Beyond Coincidence (20 page)

The crew had very little to eat or drink for nineteen days and became desperate. Richard Parker drank sea water and became delirious. Captain Dudley considered drawing lots to choose a victim to feed the remaining crew. Brooks was against any killing whatsoever, and Stephens was indecisive so the Captain decided to kill the boy as he was near to death and had no dependants.

They said some prayers over Richard's sleeping body. Dudley then shook him by the shoulder and said, “Richard my boy, your time has come” The three sailors dined and survived on Richard's carcass for thirty-five days until rescued by the aptly named vessel SS
Montezuma
—named after the cannibal king of the Aztecs.

The resulting court case fascinated Victorian society and became the best-documented study of cannibalism in the UK. Dudley, Stephens, and Brooks were each sentenced to six months' hard labor and later emigrated.

But the story has a strange twist in its tail. Half a century before the grisly events, in 1837, Edgar Allan Poe wrote
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.
This book tells of four shipwrecked men who, after many days' privation, drew lots to decide who should be killed and eaten.

The cabin boy drew the short straw. His name was Richard Parker!

R
ICHARD
P
ARKER
P
OSTSCRIPT

It seems that coincidences beget coincidences.

Craig Hamilton Parker's grandfather was a cousin of the young cabin boy Richard Parker. Craig has recorded a whole string of further coincidences connected with his ancestor's tragic story.

“My cousin Nigel Parker was the first to notice the link between the Poe story and actual events. He wrote an account and sent it to Arthur Koestler who published it in
The Sunday Times
on May 5, 1974.

“Koestler, author of
The Roots of Coincidence,
relates how sometime after the news story, he casually mentioned it to John Beloff at the University of Edinburgh, who had, that day, written about it in his journal.

“Nigel's father, Keith, thought that Richard's story would make an interesting theme for a radio play and began to plan a synopsis. At that time, to supplement his writer's income, he reviewed books for Macmillan publishers. The first book to arrive through the post was
The Sinking of the Mignonette.
A few weeks later he was asked to review another play, among a collection of short plays, called
The Raft.
It was a comedy for children with nothing sinister about it at all, apart from the cover illustration. Three men seemed to threaten a young boy, which is completely out of keeping with the play's tone.
The Raft
was written by someone called Richard Parker.

“In the summer of 1993, my parents took in three Spanish-language students. My father told them about Richard Parker one evening over supper. The television was on in the background. All conversation stopped when a local program started talking about the remarkable story. Dad went on to break the silence by saying how weird coincidences always occur whenever Richard's tale is mentioned. He told them about Edgar Allan Poe.

“Two of the girls went white. ‘Look what I bought today,' said one. She reached into her bag and pulled out a copy of the Poe story. ‘So have I,' said the other girl. Both had gone shopping that day and independently bought the very same book containing the Richard Parker story.”

P
ATTY
H
EARST

Patty Hearst, daughter of a wealthy media tycoon, was kidnapped in 1974 by a radical terrorist group called the Symbionese Liberation Army. It was one of the strangest kidnapping cases ever.

Even stranger was the fact that a pornographic novel called
Black Abductor
by James Rusk Jr. (writing under the pseudonym Harrison James) had been published two years earlier, which described many of the facts of the Hearst story with startling accuracy.

As soon as the kidnapping made world headlines, the publishers, Dell-Grove, wasted no time reissuing the book with a new title,
Abduction: Fiction Before Fact.
Though often shrouded by lurid accounts of sex, the story contains many eerie parallels to the Hearst case.

It tells of a young college student named Patricia, daughter of a wealthy and prominent right-wing figure, who is kidnapped near her college campus while walking with her boyfriend.

The boyfriend is severely beaten and becomes a prime FBI suspect before being cleared.

The kidnappers belong to a multiracial group of radical activists who model themselves on Latin American terrorists and are led by an angry young black ex-convict.

They demand the release from jail of a comrade who is imprisoned for a political assassination, sending Polaroid pictures of the girl with their communications to her father and describing the abduction as the United States' first “political kidnapping.”

At first the girl is an unwilling captive but later she becomes receptive to the group's aims and joins them.

The fictional abductors predict that eventually their hideout will be found by police and they will be surrounded, teargassed and killed.

Given such similarities, the FBI were bound to consider whether Rusk had been in on the planning of the kidnapping or the SLA had got the idea from reading his book.

M
ARIE
C
OLLIER

On December 8, 1971, opera star Marie Collier fell to her death from the balcony of her home. She had been talking to her financial adviser about a new tour when she opened a window and fell out. Marie Collier had come to fame in the role of Tosca, who leaps to her death from atop a wall in the last act. It was Collier's last role before she fell from the window.

6

TIMELY MANIFESTATIONS

You've worked yourself into a fine lather, addressing your coworkers on the gross inadequacies of the boss—his arrogance, his general incompetence, his failure to grasp even the barest essentials of management. Suddenly, it dawns on you that you have lost the attention of your audience. They are all staring at a point just behind you. You turn to discover the great man standing in the doorway—glaring at you.

Such manifestations are the downsides of coincidence. Sometimes, thankfully, they can work in our favor.

T
HE
C
ONQUEST OF
S
PACE

Charles Carson had a frustrating problem. He was making slides of book illustrations to show at a talk he was about to give to his local astronomical society. But he was missing the most important book and he couldn't find it anywhere.

The talk was about artists who paint representations of outer space. Carson had lots of paintings of outer space, but none by the most respected artist in the field, Chesley Bonestell. The book he needed,
The Conquest of Space,
was full of Bonestell's paintings, but a search on the computer at his local library revealed that there wasn't a single copy anywhere in town.

