In 1838, Edgar Allan Poe published a novel about four shipwrecked sailors who killed and ate one of their own, a man named Richard Parker. Forty-six years later, the four shipwrecked crew of the English yacht Mignonette killed and ate one of their own. The seventeen-year-old cabin boy. His name was Richard Parker.

Poe's novel was called The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. He published it in New York in 1838 at the age of twenty-nine. It was the only complete novel he ever wrote. He died eleven years later in a Baltimore gutter, of unknown causes. The relevant passage is in chapter twelve. Four sailors are adrift in a lifeboat after a storm has wrecked their whaler the Grampus. They are starving. One of them, a former mutineer named Richard Parker, proposes drawing lots to decide who will be killed and eaten. He loses. They stab him. They eat him. They survive.

On the nineteenth of May, 1884, a small English yacht named the Mignonette set sail from Southampton on a delivery voyage to Sydney. She had a crew of four: Captain Tom Dudley, Mate Edwin Stephens, sailor Edmund Brooks, and a seventeen-year-old cabin boy. On the third of July, fifteen hundred miles off the coast of Africa, a storm sank her. The four men reached a thirteen-foot dinghy. They had two tins of turnips and no fresh water. They drifted for nineteen days. The cabin boy drank seawater and became delirious. On the twenty-fifth of July, Dudley cut the cabin boy's throat. He, Stephens, and Brooks ate him. They were rescued four days later. The cabin boy's name was Richard Parker.

The case became R versus Dudley and Stephens. The Queen's Bench Divisional Court decided on the ninth of December, 1884, that necessity was not a defence to murder. Dudley and Stephens were sentenced to hang. The Crown commuted the sentence to six months. The case is still cited in every common-law courtroom on earth as the leading authority on the limits of self-preservation. In every law textbook, the boy is still called Richard Parker. In Yann Martel's novel Life of Pi, the Bengal tiger in the lifeboat is also called Richard Parker. Cannibalism at sea has only one name.

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