Talk:Custom of the sea/Archive 1

Archive 1

Naming

I don't see any source for this being known as 'The Custom of the Sea'. You have quoted cases where cannibalism has taken place, all of which have differing rationales as to why the eventual cannibalee was chosen. So, what is the custom? Is there even such a thing as 'the custom of the sea' - where has it been referred to as this?

There is no canibalism in The Lord of the Flies. I'm taking that down.

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I removed most of the content from the article (much of it involving cannibalism) because there were no sources and was irrelevant to the title of the article. napstein. 2 May 2009 (UTC)

The 1915 Marsden book "Documents relating to law and custom of the sea" is out of copyright and is available online at http://www.archive.org/details/documentsrelatin01marsuoft. It has references to "custom of the sea" dating back to 1630 in various places and would be a reliable source for a Wikipedia editor who wants to expand this article. napstein 2 May 2009 (UTC)

I note that User:134.173.88.173 reverted my wholesale changes to the article with the comment "Reverting Deletion. Information was relevant and useful. Please refer to Neil Hanson's Custom of the Sea which agrees with the information on this page".

I am reverting this reversion for the following reasons:

a) Wikipedia requires multiple sources, and only one has been put forward.

b) Neil Hanson did indeed write a book with the name "The Custom of the Sea", with the byline "A shocking true tale of shipwreck, murder and the last taboo" (http://www.neilhanson.co.uk/book3.php). This book is about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._v._Dudley_and_Stephens. It is not a scholarly work on the Custom of the Sea.

c) My own investigations have not led me to any sources that state that there is one Custom of the Sea as desribed in the previous version of this article.

d) This content would be more properly placed in an article with a title like "Survival Cannibalism".

napstein 2 May 2009 (UTC)

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Consider merging this article with Consulate of the Sea or correcting the references in there. Something does not match.--Paco ✉ 17:19, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

I would oppose such a merge. The two topics are not related. 216.36.188.184 (talk) 00:12, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

I too would oppose the merge, it's not all formal law. Tristyn^⌘ 06:54, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

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I'm going to make a list here so hopefully we'll have some more direction:

• Parley
• Law of salvage
• Man overboard
• Seamanship (maybe, maybe just also see)
• Pirate code (maybe, maybe just also see)
• Admiralty law (just the also see)

Tristyn^⌘ 06:54, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Cleanup

This article is highly problematic. The name is not appropriate for its content. (See previous discussion!)

This comes across as disorganized trivia, mostly. 81.229.174.188 (talk) 10:29, 25 March 2019 (UTC)

I came across this article via R v. Dudley and Stephens, where it states that the defendants (and, it seems implied, by the exact wording of this article's title) cited "customs of the sea" to defend the killing of one of their group to survive (not so much the cannibalism)

I expected to find a list of several more 'customs', though not all of them as gruesome. It seems plausible that there was indeed some 'unwritten' rules, most likely several different versions, concerning early seafaring, that simply haven't been added to this article. Instead, some people might have misunderstood the "customs of the sea" to pertain ónly to cannibalism.

Or, I could be completely wrong. If any grouping of customs exists, this could be quite an interesting article. Otherwise, its contents should be moved to Cannibalism, or R v. Dudley and Stephens, or something similar.

Simply having a niche subset of cannibalism at sea as a standalone article, seems unnecessary. 87.209.236.59 (talk) 14:33, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

A recent documentary on Irish public radio lends support to the title and content of the article. The documentary is titled "The Custom of the Sea" and refers to a 19 century incident of cannibalism on a ship that was damaged and left adrift traveling from Canada to Ireland. "Custom of the Sea" seems to me a credible euphemism that might have been used to describe this practice, without needing to refer to any other "customs". The documentary's description of the incident might be worth adding to this article, as well as its reference to a later cannibalism incident which resulted in the prosecution of the captain, thus leading to the end of the "custom". Objection1 (talk) 22:45, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Anecdotally, I've always known this term as a euphemism for cannibalism at sea in dire circumstances. I don't have a good ref though. --Ef80 (talk) 09:43, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

I believe the "cleanup" template can now be removed from the article. That lot drawing prior to survival cannibalism was a "custom of the sea" is now well-established through several sources and the custom and its variants are described in detail. Unless someone protests I'll remove the "cleanup" template in a few days. Gawaon (talk) 16:34, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Done. Gawaon (talk) 17:31, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

References

St Christopher case

The St Christopher case seems very dubious to me. The section claims "the judge pardoned them". But pardon is part of the royal prerogative of mercy; judges do not have the power of pardon. Nor could he have acquitted them: in a murder case, the trial must be by jury, so it would be the jury that acquitted, not the judge. There are also no names given for the defendants or their victim. All of this was true of English law already in the 17th century. I strongly suspect the story is apocryphal. Hairy Dude (talk) 22:46, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

Might be worth checking out what the source (Simpson 1984, pp. 122–123) has to saw about this case. Maybe some of the details got mangled in our summary. Gawaon (talk) 18:03, 29 November 2023 (UTC)

I've now checked what exactly Simpson says about this case and have adapted the section accordingly. All in all our old account was already quite accurate, except for a garbled sentence about "a post-1884 medical work" – actually it was a 1641 medical work, and Dutch rather than British. The judge's "pardon" is explicitly mentioned, and no jury is mentioned. I suppose English law in newly established colonies might not always have closely corresponded to the ideals formulated on the mainland, or else Tulp, being Dutch, might have made a mistake in his case summary. But we must stick to what the sources say, and Simpson doesn't seem to consider these details as problematic. Gawaon (talk) 12:37, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

Article topic

This article claims to be about customs of the sea generally, but aside from the first sentence, it's exclusively about survival cannibalism at sea. Should it be expanded to cover other maritime traditions? Or moved, and the first sentence altered?— Moriwen (talk) 22:28, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

In my experience, when people talk or write about "the custom of the sea", they do indeed refer to survival cannibalism at sea, so I'd say the article title is appropriate even in the absence of further coverage. That said, if you know of other customs sometimes called such that could be covered here and don't yet have an article of their own, feel free to add them. A few other customs – such as Man overboard and The captain goes down with the ship – are already linked in the "See also" section. Gawaon (talk) 06:27, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

If you check the talk page archive, you'll see that this issue has been discussed before. I agree with you that the term was a widely used euphemism for survival cannibalism at sea, particularly in maritime and naval communities in the Age of Sail. --Ef80 (talk) 13:57, 3 June 2024 (UTC)