Seafurrers, Page 5

  Incidentally . . .

  The overkill question: Do cats kill because they are hungry, or is the urge to eat separate from the urge to kill? Curious about “reservoirs of neural energy,” this is the sort of question scientists ask. Ethologist Paul Leyhausen is the man who did the fieldwork on this and published the classic book Cat Behavior. He gave mice to hungry and well-fed cats to see how long they would go on catching, killing, and eating them. Not too many surprises from what he found:

  • Hungry cats killed and ate mice faster than well-fed cats.

  • Hungry cats ate more mice than well-fed cats; some ate as many as twelve (reminiscent of people at a smorgasbord).

  • Well-fed cats stopped eating mice at three—but kept on catching.

  • After catching ten mice, there was a noted lack of enthusiasm all around, and all cats slowed down.

  • After fifteen mice, all cats lost interest—and one mouse turned the tables and bit a cat on the paw.

  Possibly all this experiment really showed was that:

  • A hungry hunter will hunt until full to the brim and bored stiff.

  • Some cats know when enough is enough.

  • Farmers and millers knew they were onto a good thing when they employed cats as pest controllers.

  To look at the “reservoirs of neural energy” question another way: Do sapiens hunters kill because they are hungry, or is the urge to eat separate from the urge to kill? With recreational hunting and fishing more popular than ever, it’s more likely to be sport or trophy bagging than feeding the family, though fish, fowl, and other fauna (so long as it’s not filled with shot) may be eaten after a spell in the family freezer.

  INCIDENT 10: Classic Catches

  “Cat Catches Fish: Story from the Pacific”

  Telegraph (Brisbane), December 28, 1926

  “

  ‘Believe it or not, this cat catches flying fish and provides portion of the sailors’ diet,’ said Mr. Gustave Green, chief officer of the Roosevelt Line steamer Cokesit to a representative of ‘The Telegraph’ on Tuesday. The chief officer’s story was confirmed by Messds. Frank Brewer (second officer) and H. P. Simmons (third officer). They said that the cat sitting on the lower deck aft would reach up and seize a flying fish with its claws and mouth, then kill it by chewing its head, but save the body for the crew.

  ‘The cat proved most difficult to train,’ said the chief officer, ‘but the trouble has proved worth while. It is a well known fact that flying fish often jump aboard vessels especially when passing through the Pacific Ocean. The fish is capable of flying at a height of 15 feet off the water. When the ship is fully loaded and is lying low in the water we frequently find a number of flying fish lying on the lower after deck. For some time, our cat Jenny got to the fish before we discovered them, and she commenced to make a meal of them. At first the members of the ship’s company did not believe that Jenny caught the fish herself, but one evening an apprentice was patrolling the deck aft, when he saw Jenny reach up and seize a fish in the air. Jenny at first sat on the edge of the deck outside the rail when the fish were flying and tried to grab them. Now and again the fish would fly on to the deck, and Jenny evidently considered that she should not waste her energy catching them when they would come aboard of their own free will. She devoted her energies to catching the fish that came near the edge of the ship. After the cat had been punished a few times she realised that she was not allowed to eat the fish she caught and thus she became a benefactor to the officers and crew of the Cokesit.’

  Jenny this afternoon blinked when the officers were recounting her performances.

  ”

  ACCORDING TO BART

  The occasional flying fish landing at your feet is as close to home delivery as you’ll get at sea. Before tucking into fresh panfried fillets, people wax lyrical in journals and letters, as it’s spectacular to see them explode out of the water, take off, and soar, wings outstretched, above the waves. It even blew Sir Joseph Banks’ mind:

  1768 September 25. Wind continued to blow much as it had done so we were sure we were well in the trade; now for the first time we saw plenty of flying fish, whose bea[u]ty especialy when seen from the cabbin windows is beyond imagination, their sides shining like burnishd silver; when seen from the Deck they do not appear to such advantage as their backs are then presented to the view, which are dark colourd.

