Bloodlust : The unsavoury tale of Alexander Pearce, the convict cannibal 

Citation

Bleszynski, Nick. Bloodlust : The unsavoury tale of Alexander Pearce, the convict cannibal, North Sydney: Random House, 2008.

Annotation

This is one hell of a gripping survival story.

8 convicts escape the most remote and brutal penal colony, Macquarie Harbour in Tasmania in 1820’s. ‘8 of us are starting, but how many will be there at the finish? I wondered.’ It’s a tale mostly about starving, relentless hunger, the cold dense lashing of rain, known only to a few bleak places on this earth, the exhaustion and the impassable rugged primal terrain and then the fear of who was to be eaten next, ‘No man will know what he will do until driven by hunger.’ In the words of Alexander Pearce who tells the tale of ‘eat or be eaten…. that was the terrible choice’.

The escape from a wretched and brutal tyrannical penal system delivered the 8 bolters into a further harsh tyrannical primal landscape. From a solid screen of springy green thicket, to ‘cutting grass’, edges keen as razors, to mountainous crags and then the starvation. ‘God I could eat a piece of man… he sighed.’ And so the murders, the lies, the betrayal,’ our degraded souls had surely descended to the lowest circle of damnation.’

Alexander Pearce later survived such horrors and another escape, only to be hanged in 1824. He left only a few written pages of a confession.

‘Everyman has limits of hope and faith and I had already gone far beyond mine.’

Alexander Pearce's skull on display