Edgar Allen Poe is what you would literally call – or rather called in literary circles – the master of the dark arts for his penchant for writing dark stories and poems. Such is the case with one of his novels titled The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket that tells the tale of four sailors lost at sea.
There comes up a suggestion by one of them to vote to determine who among them will be sacrificed to feed the remaining three. And boy, oh, boy – the loser is the very fellow who came up with the idea. His name was Richard Parker.
>>>Fast-forward 46 Years Later…
It is July 5, 1884 and an English vessel dubbed the Mignonette embarks on a voyage to Australia. En route, the yacht is smashed in a windstorm, and the four-man crew has no option but to abandon ship and retreat into their 13-foot lifeboat. The men were 700 miles from land and without any actual food source, the y slowly began to starve, and their wild instincts began showing. That’s when the voting idea sprung to Richard Parker’s mind. The other men justified that they were married with families and that the young cabin boy – Richard Parker – was dying anyways. It was then that they descended on him and chopped off his jugular with a penknife.
Parker was to provide some good amount of human flesh until they were rescued. The interesting thing in this whole story is: was it just a coincidence or did Poe experience a harbinger? If your name is Richard Parker, careful not to roam into the high seas. Turns out the name is one bore by several seamen – both actual and fictional – who have been shipwrecked in the history of sailing. And armed with this information, author Yann Martel decided to name the shipwrecked tiger Richard Parker in his book titled the Life of Pi.
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