Matthew Flinders' Cat (4 page)

Despite being constantly indulged, Trim remained a working cat and it was this work ethic that earned the crew’s constant admiration. He was an intrepid hunter and more than earned his reputation as the scourge of the mice and rats which had the temerity to sneak on board at a foreign port of call or, alternatively, the extreme misfortune of being born at sea. Trim saw to it that they had a very short life expectancy.

While some mice did manage to remain safely hidden in the deepest, darkest holes and crevices the ship could provide, the rats were seldom fortunate enough to find a safe place to live. Trim was a patient and merciless hunter of the genus
Rattus
, his otherwise generous nature showing them no mercy. Should he come upon a rat’s droppings or sniff its urine, he would remain concealed in the area for as long as two days and nights without taking food or water until the miscreant rodent was driven by hunger from its hiding place and straight into the deadly claws and mighty jaws of the great seagoing hunter.

Trim didn’t always keep his prey and was known to be very generous on occasions. Matthew Flinders could count on finding a dead rat laid neatly on the decking beside his bunk after one of Trim’s prolonged stake-outs. He was reminding his master that he always delivered and was prepared to do his share of the work while at the same time contributing to the ship’s larder.

Although Trim was prepared to accept the occasional handout from the cook, he would seldom partake of a seaman’s vittles. Trim ate at the officers’ table, always being the first to meals. He neither meowed nor made a fuss but expected to partake of the fare on an equal footing with the other officers. Nor did he hang around the chair legs, brushing against the officers’ boots and begging for scraps as might any other cat. Instead, he began each meal with his paws together and his tail neatly curled, sitting upright upon the table directly to the left of his master.

By tradition, though no one could remember when it had originally come about, the first forkful off the master’s plate belonged to Trim. Matthew Flinders would solemnly cut a morsel of meat to the required size and hold it out on the end of his fork. Trim, with a great delicacy of technique and good manners, would then remove it from the tines, never touching the fork. He would remain seated and proceed to masticate, cleaning his paws and licking his chops. Moving left, in imitation of the port decanter, which would make the same journey at the conclusion of the meal, he would then seat himself to the left of the first officer and wait to receive a similar offering at the end of his fork. This process was repeated around the table until Trim found himself once again seated beside the ship’s captain, though this time to the right. Nor was he a glutton. Having completed the round and in the process received a square meal, Trim would never embark on a second helping, no matter how tasty the mutton or salted beef. Trim thought himself an equal in any man’s company and felt no need to be grateful for this repast. He was sufficiently arrogant to know that he could fend for himself and catch his own grub. He refused to be under an obligation to anyone for his vittles.

Billy was again conscious that a word like ‘vittles’ was probably beyond the boy but he was beginning to enjoy the story he was telling and was loath to stop for corrections.

A larrikin among the seamen and a gentleman among the officers was Trim Flinders, a cat admired and respected by all and about whom the opinion was often enough expressed by both officers and crew that he would have made an ideal ship’s captain had he not had the misfortune of being born a cat.

In any case, Trim did not perceive his feline nature as a misfortune, nor was it likely to prohibit the vocation of ship’s master, which he regarded as his right, and he behaved accordingly. He ran the ship with an iron paw, and many an errant seagull, thinking it might perch on the ship’s rail or stroll along the deck on the lookout for a free feed, soon departed with a loud flapping and shrill squawking in a cloud of floating pin feathers.

It was Trim’s custom to inspect the ship thrice each day. In the morning after breakfast, at precisely seven bells, he would inspect the hammocks to see that they were piped up and the between decks washed and swept. He kept to his master’s instructions that the
Investigator
was consecrated to science, where slovenly methods and careless observation were the great enemy. At noon and again after the evening meal, he would patrol the main deck to ensure that the ropes were belayed and coiled fair and the sails trimmed to perfection with no possible afterthought of lifts, braces and backstays.

It was Trim’s custom to perform a small concert to benefit the men after the evening inspection. For this entertainment he would choose a cockroach. There was always some fool cockroach which neglected to look twice over its varnished shoulders before venturing from its dark cracks and crannies onto a moonlit deck. Trim would pounce upon it and play with it in much the same way a boy might perform tricks with a football on the front lawn. He would juggle the cockroach with his paws while standing upright, throw it high into the air and catch it in his mouth, flick it left or right a dozen times in a blur of pawmanship or send it skating several yards across the deck. Whereupon the dazed and disoriented cockroach, thinking it had made good its escape, would attempt to scurry away. Watching it out of the corner of his eye, apparently bored with the cat-and-roach game, Trim would allow it to think it had escaped his beady eye. Then, with a sudden electrifying burst of speed, he would perform a series of paw springs and somersaults and come to land with his front paw neatly pinning the hapless insect to the deck.

The seamen, taking the evening breeze while smoking a tobacco pipe, would applaud loudly and consider themselves greatly privileged to be members of the audience in this one-cat show. Later, swinging in their hammocks in the darkness of the fo’c’sle, they would regale their shipmates with a blow-by-blow description of the evening’s performance where the mighty Trim Flinders got the better of Speedy Gonzales, the dastardly Mexican cockroach.

