On May 5, 1974, author and journalist Arthur Koestler published a letter from reader Nigel Parker in "The Sunday Times" of a striking coincidence between a scene in Poe's novel and an actual event that happened decades later: In 1884, the yacht "Mignonette" sank, with four men cast adrift. After weeks without food, they decided that one of them should be sacrificed as food for the other three, just as in Poe's novel. The loser was a young cabin boy named Richard Parker, coincidentally the same name as Poe's fictional character. Parker's shipmates, Tom Dudley and Edwin Stephens, were later tried for murder in a precedent-setting English common law trial, the renowned "R v Dudley and Stephens."