Seafurrers: The Ships' Cats Who Lapped and Mapped the World

Seafurrers: The Ships’ Cats Who Lapped and Mapped the World

Copyright © 2018 by Philippa Sandall

Illustrations copyright © 2018 by Ad Long unless otherwise noted in the Permissions Acknowledgments, a continuation of this copyright page.

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no portion of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

The Experiment, LLC | 220 East 23rd Street, Suite 600 | New York, NY 10010-4658

theexperimentpublishing.com

Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and The Experiment was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been capitalized.

The Experiment’s books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk for premiums and sales promotions as well as for fund-raising or educational use. For details, contact us at [email protected].

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sandall, Philippa, author.

Title: Seafurrers : the ships’ cats who lapped and mapped the world / Philippa

Sandall and Ad Long.

Description: New York, NY : The Experiment, [2018] | Includes bibliographical

references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017047334 (print) | LCCN 2017056969 (ebook) | ISBN

9781615194384 (ebook) | ISBN 9781615194377 (cloth)

Subjects: LCSH: Cats. | Human-animal relationships. | Seafaring life.

Classification: LCC SF442 (ebook) | LCC SF442 .S26 2018 (print) | DDC

636.80092/9--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017047334

ISBN 978-1-61519-437-7

Ebook ISBN 978-1-61519-438-4

Text design by Sarah Smith, based on designs by Clare Forte and Ky Long

Cover design by Sarah Schneider

Front cover illustration by Ad Long; cover photo © Robert Bahou | offset.com

Back cover photo, Sydney, circa 1910, by Samuel Hood/Australian National Maritime Museum

Manufactured in China

First printing April 2018

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Sailor with pet cats sitting on hatch cover, Sydney, Australia, circa 1910

Contents

Preface

Embarking

MOUSERS AND MORE

Incident 1: Don’t Forget the Cat

Incident 2: South Sea Adventures

Incident 3: Survivor

Incident 4: Sailing into History

Incident 5: Beating Scurvy’s Scourge

Incident 6: Naming Rights

Incident 7: Collectomania

Incident 8: Flying Cephalopods

Incident 9: War on Rats

Incident 10: Classic Catches

Incident 11: Firing Line to Fame

MATES

Incident 12: Vital Victuals

Incident 13: Away Up Aloft!

Incident 14: Team Players

Incident 15: All Aboard

Incident 16: The Consolation of Pets

Incident 17: Vigilance

Incident 18: Sleeping Quarters

Incident 19: Mateship

Incident 20: Jobs for the Girls

Incident 21: Able-Bodied Seafaring Cat Wanted

MISADVENTURES

Incident 22: Wreck Rights

Incident 23: Swings and Roundabouts

Incident 24: Designated Diver

Incident 25: Epitaph

Incident 26: Penguin Buddies

Incident 27: Ghost Ship

Incident 28: Cannon Cat Cold Case

Incident 29: Soggy, Groggy Moggies

Incident 30: Hardtack Saves the Day

MASCOTS

Incident 31: Spick-and-Span

Incident 32: Turning Tricks

Incident 33: Under Fire

Incident 34: First Aid

Incident 35: The Real Deal, or Tall Tale Deconstruction

Incident 36: Brush with Fame

Incident 37: Red Lead

Incident 38: Disembarking

Acknowledgments

Permissions Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Authors

Preface

While the many extraordinary exploits and achievements of the seafarers who lapped and mapped the world are well documented, those of their indispensable pest controllers, shipmates, and mascots are not, apart from a few celebs you will read about here. These famed felines include the intrepid Trim, who circumnavigated Australia with Matthew Flinders; the invaluable Mrs. Chippy, who weathered Antarctic blizzards while keeping watch on Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance ; and the redoubtable Simon of the Amethyst , who maintained his pest-control duties day in, day out despite being seriously injured in the Yangtze Incident. Hence this incidental seafurring history, a somewhat flotsam-and-jetsam maritime miscellany drawing on letters, diaries, memoirs, newspaper reports, and photographs to shed new light on life on the ocean waves in the days of sail and steam. We felines favor the oral tradition of storytelling, as you may be aware, so to help me pull this together and put it down on the page, I roped in the indispensable services of a scribe (Philippa Sandall) and illustrator (Ad Long). The views and commentary, of course, are all my own and are signposted throughout: According to Bart.

I am from a seafurring family. My name, Bart, is a nod to our family hero, the courageous Portuguese explorer and navigator Bartolomeu Dias de Novais, who was given instructions to sail southwards and on to the place where the sun rises and to continue as long as it was possible to do so in 1487. First to round the Cape of Good Hope was his claim to fame. (European and as far as we know should probably be added to this.) Dias sailed out of Lisbon, headed down the west coast of Africa, rounded the Cape, and made it into the Indian Ocean—gateway to the Orient and its riches—and then safely back home. Round trip: sixteen months and seventeen days. There were plenty of rough patches, but homeward bound the Cape took the cake. Cabo das Tormentas (Cape of Storms) was what he wrote on the charts. Back in Lisbon, armchair traveler King John II claimed naming rights and plumped for Cabo da Boa Esperança (Cape of Good Hope), in hot anticipation of pepper profits and the lucrative spice trade with India. But that was not to be, at least not for another decade and another king.

