Trim, the Cat Who Went Round Australia
A ship's cat with a documented career, a coastline named around him, and a biography written by a navigator in a French prison cell.
Most famous ships' cats are anecdotes. Somebody remembered a cat, somebody wrote it down a century later, and the story acquired a medal it never had. We have written before about how thin most of these accounts are.
Trim is the exception, and for an unusual reason. His biography was written by the man who owned him, at length, by name, while that man was under house arrest on Mauritius with nothing else to do.
The navigator
Matthew Flinders was the officer who established that New Holland was a single continent, and who successfully lobbied for the name Australia. Between 1801 and 1803 he took HMS Investigator around its entire coast, charting as he went.
Trim was born at sea in 1799, on the Reliance, on the passage from the Cape of Good Hope to Botany Bay. He was black with white feet and a white star at the chest. Flinders records that as a kitten he fell overboard and swam back to a rope thrown down for him, hauled himself up it, and was thereafter regarded as belonging to the ship rather than to anyone on it.
He sailed with Flinders on the Investigator for the whole circumnavigation. He is, in the most literal sense, the first cat known to have gone all the way round Australia.
The biography
In 1803 Flinders sailed for England, was wrecked, returned, and set out again in a small schooner. He put in at Mauritius, not knowing that Britain and France were at war again. The French governor detained him. He stayed for six and a half years.
Somewhere in that confinement he wrote a tribute to his cat. It runs to several thousand words and it is not a joke — or rather, it is a joke told with complete sincerity, in the register of a formal eighteenth-century biography, by a man who had lost almost everything else.
He describes Trim's manners at table, his habit of sitting on a shoulder during observations, his tolerance of the ship's routine, his particular and confident opinions. He records that Trim came with him to Mauritius and vanished there in 1804. Flinders believed he had been eaten, and said so.
He opens the tribute by calling Trim the best and most illustrious of his race, the most affectionate of friends, and faithful of servants. The joke and the grief are doing the same work.
Why this one holds up
Test the usual claims and most naval cat stories fall apart. Trim's do not, and the reason is documentary.
There is a named owner who was a public figure with a paper trail. There is a manuscript in Flinders' own hand, held in the State Library of New South Wales. The voyages are logged, dated and independently recorded. The dates are internally consistent. Nothing about the account requires the reader to trust a story passed along.
What you cannot verify is the character — the wit, the specific opinions, the table manners. That is Flinders writing a portrait, not a log entry. But the animal existed, went where the account says he went, and disappeared where the account says he disappeared.
That is a better evidentiary position than almost any other famous cat in history occupies.
The statues
Trim is unusually well commemorated for an animal with no rank.
There is a bronze of him on the window ledge of the Mitchell Library in Sydney, behind the statue of Flinders, put there in 1996. There is another at Donington in Lincolnshire, where Flinders was born. Port Lincoln has one. Several places along the coastline Flinders charted carry versions of the name.
The cat has, in effect, been folded into the memorial of the man — which is roughly what Flinders was arguing for in the manuscript, though he can hardly have expected it to work.
The part worth keeping
Ships carried cats because ships carried grain, and rodents ate both the stores and the rigging. That is the practical history, and it is not sentimental.
But the reason we know Trim's name and not the thousands of other working cats who did the same job is that one of them happened to belong to a literate, grieving, bored and extremely thorough man with six years to fill.
Most history of animals is like this. It survives where somebody with a pen happened to care.
This is general information, not a diagnosis.
Every cat is a specific animal with a specific history. Use this to ask your vet better questions — not to replace the examination. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it in public.