  But they aren’t flying, says fish expert Frank Fish of West Chester University in Pennsylvania. They are gliding (there’s a difference), using their pectoral and pelvic fins as wings:

  To take to the air, a flying fish leaps from the water or rises to the surface continually beating its tail to generate propulsion as it starts to taxi. The taxiing run lets the fish accelerate at water surface and build momentum for takeoff. Once the fish reaches its top speed of 20 to 40 miles an hour [32 to 64 kilometers per hour] it spreads its elongate fins and becomes airborne. . . .

  The flight performance of these animals is impressive, with typical glides of 50 to 100 feet [15 to 30 meters] and flight times of 30 seconds. The fish can reach altitudes of 20 feet [6 meters]. Scientists hypothesize that the fish can increase distance and time aloft by using updrafts from the windward face of the waves. One report claimed that when flying into the wind a fish could travel over a quarter of a mile!

  The trajectory of the glide by a flying fish is a flat arc, like that of some missiles. The French Exocet (the word means “flying fish” in French) [via Latin from Greek ekōkoitos, “fish that comes up on the beach”—literally “out of bed”] is a missile that skims just above the water surface before striking its target, usually a ship. Such a sea-skimming weapon caught the world’s attention in 1982 when the British ship HMS Sheffield was sunk by an Exocet launched from an Argentinean naval aircraft [during the Falklands War, no lives lost].

  At the end of the glide when speed and altitude are decreasing, flying fish can either fold up their wings and fall back into the sea or drop their tail into the water and reaccelerate for another flight. This capacity for successive flights greatly increases the possibilities for air time. The record reported is 12 consecutive flights covering 1200 feet [365 meters].

  INCIDENT 11: Firing Line to Fame

  People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA)

  Dickin Medal Award Citation

  “

  Served on HMS Amethyst during the Yangtse Incident, disposing of many rats though wounded by shell blast. Throughout the incident his behaviour was of the highest order, although the blast was capable of making a hole over a foot in diameter in a steel plate.

  ”

  “Simon V.C.”

  News (Adelaide), November 24, 1949

  “

  SIMON, the cat hero of HMS Amethyst and winner of the [PDSA] Dickin Medal (the animal’s Victoria Cross) is resting quietly at Hackbridge Quarantine Kennels in Surrey until the frigate is refitted. The crew are being feted in England following their return from China where they were shelled by Communists.

  ”

  Signaller E. H. Wharton of Birmingham (left), telegraphist J. E. Welton of Chester (center), and Signaller J. E. Thomas of Breedon on the Hill, Leicestershire, (right) with Simon, DM

  ACCORDING TO BART

  Simon died in quarantine on November 28. Some say it was war wounds, others a broken heart. It was most likely feline enteritis. He was buried with full naval honors and farewelled by his shipmates at the PDSA’s pet cemetery in Ilford, Essex.

  HMS Amethyst had steamed up the Yangtze River from Shanghai to Nanjing to relieve the duty ship on April 19, 1949. It seems a bold decision during the Chinese Civil War with the People’s Liberation Army on the north bank and the Kuomintang on the south. They came under a salvo of PLA fire at Jiangyin the very next day, with seventeen dead and ten wounded, including Simon and the captain. The captain later died of his wounds; medical attention and TLC got Simon back on his feet and on the job, and over the steamy 101 days the PLA held the ship hostage, he ca
rried on with his duties. When negotiations failed, the Amethyst slipped her moorings on July 30 and made her escape in the dark.

  Once free, Lieutenant Commander Kerans wasted no time nominating Simon for the PDSA’s Dickin Medal for behavior of the highest order.

  There were a large number of rats on board that began to breed rapidly in the damaged portions of the ship. They represented a real menace to the health of the ship’s company. Simon nobly rose to the occasion and after two months the rats were much diminished. Throughout the Incident Simon’s behaviour was of the highest order. One would not have expected him to have survived a shell making a hole over a foot in diameter in a steel plate, yet after a few days Simon was a friendly as ever. His presence on the ship, together with Peggy the dog, was a decided factor in maintaining the high level of morale of the ship’s company. They gave the ship an air of domesticity and normality in a situation which in other aspects was very trying.

