"The Maneater's Escape" / OCCULT READS PRESESNTS: "Llewellyn's Complete Book of Divination: Your Definitive Source for Learning Predictive & Prophetic Techniques"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
September 20
The Maneater's Escape
(Affiliate
disclosure: Some links on this blog may earn us a small commission at no cost
to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.)
On
September 20th, 1822, eight convicts overpowered their overseer while cutting
Huon pine on the shore of Macquarie Harbour, on Tasmania's brutal Sarah Island penal station,
and fled into the surrounding wilderness. Only one of them, an Irish shoe thief
named Alexander Pearce, walked out alive, having survived by eating his fellow
escapees over the course of a hundred and ten days lost in some of the harshest
terrain on Earth. It's a genuinely dark departure from this blog's usual
territory, a true-crime story rather than an occult one, but it earns its place
here through an oddly persistent thread: even two centuries later, the popular
retelling of Pearce's story still can't get its own basic facts straight, and
his remains ended up entangled with one of the nineteenth century's most
consequential pseudo-sciences.
Even
the date most commonly attached to this story gets the year wrong by two…
Some modern calendars list Pearce's escape as a 1824 event. He was executed on July 19th, 1824, meaning he was already dead by the time that year's September rolled around; there was no escape left for him to make. The actual, documented escape happened on September 20th, 1822, the beginning of the journey that made him infamous. Pearce was recaptured alone that December, and when he confessed to cannibalizing his companions, the authorities didn't believe him, assuming he was covering for men they thought were still alive as bushrangers in the wilderness. A second escape followed in 1823, this time with a young convict named Thomas Cox, and Pearce was recaptured within ten days carrying pieces of Cox's body in his pockets, evidence considerably harder to dismiss. He was tried, convicted, and hanged the following July. The two-year gap between the real escape and the commonly cited one isn't a small error; it's the difference between a story that actually happened and one that, as dated, couldn't have.
Pearce's
most widely repeated line, delivered, according to popular legend, moments
before his execution, “Man's flesh is delicious. It tastes far better than fish
or pork,” appears in article after article as settled fact. It's worth noting
that at least one filmmaker who researched the case closely for a 2008 docudrama
deliberately left the line out of the finished film, judging it probably
apocryphal. No contemporary court record or newspaper account from 1824 that
survives in the historical record actually documents Pearce saying it at the
gallows. The Hobart Town Gazette's own contemporary coverage, by
contrast, described him as someone who didn't outwardly appear “laden with the
weight of human blood,” a considerably less theatrical, and more historically
grounded, portrait than the quote that's since eclipsed it.
The
strangest afterlife of this story belongs to Pearce's own remains. Following
his execution, his body was dissected, as was customary for the era's most
notorious capital crimes, and his skull eventually made its way into the
collection of Samuel George Morton, an American physician and one of the
founding figures of craniometry, the practice of measuring skulls to draw
conclusions about intelligence and character. Morton's research became a
cornerstone of what's now recognized as scientific racism, using skull
collections exactly like Pearce's to argue that race and even criminality could
be read directly from cranial measurements, conclusions modern scholarship has
thoroughly discredited both morally and methodologically. It's a genuinely
uncomfortable footnote worth stating plainly rather than glossing over: a
body-reading practice with real historical roots alongside palmistry and
physiognomy in the broader catalogue of divinatory arts got weaponized, in
Morton's hands, into a tool for justifying racial hierarchy. Pearce's skull
remains at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia today, and Tasmanian advocates have
spent years asking for its return.
None
of this diminishes the genuine, grim fascination of Pearce's story, which
inspired the 1874 novel For the Term of His Natural
Life and continues to draw filmmakers and historians more than
two centuries later. It simply means the version worth telling is the one
anchored to September 20th, 1822, not a year that had already ended for him,
built on contemporary court records rather than a probably invented gallows
quip, and honest about how his own remains were later pressed into service for
a pseudo-science that deserved neither his skull nor its own credibility.
Modern Occultist is proud
to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the
newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of the legitimate
divinatory arts phrenology's pseudo-science distorted for its own ends, we're
recommending a proper guide to reading the body the way it was actually meant
to be read.
By
Richard Webster | Llewellyn Worldwide
Richard
Webster's sprawling survey of divinatory practice covers more than thirty
distinct systems, tarot and astrology alongside genuinely obscure methods, and
includes real, careful treatment of the body-reading arts that phrenology's
pseudo-scientific offshoot borrowed its surface language from: palmistry,
physiognomy, and related practices tracing back centuries as legitimate
divinatory traditions in their own right, long before craniometry twisted a
superficially similar premise toward racist ends. The book's real value here is context: situating
genuine divinatory body-reading traditions honestly alongside the era's other
predictive arts helps readers understand exactly where phrenology's
pseudo-scientific claims to be measuring “criminality” or “intelligence”
departed from any legitimate divinatory or spiritual tradition, borrowing
surface trappings while abandoning the actual practice and ethics underneath
them.
This
is a broad survey rather than a deep dive into any single tradition, and
readers wanting the fuller history of scientific racism and craniometry
specifically should pair it with a dedicated academic source. But for readers
of this magazine wanting to understand what legitimate body-based divination
actually looks like, separate from the pseudo-science that borrowed its
vocabulary, this remains a genuinely thorough place to start.