In 1838, the American writer Edgar Poe wrote The Adventure Tale of Arthur Gordon Pym. It tells how, after a shipwreck, four survivors ended up on the high seas. Driven to despair by hunger, three of them kill and eat the fourth. In the book, his name is Richard Parker.
In 1884 the ship "Mignonette" is shipwrecked. The four survivors, like the heroes of Edgar Poe, ended up in the same boat. After many days of wandering across the sea, mad with hunger, three kill and eat the fourth. The name of this fourth turned out to be Richard Parker.
Let's remember this real story in more detail …
In June 1884 Southampton sailed the yacht Mignonette. The yacht was built on the Thames by order of an Australian millionaire who was going to explore the Great Barrier Reef on it. Captain Thomas Dudley picked up the crew members, and the customer of the yacht, without waiting, went to the research site on an ocean liner. Finally, the yacht also headed for the shores of Australia with the crew of Captain Thomas Dudley, his assistant Edwin Stevens, sailor Edmund Brooks and cabin boy, a completely inexperienced 17-year-old boy Richard Parker.
This guy, like many young people of that time, ran away from his parents to go on a sea voyage. Captain Dudley wrote in his log on the day of sail: “June 28th. Change of weather. We went out into the open ocean. The yacht is fine, steering well. Jung is a bad sailor."
Two weeks later, a storm hit the yacht. A huge wave hit the side, the yacht began to sink. People managed to get into the boat, but in a panic, Richard Parker dropped a barrel of water and a box of provisions into the water. The captain had to return to the sinking yacht to see if there was anything left to eat. He only found two cans of canned turnips.
These cans were enough for four people for literally two days. One day, the captain tied a jackknife to an oar and contrived to kill a turtle. Then it was possible to catch fish in a similar way.
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Currents and winds carried the yacht further and further from the shipping lanes. The first did not stand the test of the cabin boy. He began to drink sea water and quickly became weak. The others were also emaciated, but not so much. Captain Dudley did his best to keep the team spirit alive.
The yacht has been drifting for 16 days. It seems that hunger and thirst broke these people. One way or another, but they began to talk about the choice: either die of hunger, or …
The stories of cannibalism on the high seas among those in disaster were known to the crew of the yacht. The sailors also knew about the point of view according to which these cases were justified for extreme situations. Captain Dudley pondered this problem for a long time and was tormented by doubts. But, in the end, he decided: he offered to draw lots - who to sacrifice for the sake of saving the rest. But by this moment the boy was so weak that he fell into an unconscious state. And his fate was decided by itself …
The sailor Edmund Brooks flatly refused to participate in this terrible affair. He moved as far as possible while Dudley and Stevens recited several prayers over the sleeping Parker. Then Dudley shook him by the shoulder and said, "Wake up, my boy, your hour has come."
They slit the boy's throat and collected the gushing blood in a rusty water bucket. Then, exhausted from dehydration and almost going crazy with fear and doubt, they drank warm blood. Captain Dudley dismembered the bleeding corpse with his folding knife. Brooks, exhausted from hunger, could not resist and joined the terrible feast …
“I prayed fervently that God would forgive us for such an act,” Dudley said, sobbing at the trial. - It was my decision, but it was justified by extreme necessity. As a result, I only lost one team member; otherwise everyone would have died.”
On the remains of Parker, the sufferers lived until July 29, when the boat was noticed from the ship "Montezuma". As the ship approached, neither the captain nor the other two members of the yacht's crew tried to hide the dismembered remains of their young companion. The captain of the Montezuma ordered the burial of Richard Parker's remains at sea.
On September 6, the Germans disembarked the survivors in English Falmouth. Dudley and Stevens checked in at customs, reported the lost ship and did not hide anything. They believed that they were protected by the maritime custom, according to which it was allowed by lot to eat one of those in distress in order to save the rest.
When the Times reported the story, the Victorian public was shocked, but oddly enough, there were people who sympathized with the accused.
The peculiarity of the situation was, however, that there was no lot. And it turned out that for the sake of survival, which is permissible, they killed and ate the cabin boy, but the murder turned out to be premeditated, and therefore punishable. The jury consulted and said that … they did not know whether the sailors were to blame or not, and let the court deal with it without them. After much controversy and debate, the jury still found Dudley and Stevens guilty of first-degree conspiracy and sentenced to death with a recommendation for clemency.