  Back home, the crew was feted and Simon packed off to quarantine. This may be another first . . . on top of being the first cat to receive the PDSA Dickin Medal, and first Royal Navy animal to get one, he may well have been the first ship’s cat to be “locked up” on landing. While “imported” cats and dogs were officially quarantined to keep rabies at bay from 1901 on, this seems to be the first record of a ship’s cat heading to the isolation ward.

  Britain had introduced strict dog controls in the late nineteenth century to deal with burgeoning numbers of stray dogs wandering the city streets and a seeming epidemic of “canine madness.” By 1902 the tough-on-dogs policy paid off and the country was declared rabies-free. There was another outbreak after 1918 when British soldiers, who tend to collect dogs wherever they are stationed, smuggled in rabid dogs from the war zone (they didn’t know they were rabid at the time, of course). The authorities got onto this promptly and Britain was rabies-free once again by 1922. Quarantine of all imported animals is how they kept it that way until the introduction of pet passports around 2001.

  The idea of quarantine goes back to the Black Death or plague, which wiped out an estimated 30 percent of Europe’s population, plus a goodly proportion of Asia’s, in the middle of the fourteenth century. The word itself comes from the Italian quaranta giorno—“forty days.” The Great Council of Ragusa (now Dubrovnik) set the quarantine ball rolling in 1377 with a law enforcing a thirty-day isolation period (trentino) for all newcomers (to see if symptoms of the Black Death developed) before they could enter the city. This was later extended to forty days, though no one is quite sure why.

  Incidentally . . .

  Hackbridge Kennels, mentioned in the Adelaide News story, has several claims to fame. It’s where:

  • Shackleton housed about one hundred sled dogs when preparing for his second Antarctic expedition

  • They trained service dogs for the 1914–18 war effort

  • They built five hundred isolation kennels for dogs the troops brought back from the front after the First World War.

  MATES

  “‘If Maizie [the ship’s cat] hadn’t been with us, we might have gone nuts,’ said Clancy. ‘There’s something about a dumb animal that takes your mind off trouble.’ Maizie took her turn at mess, eating malted milk tablets and condensed foods with the crewmen. She even comforted the men suffering from exposure and seasickness, going from one to another almost like a mother, he said.”

  —“Maizie, the Seagoing Cat,” Lookout, September 1943, quoting Eugene Clancy, rescued after fifty-six hours in a life raft with Maizie and five other crew members when their ship was torpedoed in the North Atlantic in March 1943

  mate: a companion, comrade, friend,

  partner; a fellow worker

  It’s as a “friend” that mate arrived in the fourteenth century, borrowed from Middle German’s māt(e) or gemate (“companion”). The word has Indo-European family ties to mat or met as in “measure” (a portion of food), making a mate someone to eat meat with, just as a companion is someone to break bread with (Latin com = “with”; panis = “bread”). Mate as an officer on a merchant ship and one of a wedded pair followed soon after.

  Mate is a team player. It readily pairs with other words to describe the basis of a relationship, from classmates, crewmates, playmates, schoolmates, shipmates, teammates, and workmates to bunkmates, helpmates, housemates, and messmates—companions of the same mess table and comrades on board. “Whence the saw: ‘Messmate before a shipmate, shipmate before a stranger, stranger before a dog,’” says William Henry Smyth in The Sailor’s Word-Book.

  INCIDENT 12: Vital Victuals

  A New Voyage Round the World

  William Dampier, 1697

  “

  [Setting out from Cape Corrientes for Guam,

  March 31, 1686]

  We had not sixty days’ provision, at a little more than half a pint of maize a day for each man [there were 100 men on the Cygnet] and no other provision except three meals of salted jew-fish; and we had a great many rats aboard, which we could not hinder from eating part of our maize. . . .

  When we had eaten up our three meals of salted jew-fish in so many days’ time we had nothing but our small allowance of maize. . . .

  There was not any occasion to call men to victuals for the kettle was boiled but once a day, which being made ready at noon, all hands were aloft to see the quartermaster share it, wherein he had need to be exact, having so many eyes to observe him. We had two dogs and two cats aboard, they likewise lived on what was given them, and waited with as much eagerness to see it shared as we did. . . .

