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,
Yann Martel University of Saskatchewan. "Beatrice and Virgil", his third novel, came out in 2010. The work is an allegorical take on the Holocaust, attempting to approach this period not through the lens of historical witness, but through imaginative synthesis. The main characters in the story are a writer, a taxidermist, and two stuffed animals: a red howler monkey and a donkey. From 2007 to 2011, Martel ran a guerrilla book club with the then Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, sending the Prime Minister a book every two weeks for four years, a total of more than a hundred novels, plays,