When Good Cannibles Go Bad

I think I have finally figured out the solution to the old cannibal and missionary problem. Mathematicians have been teasing students with this one for a century, and any solution must involve some algebra and the kind of logic that makes my eyes spin in little tiny circles. The setup goes like this; three cannibals and three missionaries arrive at a river too wide and strong to ford or swim. There is one boat on their side of the river but it only holds two people. And should the cannibals ever out number the missionaries, it will be Christians for lunch. So how does everybody get across the river safely? See, my first thought was that the solution was simple; the Christians cook and eat the cannibals and then after a nice post lunch nap, row across the river. However I have been informed that solution is not permitted. To which I inform the rule makers, “Nertz”.
*
What brought this problem back to mind was a discovery last week in Vienna by a cleaning woman, also called a “reinemachen frau”. She entered a ground floor 2 bedroom unit in a subsidized apartment building for the indigent mental ill who had refused treatment to find 19 year old Robert Ackerman, a German from Cologne who had moved in this month, with blood and raw meat smeared around his mouth. He calmly asked her to call the police because he had murdered and eaten his roommate, 49 year old Josef Schweiger. When the cops arrived they found the confessed anthrophagus calmly waiting, and in a second bedroom the earthly remains of heir Schweiger, gutted like a trout from throat to genitals. The police insist that “no organs had been removed from the breast or stomach areas” but did admit that his brain and tongue were on a plate in the refrigerator. The Austrian cops said they think that Robert “may be mentally confused”, but that’s outside my expertise. All I know for certain is that Robert obviously likes leftovers.








Okay, clearly the first trip has to be two missionaries, (2xMM). Then one rows back to pick up…Three cannibals because they quickly ate the lone missionary left behind. And then they ate the one who rowed back, so that won’t work. But if, on the first trip, it’s one of each (1M + 1C) then the missionary can row back knowing his two companions equal the two cannibals left behind. Then he can take…wait. That won’t work either.
*
One neighbor told reporters that, “We were watching the television one night when we realized there was a sort of howling coming from outside…we saw him (Robert) squatting down on all fours, howling at the moon…he was not wearing anything. It was really freaky.” Another neighbor reported seeing Robert pouring blood out a window. And yet nobody called the police, or even notified the management. I guess living next to that kind of hostel you expect to make certain accommodations. The residents are supposed to receive weekly visits from a “mental health professional”, but it’s easy to imagine what those bureaucratic “check ups” likely consist of.
*
The Germans just retried their own anthropophagite, Mr. Amin Meiwes, who ingested a computer programmer who had responded to his online advertisement for a victim: talk about truth in advertising. After dissecting the vorarephilic programmer into individual packets Amin then packed them away in a freezer and feasted on gourmet versions of his victim over an entire summer. Speaking of his ‘passed on’ repast, Amin insisted, “He was closer to me with every bite”. Makes you all warm inside, doesn’t it? Still, couldn’t he have just called tech support? Amin didn’t attract any attention until he advertised for a second victim. And even then, since he’d fricasseed and consumed the evidence, he might have escaped arrest if he hadn’t video taped the whole process. And then there was the skull he kept in his freezer. As your mother probably warned, don’t play with you food: it could get you arrested.
*
Amin explained his rational to the court quite rationally: “I wanted to eat him but I didn’t want to kill him.” While the original court considered that a mitigating argument, a higher court ordered a retrial and this time Amin was sentenced to 15 years to life. Boy, you eat one lousy programmer…
*
Okay, 1M rows 1C across. That gives us 1C on the far shore. The M returns and a second C takes the third C across. Now we have 2 Cs on the far shore, 1C in the boat and 3Ms on our side of the river. The C rows back and lets 2 Ms row across. On M gets out and one C gets in, and the M&C row back. You know, I think I’ve cracked it.
*
It was Christopher Columbus, the intrepid explorer, who invented the term cannibal. But then he thought the “Caribs” – residents of the Caribbean - were Japanese. And since they weren’t Christian they must be cannibals. I can’t think of another explorer who misinterpreted more of what he saw until the invention of Captain Spalding, the African explorer, (Did someone call him Schnorer? Hooray, hooray, hooray!) After all, went the logic, no Christian ever ate another person. And that fundamentally flawed observation illustrates the golden rule of cannibalism, which is that the perpetrators are always somebody else. We never eat people. We just talk about it.
*
It’s called the Blood Libel, and Christians have been libeling Muslims, Jews, Hindus and Zoroastrians with this crime almost as long as there have been Christians, certainly longer then Uruguay has fielded a soccer team. And everybody else has returned the complement. But until you are starving, not just hungry from a skipped meal but starving to death, you cannot understand how true hunger could overcome a rather fundamental human inhibition against cannibalism. Unless of course you are just nuts: in which case just being in need of a little nosh could be enough justification to eat your roommate.
*
A Viennese judge ordered Robert moved to Goellersdorf, in lower Austria, where he will be kept, authorities felt required to add, in a solitary cell. I guess that also means he will be dining alone. That is the usual definition of a cannibal, I believe. Reinhard Haller, a psychiatrist who has studied cannibals, diagnosed Robert from a distance for the London Times as suffering from either, “…a psychotic reaction triggered by alcohol or other drugs, or severe sadistic derangement.” Thank goodness the Times located this guy, otherwise we would have never figured out what was wrong with poor Robert. Now of we could just find a cure for what ails Josep.
*
There are endo-cannibals and exo-cannibals, being those who eat their own tribe members (in some kind if ritual) and those who eat only others (often in a ritual). The cannibals in our problem with the missionaries are all exo-cannibals. As was William Seabrook, a self confessed occultist and writer for Vanity Fair and the New York Times, who, back in 1931, confessed to cooking and eating a human rump roast, which he claimed he got from a Paris hospital orderly. Seabrook favorably compared the taste to veal. Few others have been so broad minded, and the ultimate insult to cannibals was probably delivered by Democratic President Lyndon Johnston, who suggested that the only difference between cannibals and liberals was that cannibals only eat their enemies. But then Johnston didn’t live to see conservative Republicans turn on Senator Larry Craig from Idaho, fellow right wing paragon and public restroom encounter devote. His fellow conservatives ate his still beating heart (assuming he had one).
*

The addendum to any cannibal recitation must be the tale of the Tolais, a band of New Guinea natives who killed and ate a Fijian Methodist Minister and four missionaries in 1878. In the Victorian spirit of Christian forgiveness the Methodists immediately burned down a dozen or so villages and killed a lot of Tolais. But they didn’t eat any of them, which was the point of the lesson plan.
*
One hundred thirty-two years later, after the Tolias had enjoyed the introduction of poverty and invading diseases, they made an abject apology for offending Western morality. That ceremony is likely to mark the conclusion to the golden age of human cannibalism. In retrospect it can be said that they ate a few of us, and in return we almost wiped them out, and then we got them apologize.
*
It makes you wonder who really ate whom, doesn’t it?
*
ps.; the solution to the missionary and cannibal problem requires that you end up with one cannibal in the boat and two on the near shore. Good luck.
- 30 -