Cats do not like the water. Dogs do. Cats are supposed to love a snug, warm berth. Dogs are agog for adventure. Yet there is seldom a ship that has not its cat, and the annals of the sea are full of stories of them, while the only sea dogs so far as I know are two-legged ones, the old salts to whom the name is colloquially given.
Cats have always had a part in the traditions of the sea, ever since the ancients identified the cat with the moon, the ruler of the tides. They had a more sinister connection in medieval times, when in many parts of Europe, particularly in the highlands and islands of Scotland, men believed that tempests and disasters at sea were caused by cats that were really witches in disguise, But today, with no superstition about it, or at least not much, sailors value cats as good shipmates, who are not only useful in keeping down rats, but who bring good luck, and often in some mysterious way sense approaching storms and other perils and give warning.
Cats have never told us why so many of them hang around the water front, but certainly in seaports it is the part of the town they prefer. Perhaps it is because longshoremen and sailors are kind to them. Or it may be because of the rats. Or the moonlight on the water. Anyway there they are, and when one gets bored he takes passage on some ship and extends his knowledge of geography.
Dick, a black cat with white spats, who makes his home on the mezzanine floor of the French Line dock in New York, where he mingles with the crowd on sailing nights, always takes a voyage when he feels run down, and returns quite restored by the sea air and tidbits in the ship’s kitchen. The steamship Clairton, plying between Liverpool and Norfolk, Virginia, arrived in America one day with a Manx cat who had sailed as a stowaway, not declaring himself till Liverpool was below the horizon. The men said the ship had never had such a smooth and speedy voyage, and they gave the credit to Stumpy, as they named the Manx. Sailors believe that tailless cats are special carriers of good luck.
When the steamship Leviathan had left for Europe on her first voyage after being out of commission for a year, there was a rumor abroad in Hoboken that she had sailed without a cat. A wireless was sent to Captain Harry Manning of the Leviathan, inquiring if this was so, and he was so disturbed that he not only wirelessed back an emphatic denial but had himself photographed with a cat on either arm and mailed the picture to America. Was it likely, he asked, that a boat that had twelve cats on its preceding voyage would sail without any?
The Leviathan always did have fine cats. One of the old-timers was Ginger, a red cat born in a sampan near the Chinese seaport, Whampoa. He was a grandson of Tiger, a huge tomcat who signed up with Captain Samuels of the clipper ship Dreadnought. Samuels would sooner have sailed without his first mate than without Tiger. At the last minute he would bellow, “Is Tiger aboard?” and not till the men answered, “Aye, aye, sir,” did he give the order to cast off.
Grandson Ginger was a great ratter, a hard fighter, and a gay old sailor, with a wife in every port.
Some sea cats have shown, on occasion, qualities of real heroism and devotion. The Coast Guardsmen at Cape Cod tell some stirring tales, and some pathetic ones, such as that of the cat of the Castagna, who after the vessel was wrecked was found upon it, keeping solitary vigil by her dead captain’s side.
And consider the courage and intelligence of Old One-Eye and of Oldtimer, two cats of whom Captain George H. Grant told in the New York Herald Tribune Magazine.
On a night when his vessel was caught in a fearful hurricane Oldtimer made her way through the blinding rain and wind to Captain Grant by the wheelhouse and gave him to understand that he must follow her. Then she led him along slippery decks and down ladders to the after well deck, and straight to where some heavy cargo had come loose from its lashings and was crashing dangerously against the bulwarks. It was Oldtimer’s last service. On that same night she was swept away by a sea that broke over the boat deck while she clung there, as it were, on guard.
Old One-Eye, “the most sagacious cat that ever trod the deck of a vessel,” according to Captain Grant, was born dumb, but on two occasions he forced himself to miew. On one, he waked the captain just in time for him to save himself from a drunken cook who threatened him with a galley knife. On the other, he gave warning of a drifting dory with two exhausted fishermen in it, on a night so dark that but for the cat they would never have been sighted. Did Old One-Eye see the dory, or did he sense it out in the fog? The fishermen thought he might have smelt their fish, but Captain Grant did not agree. He called it “uncanny intuition.”
For many years the effigy of a ship’s cat stood over the door of a house in Stockholm, Sweden. Recently this house was torn down, and old people in Stockholm recalled the deed for which this cat was honored. The captain of a sailing vessel died during a voyage from Haiti, and his wife died also, and their baby daughter was left in charge of a nurse who did not know if the child had relatives, or where to go to find out. But the ship’s cat, a former resident of Stockholm, knew where to go. As soon as the boat docked he led the nurse with the baby up one street and down another till he reached No. za Vasterland Street. There he stopped and miewed at the door. It was the home of the baby’s grandmother.
One hears a great deal about dogs on polar expeditions, and of course in heavy work like hauling sledges they are more useful than cats could be. But cats have their uses, even in the eternal snows. Lincoln Ellsworth took a lady cat along on the last Ellsworth Transantarctic Flight Expedition, and on Christmas night she presented him with three kittens. It was a pleasant little touch of home. Ellsworth sent announcements to the home papers, but one wonders why he did not arrange to have the kittens go on the air. The barks of the Byrd Expedition dogs and the squawks of its penguins were broadcast. Surely the miews of polar Christmas kittens are quite as worthy of the radio.