Savvy editors quickly caught on that pet stories, whether tall tales or true, boosted sales. Tucked among ads for Rising Sun Stove Polish, Swamp-Root Kidney, Liver and Bladder Cure, and Tuft’s Pills, in newspapers like the People’s Press and the Wray Rattler (in Yuma County, Colorado), they filled column inches. YouTube, eat your heart out.
INCIDENT 17: Vigilance
“Sailors Declare Cat Saved Ship from Ice:
Crew of Freighter Asserts Feline’s Vigilance Was Responsible
for Their Safe Arrival in Port of Boston”
Los Angeles Herald, June 28, 1908
“
BOSTON, June 27.—A common black cat, with a bob tail, dog-like ears and green eyes, saved the deeply laden British steamship Daltonhall from colliding with an iceberg off Cape Race. So at least say the crew of the ship, which is now berthed at Mystic wharf. The cat messes with the officers, which is another proof of the truth of the story. She answers to the name of ‘Queen Lil’ and is a native of Rotterdam.
Three weeks ago when the Daltonhall was at Rotterdam, Queen Lil came aboard and proceeded to make herself at home. Instead of making a beeline for the galley, as a cat might be expected to do, she seemed more interested in the engine room and the working of the telegraph, binnacle and steering gear. Indeed, the first thing Queen Lil did after boarding the ship was to make a tour of inspection. Evidently all was satisfactory, for she started with the steamer for Boston.
The freighter arrived in the ice region. The temperature had fallen and the water through which the ship was plowing was very cold. The cat was alert and so were the navigators. Her green eyes gleamed like coals and the doglike ears were cocked forward. She appeared to scent impending danger. The crew feared ice, and it was known the Daltonhall was hemmed by bergs and a collision might send her instantly to the bottom with all hands.
The seamen watched the cat, and the cat kept close to the navigators, all that weary night when double lookouts became almost blind for the time being by straining ahead for glimpses of bergs. After a sleepless vigil dawn revealed four bergs close to the ship. They were huge and colored a beautiful pale green with clouds of shadowy vapor floating above their glistening pinnacles. To have struck one of these formidable barriers would have been the death of the stout steel ship.
They feted the cat from Rotterdam and named her Queen Lil. Condensed milk was fed her from a spoon in honor of the deliverance from the icebergs.
”
ACCORDING TO BART
A hunter’s vigilance and ability to monitor surroundings comes in handy standing watch. While there’s a popular saying that cats can see in the dark, it’s not entirely true—not total dark. Cats can see in near darkness where sapiens’ eyes are useless, because feline eyes are designed to be highly efficient at capturing whatever light is around. It’s about size. A cat’s eyes are very big compared with the size of its head; in dim light, the iris, or colored portion, can open very wide to let in as much light as possible.
Cats’ eyes also have a special reflective layer at the back called the tapetum. This has a very specific job: reflecting any incoming light that the receptor cells miss right back to the retinal cells, which enhances sensitivity by some 40 percent. This also explains why a cat’s eyes glow in the dark when they catch the light.
Then there are the rods and cones. They turn incoming light into electrical signals. Rods are for black-and-white vision in dim light, and cones are for color vision in bright light. Cats have more rods, humans more cones. But there’s more to the story. In humans, each rod connects to a single nerve; in cats, the rods merge and are connected in bundles. What this adds up to is cats have ten times fewer nerves than humans traveling between their eyes and their brains, which consolidates the energy in low light and allows cats to see when there’s very little light around.
When one ship’s cat led its crew to safety after their small boat capsized in Grangemouth (Firth of Forth, Scotland) in 1920, the journalist on the spot put it down to feline intuition and wanting to get home and dry:
Nine men of the crew of the American cargo steamer Lake Eliko were saved from drowning recently by the instinct of the ship’s cat to swim toward the steamer in a storm and darkness when their small boat foundered at midnight between the ship and the shore.
