Futility is a novella written by Morgan Robertson and published first during 1898. It was revised as The Wreck of the Titan in 1912. It features a fictional British ocean liner named Titan that sinks in the North Atlantic Ocean after striking an iceberg. The Titan and its sinking are famous for similarities to the passenger ship RMS Titanic and its sinking 14 years later. After the sinking of the Titanic the novel was reissued with some changes, particularly to the ship's gross tonnage...
...Although the novel was written before the RMS Titanic was even conceptualized, there are some uncanny similarities between the fictional and real-life versions.
I have the 1912 re-issue. Haven’t read it, but it’s cool to have on my shelf.
Forty-six years later in 1884, a yacht named Mignonette sailed from Sydney, Australia to Southampton, England. This reaL event involves shipwreck, cannibalism, and a murder trial. Using the actual novel, and the event story from Wikipedia, both stories share some remarkable similarities:
The individual who was sacrificed/murdered and cannibalized was named Richard Parker.
The murder/cannibalism took place in late July. In the novel, the body was consumed over four days, 17 to 20 July. In the event, the murder took place on 24 or 25 July. (Poe’s novel was originally published in July).
In the novel, a tortoise was consumed for survival; in the event, a sea turtle was consumed. Both accounts mention “three pounds” of meat from the animal:
”With a view of preserving a portion of this as long as possible, we cut it into fine pieces…. In this manner we put away about three pounds of the tortoise” (novel)
”On or around 9 July, Brooks spotted a sea turtle which Stephens dragged on board. This yielded about three pounds (1.4 kg) of meat” (event)
The quenching of thirst by consuming human blood: ”Let it suffice to say that, having in some measure appeased the raging thirst which consumed us by the blood of the victim" (novel)
“Killing Parker before his natural death would mean blood to drink" (event)
In the novel, the character Pym has a dog, Tiger. The dog disappears from the story prior to the cannibalism, and its fate is left unresolved.
Finally, the philosophical novel, Life of Pi,” written by Canadian author Yann Martel, and published on September 11, 2001, is about a teenage boy who survives at sea after a shipwreck while stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger named…Richard Parker.
Yann Martel on Richard Parker:
Richard Parker and shipwreck narratives
The name Richard Parker for the tiger was inspired by a character in Edgar Allan Poe's nautical adventure novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). Richard Parker is a mutineer who is stranded and eventually cannibalized on the hull of an overturned ship, and there is a dog aboard who is named Tiger. Martel also had another occurrence in mind 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, with a cabin boy cannibalized during an incident involving the same ship in 1835. "So many victimized Richard Parkers had to mean something," Martel suggested.
Predictive programming is a conspiracy theory...