In the fall of 1899, the schooner C.C. Funk was lost to the harsh, unforgiving waters off the coast of Alaska, leaving its surviving crew adrift in a small boat with perilously few supplies. The three men, Charles West, John Daly, and Frank Anderson, were left to the mercy of the sea with only a handful of crackers and a little fresh water. As days turned into a week, their meager provisions vanished, and the gnawing pains of starvation and an agonizing thirst began to take a severe toll, pushing them to the absolute limits of human endurance.
The relentless suffering soon fractured the sanity of the crew. Frank Anderson was the first to break, descending into a state of raving madness from the constant deprivation. For West and Daly, the situation became a terrifying fight for their own lives against both the elements and their crazed companion. In a final, desperate act, they killed Anderson. Overcome by a thirst that had become unendurable, the two survivors then committed a horrifying act of necessity: they drank their mate’s blood to stay alive.
This grim sacrament was only the beginning of their ordeal. To fend off the gnawing hunger that threatened to consume them, West and Daly resorted to the ultimate taboo of the sea: survival cannibalism, eating portions of their fallen comrade’s flesh. When they were finally rescued by a passing vessel, the two men were hardly recognizable as human. They were described as “mere skeletons” and “almost raving maniacs” themselves, a testament to the profound physical and psychological trauma of their horrifying fight for life.
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