Christopher Columbus stole the limelight in the interim. He headed west for the spices of the East in 1492 and found the New World. What that really means is he sailed across the Atlantic, dropped anchor in the Bahamas, staked the Castile Crown’s claim, called the fiery chile that the locals ate pepper, and to his dying day never admitted he hadn’t found what he was looking for. As an unknown and unkind critic aptly put it: When he started out he didn’t know where he was going. When he got to the New World he didn’t know where he was. And when he got back to Spain he didn’t know where he had been.

Vasco da Gama knew exactly where he was going on his passage to India in 1497–98, and Portugal got its sea route to the East Indies and a monopoly on the profitable spice trade for the next hundred years or so, until the determined emergence of Dutch maritime power, seemingly from nowhere, changed the game again.

But not one of them—Dias, Columbus, or da Gama, nor the explorers and traders who followed—could have done it without the onboard protection against pests for their provisions and cargoes that their able-bodied seafurrers tirelessly provided. How do we know ships’ cats played such a key role? The Portuguese carved it in stone, as you can see on this sixteenth-century decorative column in the cloisters of the Jerónimos Monastery in Belém, Lisbon.

A watchful seafurrer stretched out on a square knot, carved on a column of the sixteenth-century Jerónimos Monastery in Lisbon. Today, the monastery’s west wing houses the Maritime Museum.

A seaman enticing the ship’s cat up one of the shrouds of Pommern, a four-masted barque

and windjammer operating on the grain trade route between Australia and England during the interwar years, and now anchored behind the Åland Maritime Museum as a display

Embarking

ACCORDING TO BART

To begin at the beginning, I guess I need to explain how our feline forebears stepped out of the wild and became the sea cats who lapped and mapped the world. It all began some twelve thousand years ago, when Homo sapiens (whom I’ll call sapiens from now on to keep it simple) embraced a change that changed everything. They quit their nomadic hunter-gatherer way of life in various parts of the world and, with a natural eye for real estate, picked out prime locations by lakes and rivers with plenty of freshwater to settle down.

In the Fertile Crescent they built houses, planted seeds of local grasses such as barley and wheat, and kept a few animals around. It was a struggle, but they stuck to it, found their green thumbs, and one day discovered they were harvesting bumper crops of beans, peas, lentils, barley, and wheat and storing the surplus in granaries to put food on the table in lean times. Sapiens were now farmers.

The Fertile Crescent and Nile Valley

Change, sapiens found, was constant, as those small settlements grew into villages, towns, cities, empires, and even civilizations, with an ever-increasing number of hungry mouths to feed. Their grain was much more than a vital food source—it was a valuable commodity for barter and trade. Sapiens were in business.

But there was a fly in the ointment. Mus musculus muscled in for a piece of the action. To a house mouse, the farmers’ fields of ripening grain must have looked like an open invitation to dine at a never-ending buffet. They moved in and made themselves at home on farms and in granaries, enjoying the bounty of a resource boom. How do we know this? Digging around ancient sites in what is present-day Israel, archaeologists found mouse teeth in remains of grain stores dating back some eleven thousand years.

Mrs. Mus bred with a let’s make hay while the sun shines approach. As she readily produces five to ten litters a year, with around six to eight youngsters a litter who reach sexual maturity in six weeks and start their own breeding program, it’s not hard to imagine plague proportions and ruinous crop losses. It’s not just what they eat that’s the problem. It’s what they spoil. One adult mouse eats about 3 grams of grain a day (that’s about a teaspoon) but spoils from five to ten times more with its droppings and urine, bringing the total food losses up to 18 to 33 grams a day. Multiply that by 365 days, and in a year one mouse can potentially ruin anywhere from 6.5 to more than 12 kilograms (roughly 14 to 26 pounds) of grain.

When a free pest-control service arrived on the doorstep out of the blue, the farmers probably thought the gods were on their side. But it wasn’t the gods. It was the easy pickings that lured the Near Eastern wildcat (Felis silvestris lybica), a solitary hunter, to step out of the desert and onto the farm, or at least its outskirts.

Over time, wildcats and farmers slipped into a comfortable and mutually beneficial working relationship. At some point, with the odd tasty tidbit or a friendly pat, farmers began encouraging wildcats to stick around after the harvest and use their pest-control prowess to protect the granaries year round. Some wildcats, ever open to a free lunch, embraced change. They settled down (in a feline sense) as farm cats and granary cats. They also found there were fringe benefits to enjoy when they stepped indoors—they discovered the human hearth was a pleasant place. They even sat on laps and very likely purred. They became tame cats or, as sapiens called them, domestic cats.

No one knows exactly when or where all this took place, but it was certainly a fait accompli around four thousand years ago in Egypt. One of the earliest acknowledgments that felines were indispensable for pest control appears in the Rhind Papyrus:

In seven houses there are seven cats. Each cat catches seven mice. If each mouse were to eat seven ears of corn and each ear of corn, if sown, were to produce seven gallons of grain, how many things are mentioned in total?

The 49 cats in those seven houses saved those seven farmers 16,807 gallons of grain.

Houses = 7

Cats = 7 x 7 (or 7²) = 49

Mice caught = 7 x 7 x 7 (or 7³) = 343

Ears of corn = 7 x 7 x 7 x 7 (or 7⁴) = 2,401

Gallons of grain (if each ear of corn were sown) = 7 x 7 x 7 x 7 x 7 (or 7⁵) = 16,807

Impressive though that is, it’s