Seafurrers Read online

  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.

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  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 decorat
ive 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 not the answer the puzzle writer is looking for, which is the grand total of “things mentioned”:

  Grand total = 7 + 49 + 343 + 2,401 + 16,807 = 19,607

  Incidentally . . .

  Puzzled how corn got to Egypt from the Americas three thousand years before Columbus brought it back to Spain? It didn’t. Corn is the old word for grain, “a small hard particle, a seed,” going back to grnom, Indo-European for “worn down particle.”

  This is the only puzzle in the Rhind Papyrus in which felines save the day, but there are many others about grain and granaries. Grain built Egypt. Grain fed the masses—the thousands and thousands and thousands of laborers who built the pyramids and the dams and lakes that regulated the Nile, preventing floods and providing water in times of drought. And to make sure everyone got the grain they needed, Egypt needed managers who could not only manage but also compute.

  The Rhind Papyrus was penned by the scribe Ahmes around 1550 BCE, though it may be older. It isn’t ancient Egyptian Sudoku to puzzle away an idle afternoon. Its full title is The Correct Method of Reckoning, for Grasping the Meaning of Things, and Knowing Everything—Obscurities and All Secrets. Egypt was a world in which you had to be numerate “so that you may open treasuries and granaries, so that you may take delivery from one corn-bearing ship at the entrance to the granary, so that on feast days you may measure out the gods’ offerings,” so it’s most likely this is simply a math practice book. In total, it has eighty-four practical problems (with solutions) that a young man on the way up must master to show potential employers he has the computing skills to handle a scribe’s job. It wasn’t cheap. At about sixteen feet (five meters) unrolled, a copy would set the purchaser back the equivalent of a small goat (two deben). It’s the sort of investment ambitious parents might make to help set their son up in the world.

  Incidentally . . .

  Bemused by the “Rhind”? It’s nothing to do with cheese. The papyrus is named after the Scottish antiquarian Alexander Henry Rhind, who picked it up quite possibly for a song in a market in 1858 and whose family bestowed it on the British Museum in 1864 after his death, and that’s where it still is, behind glass in the Papyrus Room. Well, two parts of it are; the third is in the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

  It’s not surprising the call went out for farm cats and granary cats, with their exemplary pest-control track record, to sign on as mousers for the grain ships. Again, it’s not known exactly when or where this took place first, but they took the plunge and became sea cats or seafurrers, as they prefer to be called.

  Sapiens were possibly surprised at how readily their new shipmates found their sea legs. But felines have natural assets such as agility, balance, independence, patience, and perseverance that helped them take to life on the ocean waves like the proverbial duck to water. What’s more, life at sea brought additional responsibilities that made the most of their superior hearing (which can pinpoint the source of a sound), sensitive nose (which can sniff out trouble spots), and superefficient eyes (which can see in very dim light). And with their inherent curiosity, seafurrers proved particularly invaluable on the watch—new sights, smells, or sounds, no matter how faint, merited immediate and undivided attention.

  Mateship was the bonus. S
eafarers and seafurrers provided each other with support and companionship during long absences from home. Belgica’s Dr. Frederick Cook, commenting on their two-year voyage in Antarctica (1897–99), says Nansen, the ship’s cat, was “the only speck of sentimental life within reach.” Sailors and sea cats became shipmates.

  Worse things happen at sea, they say, and for good reason. Along with reefs, rocks, storms, shipwrecks, and piracy, seafurrers faced a new enemy, what polar explorer Roald Amundsen called “the most repulsive of all creatures, and the worst vermin I know of”: Rattus rattus—black rats or ship/ship’s rats. They aren’t necessarily black. They come in light fawn, chestnut brown with white patches, light gray, dark gray, and black. Whatever the color, they are formidable prey, ganging up and fighting in packs, and exceptionally dangerous when cornered. To make a kill, a rat will sacrifice its own life, no question. In 1858, Robert White Stevens, a longtime expert on ships and cargoes, doesn’t hold back describing why the rat problem is so daunting:

  The gun crew of HMAS Sydney’s port number 3 (P3) 6-inch gun, on the deck in front of the breech and gun shield

  Of all those [vermin] infesting ships, the rat is the most injurious, which arises from his great instinct, boldness, and natural qualifications. The inner portion of the four front teeth of rats is soft; the outer is composed of the strongest enamel; the continual growth of these teeth can only be checked by constant use. When one has been lost, the opposite tooth has been known to lengthen until it met the gum, which caused it to turn and ultimately to pass through the lip. It is this extraordinary growing property of the front teeth, coupled with an unconquerable thirst, which makes rats so formidable on board ship.

  They certainly are omnivorous eating machines. They will devour pretty much anything and everything, chewing their way through the grain and whatever else is in the hold, and then through rations, ropes, boots, biscuits, sails, clothing, and the hard skin on the soles of sleeping sailors’ feet.