While cockroaches and seagulls might be considered amusing to Trim, not so rats and mice. Trim ran a strictly rodent-free regime, retaining only a few rats and a handful of mice for purposes which will be explained at a later time. Those small whiskered creatures who formed the vermin community and, by virtue of cunning and good luck, managed to survive, lived for the day the ship would reach dry land. It was an accepted part of the ship’s lore that when the vessel commanded by Captain Trim Flinders came into port, any rats and mice that had somehow survived the voyage would pack their bags in the dead of night and tiptoe across the deck down the gangplank to seek a berth on another ship under the command of a less ferocious cat.

If Trim was in a playful mood, which was quite often, he’d jump over a sailor’s extended arm or perform all manner of tricks taught to him as a kitten. He could do somersaults and backflips, fly through a small hoop held high above a sailor’s head, climb up anything, cling to a fiercely flapping sail in a breeze that would rip the canvas from a seaman’s grasp, and balance majestically on a most precarious perch or atop a mast that swung through thirty degrees in a stiff ocean breeze.

There was one trick in which every man on board hoped he might at some time participate. Perhaps not really a trick, for in Trim’s mind it was clearly not intended to amuse or entertain. It was a manoeuvre entirely of Trim’s own invention and it only ever took place if the ship was entering a harbour preparatory to docking or putting down anchor.

With not so much as a by your leave, Trim would leap onto the back of a sailor’s neck. His front paws, claws sheathed, would grip about the seaman’s forehead while his rear end placed itself squarely at the base of the sailor’s neck, which was flanked on either side by the hind legs to form a furry black collar, with their white tips forming a snowy clasp over the sailor’s Adam’s apple.

With his ears fully foxed, and his head held well above that of his human perch, Trim would observe the approaching landfall or quay and immediately commence to issue a series of meowing instructions. With his tail flicking to indicate port or starboard, Trim Flinders guided the ship to a safe berthing or anchorage.

The crew agreed among themselves that Trim Flinders was a very practical seaman. They would point out that he could as easily have found a sufficiently convenient lookout amongst the rigging but that this would have prohibited them from hearing his instructions or observing his tail. Like any good ship’s master, he preferred to remain among the men. This, they insisted, was an indication that he thought of himself as one of the crew, albeit always their superior.

Bringing the ship alongside was clearly a procedure Trim was convinced could not be achieved without his personal supervision. His frequent meowing and tailed instructions would persist until the vessel was safely moored and the gangplank about to be lowered. At this point, with a rope secured to a bollard on shore, he would leap from the shoulders of his moving platform and make a dash for the foredeck where he would hop onto the ship’s rail and immediately place a front paw on one of the ship’s hawsers. With the grace and confidence of a seasoned tightrope-walker, he’d run along the rope spanning the gap between ship and shore so as to be the first to put a foot on dry land.

It may be that all cats, given the opportunity, could be taught to do all these things, although the most seasoned seamen aboard would swear that they had never witnessed the likes of Trim Flinders among all the ships’ cats with whom they’d had the pleasure or otherwise to sail.

Seamen are experts at the business of a seagoing cat’s behaviour. Unlike the average household tabby, which leads a secretive life its owners may only guess at, a ship’s cat has nowhere to hide. A domestic tomcat is fortunate enough to possess his own backyard as well as any other vacant neighbourhood territory he chooses to stake out and fight to maintain. A ship’s cat only has a small area above and below decks to patrol and is almost always in the process of being observed by someone. Trim Flinders, like all ships’ cats, had no secrets from the humans with whom he shared his cloistered life.

On long tedious voyages, Trim’s feats of derring-do often formed the prime subject of conversation among the crew, his daily exploits invariably recounted with a fair dollop of exaggeration, most of it concerning his hunting skills, his mastery of the art of acrobatics and his extraordinary sagacity. In the minds of Trim’s admirers, this level of practical intelligence was placed well above that of many an admiral of the fleet.

Billy thought a moment about cats. He had always been passionate about them, and Baby Grand, the cat of his own and later Charlie’s affections, had lived to be almost twenty when he’d died. In the last years of his life, Baby Grand had been in and out of the vet’s so often that Billy had learned a great deal about the anatomy of a cat. In his mind he now explained to the boy why the average domestic cat is remarkable in several respects.

A cat’s body contains two hundred and thirty bones, twentyfour more than a human skeleton. Its pelvis and shoulders are more loosely attached to its spine than most other fourlegged beasts, which gives it extreme flexibility. Its capacity for great speed over short distances is founded in muscles that seem larger than necessary for so small a frame. Like a monkey, a cat is also equipped with a tail that provides the necessary balance when jumping or landing on a narrow branch or ledge, surface or wall.

Cats can leap from considerable heights and they do so with their backs arched and all four legs extended, which allows the shock of landing to be spread evenly and so cushion their fall. Their forelegs can turn in almost any direction so they almost never fall awkwardly or sprain a wrist or jar a heel. Their heads can turn nearly 180 degrees so that they can look to the rear without employing their shoulders. They can see well enough during the day, narrowing their pupils against the brightness, as well as exceptionally at night when their pupils expand to utilise all of the available light. Their hearing is acute and a cat can distinguish its master’s footsteps on the pavement several minutes before he arrives home. Unlike most animals, they walk on their toes with the back part of their paw raised. Their paws not only hold things down but may be used to scoop, lift, grip, pat, pummel and punch.

Trim and his feline family are remarkable athletes, although they are sprinters rather than endurance runners, stalking their prey and then accelerating at high speed to make a kill, like the larger cats in the wild, particularly a cheetah stalking an antelope, which is a picture you see often enough on television.