Tiger benign. In the Hindu epic Mahabharata, tigers are fiercer and more ruthless than lions. The tiger's tail appears in stories from countries including China and Korea, it being generally inadvisable to grasp a tiger by the tail. In William Blake's poem in the "Songs of Experience", titled "The Tyger," the tiger is a menacing and fearful animal. In Yann Martel's 2001 Man Booker Prize winning novel "Life of Pi", the protagonist, surviving shipwreck for months in a small boat, somehow avoids being eaten by the other survivor, a large Bengal tiger. The story was adapted in Ang Lee's 2012 feature
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"