John Shortne, a sailor, and Gilmer Stroud, a mess room boy, were drowned.
The 11 members of the crew had been ashore on leave. They had with them the ship’s cat. A storm began while they were ashore and when they were some distance out on their return journey to the steamer their boat capsized. In the darkness no one could make out the lights of the ship.
It’s more likely that Tabby could (a) make out the lights of the steamer in the darkness when the crew couldn’t and (b) sense things the crew was oblivious to. On top of this, her very sensitive hearing would help her pinpoint the direction sound was coming from—the steamer would certainly have had engines running.
INCIDENT 18: Sleeping Quarters
Diary of the Terra Nova Expedition
to the Antarctic 1910–1912
Edward Wilson
“
[Monday, October 17, 1910] The Admiral and his officers came on board early and we were all introduced and trotted him round. He was a most intelligent questioner and seemed to go to the heart of every detail at once and was very pleasant. Our cat was inspected. We have a small muscular black cat . . . who came on board as an almost invisible kitten in London or Cardiff. He has grown stiff and small and very strong and has a hammock of his own with the ‘hands’ under the fo’c’s’le. The hammock is about 2 ft long with proper lashings and everything made of canvas. A real man o’ war hammock with small blankets and a small pillow, and the cat was asleep in his hammock with his black head on the pillow and the blankets over him. The Admiral was much amused and while he was inspecting the sleeping cat, [he] opened his eyes, looked at the Admiral, yawned in his face and stretched out one black paw and then went back to sleep again. It was a very funny show and amused the Admiral and his officers as much as anything. [He] has learned to jump into his hammock which is slung under the roof along with the others and creeps in under the blanket with his head on the tiny pillow.
”
ACCORDING TO BART
The full story behind why the “small muscular black cat” was so sleepy is that he had turned in early, “not feeling very well, owing to the number of moths he had eaten, the ship being full of them.” When he was suddenly awakened for an entirely unexpected inspection by the admiral commanding the Australian Station, he had no idea of the importance of the occasion; how could he? No wonder he stretched, yawned, turned over, and went back to sleep.
Felines need an average of fifteen or sixteen hours of sleep a day. No surprises there, as it’s a typical sleeping pattern for hunters who need to keep the sleep tank topped up, spreading it over the day in
• Catch-up catnaps
• Longer light sleeps (which drift into)
• Short bouts of deep sleep.
Six Bell Sleeper, mascot of USS Wyoming, on a postcard from the ship while at sea,
dated July 8, 1913
As for hammocks, they were another Columbus “discovery.” Along with peppers and pineapple, he brought them back from the Old World to the New. Wikipedia’s “Hammock” entry tells us he came across them on his first voyage when “a great many Indians in canoes came to the ship to-day for the purpose of bartering their cotton, and hamacas, or nets, in which they sleep.”
It didn’t take long for the naval powers-that-be to figure out these woven sleeping nets were an ideal way to fit many men into a small space for a night’s sleep. Better still, they could be taken down and stowed during the day, clearing the decks for battle, blockade, or other seafaring or w
arfaring business. And they did double duty as shrouds: A sailor who died at sea would be sewn up in his hammock and tossed overboard with due rites.
It’s possible Spain shared the benefits of hanging beds during a brief period of cordial relations between warring nations around 1554, when Philip I wedded and bedded Mary I of England. However, the Royal Navy didn’t make them regulation bedding until 1597.
