Around the year 1820 a family named Hurley owned a large farm at the place now called Toms River, in New Jersey. The love of the sea was in their blood, and as the sons grew up they had their own sailing vessels, and adventured far and wide. And among the curiosities they brought back with them from their voyages were tailless cats from England, which, they said, came originally from the Isle of Man.
That is the earliest account I have of Manx cats in America. On the large Hurley farm the breed grew and flourished exceedingly, and when a son or daughter married and moved to another part of the country a pair of Manx cats went along as part of the dowry. Farmer Hurley’s descendants and the descendants of his tailless cats have come down through the years together, and today his great-great-granddaughter breeds cats of this strain at her home, jolly Hill Farm, near Philadelphia.
I fancy that some of the Hurley cats wandered away from the farm and set up a bold buccaneering tribe of their own, which still endures, for there are many tailless and bobtail cats around Barnegat, New Jersey, which is not far below Toms River, and wild creatures they are, living by their wits. When you cross the causeway from the mainland to Ship Bottom, the first town on Long Beach Island, and turn north toward Barnegat Light, you may, if you have quick eyes, see them in the dunes. They subsist on the offal of the fishermen’s catches, and perhaps they receive largess from the men at Loveladies’ Coast Guard Station, but no man can come near them, and they will fight the fiercest dog.
Even in captivity they retain their outstanding he-cat qualities. The Hurley great-great-granddaughter, Miss Elsie Walgrove, says that her Manx are “great hunters, not afraid to go far and wide from home, and very sturdy, some of the neuters weighing as much as thirty pounds.” One of her champions, Minus, attacked and killed a large weasel that had been stealing valuable cockerels from her chickenhouse, and Minus is a lady, too. Like all the Hurley family they love boating, and they enjoy riding on the market wagon. They will not, as a rule, take up with tailed cats, but with their own kind they are most friendly, and as companions for human beings they are, their admirers say, better than any dog.
I have been told by cat connoisseurs that there are few really good Marx, true Manx, in America. The trouble is, I think, that in shows over here the standard is not insisted upon as it is in England. People exhibit bobtail cats as Manx, and too many judges will let them get by on their markings and color, which are not important in this breed.
After all, though, if one is an individual owner and a connoisseur rather in the qualities that make cats delightful and stimulating than in points of structure, what does it matter if one’s Manx has an inch of tail where the hollow would be? I know a Manx cat named Michael; of the first litter of kittens born to his mother, a petite Manx called Mrs. Lena Dodds, he was the only one marked with the bar sinister. His mistress gave the perfect kittens to friends and kept Michael because even at the earliest age he showed character.
Michael is now a handsome coal-black giant, swaggering about on his tall hind legs and ruling the cats of the neighborhood with a high handor should one say paw? He is afraid of nothing, and can find his way anywhere. Carried away once in an automobile, unknown to his owners, to a distant railway station, he came home on his four legs through many miles of traffic, all by himself. Both he and Mrs. Lena Dodds should belong to the nearest Izaak Walton Club, for they are tireless fishermen. They stand for hours on a flat stone in the shallow stream that runs through the foot of the garden, they even stand in the water, watching and waiting for a catch. Woe be to the fish that tries to swim past them. They have caught quite large ones with a single sweep of a paw.
Michael looks like a large black hare, and when he sees a strange cat his nose twitches as a rabbit’s does when it is excited. But as both he and Lena hunt rabbits, squirrels, and chipmunks, it is hardly likely that they have rabbit blood.
Their favorite game is hoppity-hide-and-seek, which they play in the tall grass of a neighboring field, and their mistress says that when one of them, leaping high in the air, succeeds in landing on the other, she could fancy that she hears them laughing-so mischievous and gay are their movements. Lena and Michael have very sensitive nervous systems, and their ears are attuned to the slightest sound. They are quick to hear the approach of an automobile; if it is the family car they run to meet it, but they are never deceived by a strange motor.
Few Manx cats are imported to America for breeding or show purposes. Those brought here are usually the pets of English families coming to live in the United States. Shipwreck has had its part, too, in bringing them, just as shipwreck carried the tailless cat originally to the Isle of Man. A huge gray and white Manx I know, named Jack, was purchased at the tender age of ten days from a Barnegat fisherman, and the fisherman said that the kitten’s ancestors were washed ashore from an English ship that went down off the coast in a storm.
It would be interesting to know why Manx cats, for all their intelligence and charm, for all the romance of their history, are still caviar to the general. Perhaps some time the popular taste will turn to them as it has to the Persians and the Siamese, but at present the majority of Americans seem to prefer their cats with tails.