JOSEPH CUMMINS is the author of The Snow Train, a novel, and the editor of The Greatest Search and Rescue Stories Ever Told. He lives in New Jersey.

(from the chapter Cannibalism, From Ice Blink: The Tragic Fate of Sir John Franklin's Lost Polar Expedition, p.100-1)
"One of these men, apparently a seaman suffering the last stages of starvation, scurvy, and exposure, soon died. His corpse, however, wasn't buried; it was left where it lay. One can only imagine Crozier at his ebb, his ragged greatcoat flapping in the wind, dying men collapsed all around him, the icy Passage mocking him. His eyes, like those of the men, may have gone blank with hopelessness. It had been his driving leadership, after all, that had carried them to a place from which it now seemed they could never escape. The survivors, who at every step of the awful march looked to him to sustain them, could not have helped but notice that Crozier too had reached his end. Something rather like an eclipse swept over them all. This is quite likely the moment when Crozier proposed the unthinkable. He may have asked the surviving surgeons point-blank: without food, how long could they live? The answer would have been obvious: without something to eat, sooner or later, they would all die like the seaman lying before them, like so many others they had left behind.
Faced with certain death, Crozier was forced to make a horrible and repugnant decision, the only one left him. It was certainly Crozier who made it: he was the ranking officer and among the few officers the native Inuit later reported seeing alive. He apparently chose life. ...The dead man, who had served so long and faithfully, could serve his shipmates again. With provisions exhausted, and still far from the river and with the crews broken beyond all forbearance, Crozier decided to cannibalize the dead."