So many Richard Parker's, so little time.

• In Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, published in 1838, Richard Parker is a mutinous sailor on the whaling ship Grampus. After the ship capsizes in a storm, he and three other survivors draw lots upon Parker’s suggestion to kill one of them to sustain the others. Parker is then cannibalized.
• In 1846, the Francis Spaight foundered at sea. Apprentice Richard Parker was among the twenty-one drowning victims of that incident.
• In 1884, the yacht Mignonette sank. Four people survived, drifted in a lifeboat, and finally killed one of them, the cabin boy Richard Parker, for food.
  
• Another Richard Parker was involved in the Spithead and Nore mutinies in 1797 and subsequently hanged, but not eaten. (Lucky him.)

What says Life of Pi author, Yann Martel, of all this Richard Parker hullabaloo? “So many Richard Parkers had to mean something.”

He’s right. But what does it mean, then?

It means don’t name your kid Richard Parker.