After reading the text and truly understanding Tom Dudley and Edwin Stephen's situation, I am one who says they did what they must to survive. At that time, society thought of those men as monsters not realizing that they were doing what they had to do get on that lifeboat. As the story reads, that the boat was drifting on the ocean, and was probably more than 1000 miles from land; that on the eighteenth day, when they had been seven days without food and five without water, D. proposed to S. that lots should be cast who should be put to death to save the rest, and that they afterwards thought it would be better to kill the boy that their lives should be saved; that on the twentieth day D., with the assent of S., killed the boy, and both D.