A couple of hours later his wife went into a charity shop and he followed aimlessly. Of course, he looked at the books on sale, but there was nothing there to interest him. Stuck for something to do to pass the time, he began idly leafing through a row of children's books. Among them was
The Conquest of Space
by Chesley Bonestell.

I
T'S A
S
MALL
I
SLAND

Before he became a bestselling author, Bill Bryson worked as a freelance journalist. At one point a magazine commissioned him to write an article on remarkable coincidences. He managed to gather a lot of information but didn't have enough examples to fill out the piece, so he wrote to the magazine to say he couldn't do it. He put the letter aside to mail the next day. Going into the
Times
the next day he noticed an announcement of a sale of books that had been sent in for review. The first book that caught his eye was
Remarkable True Coincidences.
He opened it at a story about a man named
Bryson
. The book had found its man.

T
HE
A
CTOR AND THE
B
OOK

In 1971 George Feifer's personal copy of his novel,
The Girl from Petrovka,
heavily annotated in the margins, had been stolen from his car in a London street. Two years later the film rights of the novel were sold and Anthony Hopkins was cast to play the lead.

Hopkins tried to buy a copy of the book, but despite trying several bookshops in London, there was not a copy to be had. Disappointed, he started his journey back home. On the way he noticed an open parcel on a seat in London's Leicester Square Underground station. He half suspected a bomb and inspected it with caution, but it was a book—George Feifer's
The Girl from Petrovka
—the very book he had been trying to buy. Later, meeting Feifer in Vienna, Hopkins showed the author the book. It was the author's personal copy, stolen two years previously.

A
LWAYS
G
O TO THE
T
OP
(U
NLESS THE
T
OP
C
OMES TO
Y
OU
)

Photographer's agent Mark George celebrated his father's eightieth birthday by buying him dinner at the Grill, in London's Savoy Hotel. During the course of the meal, he told the story of a woeful experience he'd had with a ill-tempered manager in a hotel at Lochinver in western Scotland.

Mark had been on a diving vacation with friends and that particular evening they'd decided to have dinner at the Inver Lodge Hotel. A notable feature of the hotel's dining room is a long picture window affording spectacular views across the loch and its coastline. The restaurant was almost empty that evening but the waiter showed them to a table at the back of the room. Mark asked if they could have a window table instead. The waiter looked doubtful, and when Mark and his companions started to walk across the room, the manager, who was himself eating at a window table, stood up and stopped them, saying that the window tables were unavailable because they were being laid out for breakfast.

Bristling, they nevertheless accepted the inferior table. Halfway through the evening another friend who had been driving with them joined them for a drink. He wasn't hungry but ordered some wine. No sooner had the waiter gone than the manager reappeared, saying the friend couldn't have a drink unless he ordered food as well. Exasperated, they asked for a menu so they could order a token item of food. At this the manager told them the kitchen was closed.

“I couldn't believe anyone could be so difficult,” Mark told his father, shaking his head.

At this point a man who had been eating at a table adjoining theirs at the Savoy came over and introduced himself as Lord Vestey, an English aristocrat and businessman. Vestey said he wasn't given to eavesdropping, but he couldn't help overhearing their conversation. “I'm afraid to say I own that hotel,” he said. He apologized, promised to look into the matter, and invited Mark to visit the hotel again free of charge.

I
CELANDIC
C
HESS

Arthur Koestler described the following incident as a “trivial but typical case of a frequently recurring pattern.”

He wrote, “In the spring of 1972, the
Sunday Times
invited me to write about the chess championship match between Boris Spassky and Robert Fischer, which was to take place later that year in Reykjavik, Iceland. Chess has been a hobby since my student days, but I felt the need to catch up on recent developments; and also to learn something about Iceland, where I had only spent some hours in transit on a transatlantic flight during the war. So one day in May, I went to the library to take home some books on these two unrelated subjects. I hesitated for a moment, whether to go to the “C” for chess section first, or to the “I” for Iceland section, but chose the former because it was nearer. There were about twenty to thirty books on chess on the shelves, and the first that caught my eye was a bulky volume with the title,
Chess in Iceland and in Icelandic Literature.
”

T
HE
W
EDDING
S
INGER

Tony Mills planned to ask his good friend Harriet to sing at his wedding in June 1996. He had casually mentioned it to her some months before the wedding day. As the time approached, for various reasons the reception was arranged in something of a hurry. The manager of the restaurant in which it was to be held said he would take care of the entertainment—he knew of this great singing duo. Tony realized he must phone Harriet and explain so she would not be offended. Harriet responded with the news that she had already been booked that evening to sing at a wedding reception—for Tony and his bride.

H
ERE'S
Y
OUR
S
TUPID
S
HOVEL

On December 23, 1946, seven-year-old Bill McCready, together with his parents and baby brother, set off in a blizzard in their old car for Christmas with their family. The journey ended in disaster when they careered into a ditch. Fortunately, they were rescued after a couple of hours by a truck driver who dug them out. He then drove off, leaving his shovel behind. Bill's father always kept the shovel in his truck as a lucky talisman. Seventeen years later, Bill, now aged twenty-four, found himself in a restaurant with his father.

Bill says, “The two of us were sitting there and two tables away three men were having lunch. One of them was talking about the bitter winter of '46 and how he had come across a family stuck in a car in a ditch. He was explaining how he had dug them out, but they had then driven away taking his “stupid shovel” with them.

“My father said nothing but got up, went outside, and came back with the shovel. He tapped the man on the shoulder and said, ‘Here's your stupid shovel.'”