58th Issue: Cannibals and Child Soldiers

Warning for cannibalism, murder, rape and suicide. 

I’m kind of in a cranky mood tonight, so here are two kind of depressing stories. The first is about Alexander Pearce. He was an Irish convict, who was transported to Tasmania, Australia. His crime was stealing six pairs of shoes, and then escaping when he was caught, so he was sent to a penal colony.

 

 

In 1822, Alexander along with seven other prisoners, plotted an escape. They only made it fifteen days before they ran out of food, and drew straws to find out who they would kill and eat to survive. One person was killed with an axe, and three people got scared and ran back to the penal colony. One of them died on the way. The other three kept moving, and one person was bitten on the foot by a snake. They carried him for a while, but then killed him as well. Eventually there were only two people left – Robert Greenhill, and Alexander Pearce.

Alexander ended up waiting till Robert was asleep, stealing his axe, and killing him. He ate bits of his body, and stole food from an Aboriginal campsite. He came upon an old friend who was a sheep herder, and began getting involved in a sheep-stealing ring which led to his capture again one hundred days later. Alexander was sent back to the penal colony he escaped from.

The next year, Alexander escaped again, with a young prisoner named Thomas Cox. He was recaptured in ten days and tried and convicted of murdering and eating Thomas Cox. Alexander was short, and thin, so it was hard for others to believe he was capable of ‘banqueting on human flesh’. However, he was found with parts of Thomas’s body in his pockets even though they hadn’t yet run out of food. Alexander’s excuse was that he killed Thomas when they reached a river and he learned that the young man could not swim, which isn’t really an excuse at all. Alexander was hanged in 1824, and rumor has it that his last words were “Man’s flesh is delicious. It tastes far better than fish or pork."

Another depressing story I learned about recently that is not the same time or place or even related at all to cannibalism, is the story of the Himeyuri students of World War II. The Himeyuri students were called the Lily Corps in English, and they were a group of about two hundred students and twenty teachers of the Okinawa Daiichi Women’s High School that were formed into a unit of nurses for the Japanese Army during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. The students were told that the army would defeat the Americans in just a few days, and they brought school supplies with them so they wouldn’t fall behind when it was time to return to school. However, only a few of them survived by the end of the war.

 

 

The students were told that they’d be working in hospitals away from the fighting, but the Himeyuri students worked on the front lines, performing amputations and burying the dead for the duration of the battle, which lasted three months. At the end of the war, those who still survived hid in caves with injured and dead civilians and soldiers.

The reason so many of the Himeyuri students died was because of the way the unit was dissolved. Only about 20 students were killed, but then in June, three months after they had been sent out, they were told to go home. Many of them died in the crossfire. Fifty students and teachers hid inside a shelter and were killed by US forces who did not know anyone was in there. In the week after the dissolution order, 80% of the students and teachers were killed. Some also ended up committing suicide by hand grenade, cyanide, or jumping off cliffs because they were afraid that the American soldiers would rape them.

In 1946, a monument was built to honor those who died. The survivors are an integral part of maintaining the facility as well as the Himeyuri Peace Museum. There are several still alive today. The museum is modelled after the school building where the girls had studied, and contains portraits, memoirs and testimonials from survivors. 

If you have more cheerful (or not) interesting niche topics you'd like to know more about let me know! I'm always looking for ideas for the next issue of the newsletter.