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My coincidences articles about Richard Parker appeared in The Fortean Times, The Sunday Telegraph, The Portsmouth News and The Western Daily Press. Here's a few of the letters about coincidences that readers of the Fortean Times and other magazines have sent me:

In the early 1970s The Sunday Times had asked readers to write in with their examples of coincidences. One historical example which several of them sent in was this -

"In 1838 Edgar Allan Poe published a book "The narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket ". At one point in this novel four men are adrift in a boat arid they kill and eat the cabin boy Richard Parker. Some 40 years later four desperate men were adrift in a boat and to survive they killed and ate the cabin boy whose name was Richard Parker.

When I told of this coincidence to two friends in 1982 I found their respective reactions interesting."That gives me the willies! ( J.Tisdall.) "I would expect that to be better known if it were true." (M.Stean.)

During 1984 I found myself becoming increasingly interested in the phenomenon of coincidence and decided to chase up this classic example.

I went to a bookshop and bought Poe's novel. On page 141 cabin boy Richard Parker proposes that he, Peters, Augustus and Arthur Gordon Pym (narrating in the first person ), who are by now the only surviving crew aboard The Grampus, should draw straws to see which one of them should be killed and eaten to provide sustenance for the others

This is done and poor Parker is the loser. Like Stean, I found it surprising that such a striking coincidence was not remarked upon more often, for in the decade or so sine I had read this in The Sunday Times I had not seen any reference to it

I bought the book in mid- November 1984. A couple of weeks later I turned up at Bedford railway station to catch the 9:50 AM. to London. I still say I was there with a few minutes to spare, but it appeared that this was one of the very few occasions in which a BR train had actually left early.

Accordingly I had to catch the 10:20. In the carriage that I got into someone had discarded a Daily Telegraph. Under normal circumstances this would never be my first choice of paper, and it had certainly been a good six months since I had looked at a copy.

On the diarist's page (I think he is called Peterborough )I spotted this -(From The Daily Telegraph, December 1st 1984.) .

SOFT CELL My recent note About the last case of cannibalism to cause a ripple in English legal circles reminds the wildlife painter, David Shepherd, that some years ago he was browsing around Falmouth's antique shops looking for an old oak door for his family home in Hascombe Godalming.

What Shepherd and his wife, Avril, came across was a door from a cell in Falmouth jail - the very door, Shepherd was told, that had closed on the two men accused of eating cabin boy, Richard Parker, in 1884.

Shepherd tells me that not only does the door still bear bars and a grille but that its main attraction was that it only cost £7 - and now guards nothing more offensive than the family junk.

One week later the family newspaper, The Guardian, was not delivered for some reason, probably a strike. In its place we received The Daily Telegraph. In Peterborough's column there was this:

AD NAUSEAM

Richard Parker would appear to be a name to avoid if one proposes going to sea. Not only were two of that name victims of maritime cannibalism- one a fictitious character by Edgar Allan POE and the other, a real life victim aboard the Mignonette 100 years ago but evidence of other Parkers now crops up.
Brian Simpson, Professor of Law at the universities of Kent and Chicago, reminds me that Richard Parker was hanged for his role as ringleader of the Nore mutiny in 1797 and another Parker died when the Francis Speight - on board which a number of seamen had been eaten-foundered in 1846.
Such grisly anecdotes are the very spice of life to Simpson who has recently compiled some "fairly ghastly" examples of man eating man for his book "Cannibalism and the Common Law".

As I observe, it is not that powerful, particularly by comparison with the unbelievable example of the three Spanish girls in your father's house all buying the book on the same day - the day, moreover, when there was a mention of this coincidence on the TV

My interest in the topic of coincidence rarely extends beyond my own examples, but this one could count as the most improbable of which I have ever heard, and I should be extremely grateful for more corroborative detail.

And there was the fact that you were playing chess on your computer when I, a grandmaster and former British champion, rang you- and I too had a computer screen full of chess writing in front of me at the time- for I was writing a chess book.

James Plaskett - East Sussex
livinginspain@hotmail.com
Website
James Flasket has since written a book about Coincidences and has his own website:

Copyright Craig Hamilton-Parker

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