Although sleeping arrangements were cramped and a hammock no luxury bed, young midshipman Basil Hall fondly recalled the “cozy” nest on HMS Leander that gave him the soundest sleep:
Most people, I presume, know what sort of a thing a hammock is. It consists of a piece of canvass, five feet long by two wide, suspended to the deck overhead by means of two sets of small lines, called clews, made fast to grummets, or rings of rope, which, again, are attached by a lanyard to the battens stretching along the beams. In this sacking are placed a small mattress, a pillow, and a couple of blankets, to which a pair of sheets may or may not be added. The degree of nocturnal room and comfort enjoyed by these young gentlemen may be understood, when it is mentioned that the whole of the apparatus just described occupies less than a foot and a half in width, and that the hammocks touch one another. Nevertheless, I can honestly say, that the soundest sleep, by far, that I have ever known, has been found in these apparently uncomfortable places of repose; and though the recollection of many a slumber broken up, and the bitter pang experienced on making the first move to exchange so cozy a nest, for the snarling of a piercing north-west gale on the coast of America, will never leave my memory, yet I look back to those days and nights with a sort of evergreen freshness of interest, which only increases with years.
Incidentally . . .
The English hammock comes via the Spanish hamaca from the Taíno hamaka (the language of the first indigenous peoples Columbus encountered in the Caribbean). Woven sleeping nets or hanging beds were what the original inhabitants of Central and South America slept in and were also known as “brasill beds” or “Indian beds.” Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés in his Historia general y natural de las Indias (Seville, 1535) says:
The Indians sleep in a bed they call an “hamaca” which looks like a piece of cloth with both an open and tight weave, like a net . . . made of cotton . . . about 2.5 or 3 yards long, with many henequen twine strings at either end which can be hung at any height. They are good beds, and clean . . . and since the weather is warm they require no covers at all . . . and they are portable so a child can carry it over the arm.
Hamacas were also fishing nets. The redoubtable Wikipedia suggests that whether for fishing or sleeping, these early hammocks from Mexico and the Caribbean were “woven out of bark from a hamack tree.” That seems logical, possibly too logical. On investigation, this “hamack tree” is more likely native to a widespread digital species thriving in numerous internet sites rather than a botanical species indigenous to the Americas.
More likely sources for the fibers for weaving hammocks were Agave fourcroydes (henequen) and Furcraea andina (fique or cabuya). In A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica, Sir Hans Sloane said:
The Magurie-Tree or Cabuya, yields Wine, Vinegar, Honey, Beds, Threads, Needles, (out of the prickles of the Leaves) Tables, and Hafts of Knives, besides many medicinal uses. . . . Oviedo in his Coronica de las Indias . . . tells us that they make of this and Henequen, or Silk-Grass, good Ropes. The Leaves are laid in Rivers, and covered with Stones, as Flax in Spain, for some days, then they dry them in the Sun, after clear them of filth, with which they make many things, including Hamacas, some of this is white, others reddish.
Not a hamack tree in sight.
For good measure, English is indebted to Taíno for numerous words, usually via the Spanish given here:
• barbecue: barbacoa
• maize: maíz
• hurricane: huracán
• savanna: zavana
• tobacco: tabaco.
INCIDENT 19: Mateship
North Sea. Some Crew Members of Battlecruiser
HMAS Australia (I) Displaying Winter Protective Clothing Worn During North Sea Operations from 1915 to 1918
Group portrait of unidentified crew members from HMAS Australia. They are wearing fur vests, mittens, and caps with ear flaps against the cold; the ship was operating in the North Sea. Note the ship’s cat tucked into the vest of one of the seamen. Some of the men are smoking cigarettes or pipes.
ACCORDING TO BART
The photographer probably couldn’t believe his luck when one of the crew arrived with a seafurrer stuffed in his vest. Wartime photographers early on sussed out the symbolic value of a pet in the picture. The ship’s cat was a particularly popular “prop” for official (and unofficial) photographers and starred in hug shots, mug shots, hat shots, gun shots, shoulder shots, and hammock shots. Amid bad news of bombs and body counts, seeing photos of seafurrers taking it all in stride reassured folks back home that “our hardened men at sea” were doing just fine with their seafurring shipmates.
The title of the photo is all the caption for this classic reveals. No names, no date, though it was likely the winter of 1916–17, as that’s when HMAS Australia was on regular patrols with the British Grand Fleet in the North Sea. As for the lineup, maybe “Seaman Clark,” who loaned it to the Australian War Memorial to copy for their collection, is one of the men on deck? Or maybe not. We’ll never know.
