However, after one week, they had exhausted the island's natural resources.

[intertribal]

So I'm looking up cannibalism, as usual, and stumbled upon this gem from wikipedia:

When the whaleship Essex was rammed and sunk by a whale in 1820, the captain opted to sail 3000 miles upwind to Chile rather than 1400 miles downwind to the Marquesas because he had heard the Marquesans were cannibals. Ironically many of the survivors of the shipwreck resorted to cannibalism in order to survive.

The Hits Keep Coming: The abnormally large whale that attacked the Essex "did so while the men were pursuing and killing other members of the whale's pod."

Return of The Hits: Instead of the Marquesas, the captain wanted to try to sail to the Society Islands, "which were further away but were presumed to be safer."

Sometimes The Hits Come Back... Again: The captain survived (by eating his seventeen-year-old cousin, "whom he had sworn to protect"), returned to Nantucket, and was given command of another whaleship, which ran into rocks near Hawaii and sank (again, he survived).  "This ended Pollard's whaling career."

Comments

pretty tangential, but hapless Capt. Pollard put it in my mind....

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Have you ever read The Man-eating Myth? The thesis of that was basically that there never were any people who ate other people as a daily food source. People eat people when stuck in a Capt. Pollard/Donner Pass-type situation, and people eat bits of people ceremonially, but people don't eat people the way they eat fish or pigs or cows--according to that author. What they do do, though, is ascribe that characteristic to the Other.

I read the book in an introductory anthropology course in college. I didn't pursue anthropology, and I don't know what the status of that book is now (how it was received, what academe's opinion of it is), but from a logic point of view, it struck me as very persuasive.

Re: pretty tangential, but hapless Capt. Pollard put it in my mind....

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

I haven't read it, but that book is actually mentioned extensively in wikipedia's Cannibalism page! But yeah, I would definitely say that sounds like a good argument.