In this episode of Shipwreck Tales, Graeme Hill is joined by John McCrystal to revisit the grim and morally complex story of the Mignonette, a small British yacht bound for Sydney in 1884. What begins as a delivery voyage becomes a desperate fight for survival when the vessel sinks in the South Atlantic, leaving four men adrift in a tiny dinghy with almost no food or water. McCrystal traces the ordeal from shipwreck to rescue, and then into the courtroom, where the survivors’ actions forced one of maritime law’s most enduring questions: can necessity ever justify taking an innocent life?