DEPARTMENT OF MODEST PROPOSALS |
| DIRECTOR Sharleton Keats |
ABOUT
This transaction, says Doctor Forster, appears almost incredible; it is not easy to conceive how any but the most depraved of human beings could be driven to the necessity of murdering and feeding upon their fellow-creatures, in such a place as Newfoundland, where fish abounds, and where, by their own account, there are great numbers of birds and other ani* mals. And yet horrible as is this transaction as stated by Hakluyt, Doctor Forster has thought proper to render it still more so by a direct falsification of Hakluyt's account; for his own relation runs thus: " One of them eame behind another who was digging up some roots, and killed him with a view to prepare himself a meal from his fellow-creature's flesh; and a third smelling the delicious odour of broiled meat went up to the murderer, and by threats and menaces extorted from him a share in this shocking meal." Now, according to Hakluyt's account, so far from the third person forcing from the murderer and taking with him a share in the horrid repast, knowing what it was, it is manifest that he was totally ignorant of what it consisted, and only expressed his anger that he should enjoy, as he thought, plenty, and at the same time suffer his companions to starve. He could not be a partaker Of it, because it is plain that the murderer had finished his meal before the altercation begafl, from his words: " the meat that I had." It is farther evident, that the third man was impressed with a proper sense of the enormity of the other's crime, by his making a report of it to the captain, whose horror on the discovery is very fully shewn by his conduct on the occasion. But the idea which Doctor Forster's account seems intended to convey is, that they were all equally guilty and equally ready to perpetrate those horrid and detestable crimes.