Eleven persons were still on board, namely, the Heer, his wife and servant, the mate, and seven seamen; it was evident that one must be sacrificed to prolong the existence of the rest, and mentally they resolved that whoever became the victim, should be cooked, lest the flesh might sicken them again......
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE FATAL VOYAGE—HOW THEY CAST LOTS.
"I am aware," says the author of Antonina, "of the tendency in some readers to denounce truth itself as improbable, unless their own personal experience has borne witness to it." In this spirit, some may denounce the fatalities of the Heer's voyage as improbabilities, though the hideous circumstance of human beings in extremity of hunger destroying each other for food, has been too well and too terribly established in many instances—such as the wreck of the French frigate Medusa; when the British frigate Nautilus was lost on a solitary rock in the Mediterranean; during the famine on board the American ship Peggy; and on many other occasions.
But to resume our little quarto.
The mate conducted the Heer Van Estell to the capstan, where the starving seamen stood in a silent group, and then he informed him in a hoarse whisper—
"That unless they contrived a means of furnishing themselves with food, they must all die of starvation; it was impossible for them to subsist for another day. That there were eleven persons on board, and they had come to the resolution of determining by lot who should die that the rest might live."
"Eleven on board!" reiterated the Heer, faintly, for his poor wife Grudule was one of these.
"Eleven," added a seaman named Adrian Crudelius, with a wild glare in his eye; "if one dies, ten may live. Bring your wife on deck, sir; she must take her chance with the rest. There must be no distinction here."
"Nay," said George Carpinger, "we may excuse her presence, and so spare her some of this horror; but her husband shall draw for her."