R v Dudley and Stephens of them subsequently being cannibalised by their fellow seamen. Edgar Allan Poe's only novel, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket", published in 1838, features a character named Richard Parker, who, after a shipwreck, becomes a victim of cannibalism by the ship's remaining survivors. Writer Yann Martel in his 2001 novel "Life of Pi" picked up on these occurrences, and named the book's shipwrecked Bengal tiger Richard Parker. The case was also the basis for a famous Monty Python sketch, titled "Lifeboat (Cannibalism)/Still no Sign of Land". In that sketch, five sailors are on a lifeboat after a shipwreck,
Life of Pi of the name, in the famous legal case R v Dudley and Stephens (1884) where a shipwreck again results in the cannibalism of a cabin boy named Richard Parker, this time in a lifeboat. A third Richard Parker drowned in the sinking of the "Francis Spaight" in 1846, described by author Jack London, and later the cabin boy (not Richard Parker) was cannibalized. Having read about these events, Yann Martel thought, "So many victimized Richard Parkers had to mean something." Martel has mentioned that a book review he read of Brazilian author Moacyr Scliar's 1981 novella "Max and the Cats"