An appeal was immediately filed, and a new trial was held using the classic argument - the pressure of circumstances. As a result, the court changed the sentence and sentenced the defendants to six months of hard labor.
Half a century before the events described, Edgar Poe wrote The Story of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. This story features four wrecked sailors, who, after many days of suffering and hardship, began to draw lots who would fall victim to save the rest. The cabin boy pulled a short straw. His name was Richard Parker!
“He offered no resistance and instantly fell dead when he was stabbed in the back,” wrote Edgar Poe. - Having drunk blood, the sailors to some extent satisfied the unbearable thirst that tormented them, then, by common agreement, they separated the hands, feet and head from the cabin boy, and together with their entrails threw them into the sea; then they ate the body piece by piece …"
In fact, they were forgiven: sea custom and all that. Legally - they were found guilty, regardless of maritime custom and all that.
It was rumored that Edwin Stevens, Mignonette's mate, subsequently went insane; sailor Brooks also died for the rest of his life. Captain Dudley left for Australia to start a new life. He was nicknamed "Cannibal Tom" there. He suffered all his life from a sense of guilt and, wanting to at least to some extent atone for it, paid for the monument to Parker. It is also said that Dudley secretly sent money to Parker's sister so that she could graduate from high school. He also paid for the maintenance of the monument in good condition. Dudley soon died of the bubonic plague, but back in the 1930s, the Parker monument was the tidiest of them all.
I almost forgot: do you remember the name of the tiger in Life of Pi? Yes, yes, his name was Richard Parker.
There are also interesting coincidences from the work of Edgar Poe with reality, well, for example:
Evidence number 2: "Dealer"
In 1848, railroad worker Phineas Gage (also referred to in this longread) suffered a traumatic brain injury as a result of a metal bar going through his head. Miraculously, he managed to survive, but his personality changed beyond recognition. Changes in his behavior have been carefully studied and have allowed the medical community to come to an understanding of the role of the frontal lobe in social cognition.
But a decade earlier, Poe had already understood in some unknown way that the frontal lobe syndrome causes profound changes in a person's character. In 1840, he wrote, in his own manner, a macabre story called The Dealer, about an unnamed storyteller who suffered a head injury as a child, which led him to recurrent and obsessive violent sociopathic outbursts.
Poe had such an accurate understanding of the frontal lobe syndrome that renowned neurologist Eric Altshuler wrote the following: "There are dozens of symptoms, and Poe knew each of them … This story describes everything, we hardly know anything else." Let me remind you, Altshuler, a medically licensed neurologist, not some nutcase, also says, "Everything is so accurate, it's just weird, like he had a time machine."
Evidence number 3: "Eureka"
Still don't believe it? What if I told you that Poe predicted the description of the origin of the universe eighty years before modern science began to develop the Big Bang theory? Of course, an amateur stargazer with no formal education in astronomy could not accurately describe the principles of the universe, rejecting widespread inaccuracies in solving the theoretical paradox that have puzzled all astronomers since Kepler. But this is exactly what happened.
The prophetic vision came in the form of Eureka, a 150-page prose poem that was criticized as a product of a sick imagination and booed for its complexity. Created in the last year of the writer's life, "Eureka" describes the expanding Universe, which originated as a result of an "instant flash" and originated from one "original particle".
Poe put forward the first correct explanation of the Olbers paradox, answering the question why, given the huge number of stars in the Universe, the night sky is dark - the light of these stars in the expanding Universe has not yet reached the Solar System. When Edward Robin Harrison published The Darkness of the Night in 1987, he noted that Eureka anticipated his findings.
In an interview with Nautilus magazine, Italian astronomer Alberto Cappi speaks of Poe's insight and admits: “It's amazing how Poe came to a dynamically evolving universe, because during his lifetime there were no data or observations that would allow such a possibility. Not a single astronomer in Po's time could have imagined a non-static universe."
But what if there was no time for him? What if he was timeless? What if his prophecies about Richard Parker's cannibalistic demise, the symptoms of frontal lobe syndrome, and the Big Bang theory were just travel notes from his journey across the timeless continuum?