While many shots were stage-managed, there’s no stage-managing tucking a cat in a vest. Seafurrers aren’t normally very enthusiastic about restraint, since they need to be free to come and go to check their territory.
That said, seafurrers aren’t averse to body contact, and for a bit of extra warmth will happily spread over the end of the bed. That’s exactly what Winston Churchill’s black cat Nelson did twenty-five years later in another world war. He regularly curled up on the great man’s feet at the end of his bed as he worked. Nelson “does more for the war effort than you do,” joked Churchill with colleague Rab Butler, president of the Board of Education. “He acts as a hot water bottle and saves fuel and power.” Nelson in fact played an even more vital wartime role—he ensured Britain’s PM during the Second World War did not get cold feet.
Incidentally . . .
Pets were very much a feature of life at sea in both world wars. Gilbert Adshead, engine room artificer in HMS Lord Nelson in the Eastern Mediterranean during the Gallipoli campaign (February 1915 to January 1916), recalled they had several pets on board, including:
a pigeon; a couple of canaries; a black cat; a white cat; a bulldog, who was mascot of the football team; a Manchester terrier, a lady, who eventually begat herself a family when we were refitting and brought them all on board as well; and we had early, at the beginning of the war, a goat. Oh, and we had a monkey. He was a nice fellow old Jacko. . . .
INCIDENT 20: Jobs for the Girls
The catering crew of SS Newcastle, a paddle steamer that did the overnight run between Sydney and Newcastle (New South Wales, Australia) for forty years. Sydney, circa 1910–20
ACCORDING TO BART
Jobs for the girls on the ocean waves were few and far between in the age of sail. It was a strictly male preserve, sapiens-wise. That’s not to say there were never women on board. There were on occasion wives and daughters as well as women who disguised themselves as men to get a job at sea. On the seafurring side, there were countless top-notch, able-bodied female sea cats often reckoned to be far better mousers.
Steam changed all that. Regular mail and passenger steamer services created more and different jobs, including entire catering departments. And it created jobs only women could do in those days—catering to “the ladies.”
The Times (London) described the Margate-to-London paddle steamer Thames on July 8, 1815:
Her cabins are spacious, and are fitted up with all that elegance could suggest, or personal comfort require; presenting as choice library, backgammon boards, draught ta
bles, and other means of amusement. For the express purpose of combining delicacy with comfort a female servant attends upon the ladies.
“Ladies will have a female steward to wait on them,” announced the Talbot, a cross-Channel steamer that ran from London to Calais in the summer of 1822.
Women also did the washing and ironing and mending (no surprises here). “When the ship is lying at any foreign port, the stewardesses are to be constantly employed, and every opportunity must be taken by them to keep the ship’s linen in order,” decreed the Cunard Line’s rule book.
But the men and women had to be kept apart. “I am convinced that it is a very desirable thing to have a woman of character and experience in the position of a matron on board every emigrant ship carrying single women,” proclaimed Thomas Gray, assistant secretary of the Marine Department in his report to the president of the UK Board of Trade in 1881:
Such a woman in her capacity of matron ought to act as a general supervisor of the comfort and conduct of the single women in the steerage. She should play the part of an ever present domestic inspector, and her special office should be to encourage decency and order and suppress any indecorum amongst the single females.
Such a matron had her work cut out for her. Sarah Elizabeth Stephens, emigrating to New Zealand from Wales on the Cardigan Castle, jotted down in her diary a typical hazard the chastity enforcer faced.
[October 16, 1876] . . . Some of the girls have been breaking the rules by writing notes to the sailors. The matron came up unexpectedly and tried to take the letter from them. There was a scuffle in which the Matron’s hat (a new one) fell overboard and some knitting she had in her hand. She is very angry. I do not know what will be done with the girls.