  The 20th day of May . . . at four o’clock, to our great joy, we saw the island Guam. . . . It was well for Captain Swan that we got sight of it before our provision was spent, of which we had but enough for three days more; for, as I was afterwards informed, the men had contrived first to kill Captain Swan and eat him when the victuals was gone, and after him all of us who were accessory in promoting the undertaking this voyage. This made Captain Swan say to me after our arrival at Guam, ‘Ah! Dampier, you would have made them but a poor meal;’ for I was as lean as the captain was lusty and fleshy.

  ”

  ACCORDING TO BART

  Sharing meager rations with the ships’ cats and dogs is true mateship, because a cup of maize boiled up with a bit of water each day isn’t much to live on. It was probably just enough to keep the men going, although some were “weakened by it.” It was probably around 500 calories (2,100 kJ), about a quarter of the average sailor’s daily needs. As for supplementing their diet with a bit of fishing, no luck there. They saw no fish (“not so much as a flying-fish”) or birds for five thousand miles.

  Would they really have contrived to kill and eat Captain Swan and eat him when the victuals were gone? Possibly. Survivor cannibalism was not unknown, though unsurprisingly it was not widely reported. William Boys’ account some thirty years later on the loss of the Luxborough confesses that to stay alive the survivors were “impelled to adopt the horrible expedient of eating part of the bodies of our dead companions, and drinking their blood.”

  Dampier’s route from Cape Corrientes to Guam

  It surprises me that the Cygnet’s crew completely ignored the meat at their feet: the rats. They are just rodents like guinea pigs, squirrels, and beavers, and a regular source of protein for millions of animals of one kind or another. Sapiens spent thousands of years as hunter-gatherers, and their diet would have certainly included some sort of rodent if that’s what the day’s foraging brought back to camp for dinner. Polynesian navigators plying the Pacific were very happy to have Rattus exulans (kiore, or Pacific or Polynesian rats) on board, as skinned and roasted they made a tasty treat.

  Reports of European sailors putting rats on the menu even in the direst of dietary straits are few and far between. This is no surprise to anthropologist Robin Fox, who says in The Challenge of Anthropology, “All cultures go to considerable lengths to obtain preferred foods, and often ignore valuable food sources close at hand.”r />
  Faced with starvation, Magellan’s men didn’t ignore them; they prized them:

  Wednesday, the twenty-eighth of November, 1520, we came forth out of the said strait, and entered into the Pacific sea, where we remained three months and twenty days without taking in provisions or other refreshments, and we only ate old biscuit reduced to powder, and full of grubs, and stinking from the dirt which the rats had made on it when eating the good biscuit, and we drank water that was yellow and stinking. We also ate the ox hides which were under the main-yard, so that the yard should not break the rigging: they were very hard on account of the sun, rain, and wind, and we left them for four or five days in the sea, and then we put them a little on the embers, and so ate them; also the sawdust of wood, and rats which cost half-a-crown each, moreover enough of them were not to be got.

  Louis-Antoine de Bougainville’s crew also preferred to throw fresh rats into the cooking pot rather than risk rotten meat, well known for its dire and sometimes lethal consequences, on their voyage round the world (1766–69). So did the men on a French brig the Brits captured in 1800. “The Diligent [La Diligence] was full of rats. They were so numerous that the French seamen used to kill and cook them. . . . But I could not be prevailed upon to taste any,” reported a squeamish Lieutenant William Dillon. Possibly this was a good call. Two years later, Lieutenant James Gardner related a cautionary tale of the perils of rat pie:

  Our ship was full of rats, and one morning he [Marine Lieutenant Augustus Field] caught four which he had baked in a pie with some pork chops. When it came to table he began greedily to eat, saying, “What a treat! I shall dine like an alderman.” One of our lieutenants (Geo. M. Bligh) got up from the table and threw his dinner up, which made Field say, “I shall not offend such delicate stomachs and shall finish my repast in my cabin,” which he did and we wished the devil would choke him. When he had finished, he said one of the rats was not exactly to his taste as the flesh was black; but whether from a bruise or from disease, he could not say, but should be more particular in future in the post mortem examination. I never was more sick in my life, and am so to this day when I think of it.