, &c.
, which appeared in 1734, but this too is probably based on a similar story which appeared thirty years earlier. The most popular, and generally accepted, version of Beane’s tale is found in John Nicholson’s
Historical and Traditional Tales Connected with the South of Scotland
which first appeared in 1834.

Today, many historians insist that the Beane tale was conjured up by the English as a means of demonising the Scots at the time of the Jacobite uprisings under Bonnie Prince Charlie. Certainly the accusation of cannibalism has often been used by a superior power looking for an excuse to subjugate a weaker society; in this case, however, the theory does not hold much water. When Captain Johnson first published his story, the Jacobite troubles were still in their infancy and, if his story was based on one three decades older, then the connection becomes even more tenuous. Add to this the fact that the majority of evildoers in Johnson’s book are English, and the Scottish connection falls apart entirely.

It is our belief that, in a sense, the Beane story is true. There may never have been an individual named Sawney Beane, but
his story is probably based on several similar tales, which appear to be factual. Over decades of retelling, the stories of man-eating hermits melded together in much the same way that the legends of Robin Hood and King Arthur were compilations of much earlier, fact-based tales, blended together to form a new, and more potent, story.