Trim, the Cartographer's Cat

by Matthew Flinders

  On the previous days he had been visiting his friend, the artist Toussaint Antoine de Chazal de Chamarel, who was painting his portrait.

  The portrait M. Chazal was painting in December 1806 and January 1807 is now famous. It gives us the best idea we have of what Matthew looked like. Unsmiling, he fixes the viewer with a sombre, slightly stern gaze. His mouth is set in a determined line: he looks as if he hasn’t had a shave for a day or two. Matthew described what M. Chazal was doing as ‘tak[ing] a copy of my face, of the natural size’.2

  Portrait of Captain Matthew Flinders, RN, 1774–1814, Toussaint Antoine de Chazal de Chamarel. Art Gallery of South Australia.

  It seems odd to us these days to sum up the creative process in this rather dismissive way – to describe painting a portrait as if it were merely ‘taking a copy’ of someone’s face, and to use the term ‘writing out’ a story as if no art were involved in the telling of it. But, in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was common enough for writers to claim to be ‘copying Nature’3 or presenting ‘a definite and substantial reality’.4

  M. Chazal could have decided to paint Matthew as he was when he was laughing at one of his jokes, or arguing with him over a card game, or playing the flute to Mme Chazal’s harpsichord accompaniment. But for him, the ‘reality’ of Matthew was to be captured with the use of measuring instruments. And for Matthew, the story of his cat Trim was just a matter of sitting down to write ‘a history’ that he could then use for French translation practice.

  Was the ‘history’ he wrote in January 1807 The Biographical Tribute to the Memory of Trim? On the surviving manuscript he added ‘Isle de France 1809’ to the title. Maybe what he wrote in 1807 was a simpler version that he elaborated over the next two or three years. In any case, what we have is far from a simple ‘history’.

  There can’t be many cats in history who have been described in such affectionate detail, and Trim now has his share of portraits and statues – so much so that it seems hardly proper nowadays to depict Matthew without his faithful Trim somewhere nearby. How lucky we are that somehow the manuscript of Trim survived among Matthew’s papers, to be discovered in 1971 by Stephen Murray-Smith.5 It has been published several times since then.

  But outside this manuscript, what do we know about the real Trim? In all the 235,000 words of Flinders’ private journal, he only mentioned him that one time, to say he was writing out his history. He didn’t figure in the journal during the dark days when, according to the Tribute, ‘confined in a room with his master and another officer, … he contributed by his gay humour to soften our straight captivity’.

  Matthew’s letters give us a few more hints. He mentioned him twice in letters to his wife, Ann.

  Ann would have known Trim from her short and ill-fated sojourn on board the Investigator between her marriage to Matthew on 17 April 1801 and the middle of June that year, when she was sent back to her family, banished from the voyage. Matthew wrote news of him from Sydney in June 1803 as one among several shipmates: ‘Trim, like his master is becoming grey; he is at present fat and frisky, and takes meat from ones forks with his former dexterity: he is commonly my bedfellow.’6

  In November 1804, he wrote to Ann again, this time from the Garden Prison in Mauritius. At the end of a long, passionate letter, he added a teasing paragraph directed towards ‘that idle thing, Belle’ – Ann’s teenage half-sister Isabella Tyler. ‘Does she think I will bring her any pretty feathers or little fishes when she has not written me one line for these live-long three years last past?’ He catalogued a whole lot of presents that Isabella wouldn’t get, and one of them was ‘a set of Trim’s finger nails which he shed in the Gulph of Carpentaria.’7

  Trim gets a mention in one more letter. This one was to Governor Philip Gidley King, written in September 1803 at sea in the tiny schooner Cumberland, which Matthew had decided to sail all the way to England even though nobody had ever been so far in such a small vessel. Of course he didn’t make it – he stopped at the French colony of Île de France (Mauritius) to repair the ship, and he, Trim and the rest of the dozen crew were taken prisoner by the French.

  But when he wrote to Governor King he didn’t know what awaited him and he was in a jovial mood. He wrote, ‘of all the filthy little things I ever saw, this schooner, for bugs, lice, fleas, weavels, mosquitos, cockroaches large and small, and mice, rises superior to them all’. He described the measures they were taking against the various insects, with the bugs being the most persistent: he suggested that ‘before this vile bug-like smell will leave me, [I] must, I believe, as well as my clothes, undergo a good boiling in the large kettle’.

  The rodents, however, were easily dealt with: ‘I shall set my old friend Trim to work upon the mice.’8 He knew he could rely on his ‘faithful, intelligent … sporting, affectionate and useful’ feline friend.

  Through all his trials and tribulations, Matthew was always dreaming about retiring to the English countryside to live quietly with Ann. And, ‘if ever he shall have the happiness to enjoy repose in his native country’, there would be a place for Trim: ‘under a thatched cottage surrounded by half an acre of land … in the most retired corner, a monument to perpetuate thy memory and record thy uncommon merits’.

  Sadly, that never happened. But Trim’s memory has now been restored and perpetuated to the point that he is now one of history’s most famous cats. His affectionate master and friend did him proud. At the same time, as Stephen Murray-Smith writes, Trim ‘tells us as much about [Matthew’s] personality and humanity as, perhaps, the rest of his published work does in total’.9 In writing this loving, witty, moving tribute to Trim, Matthew Flinders revealed a side of himself that we wouldn’t otherwise suspect had ever existed.

  Incidentally …

  There are now memorials to Flinders and Trim in Australia, Britain and Mauritius. Not many ships’ cats have one memorial, let alone six. The first one, by John Cornwell, was erected in 1996 on a window sill of the State Library of New South Wales, behind the 1925 statue of Matthew. Trim was included in a Flinders memorial plaque erected in Baie du Cap on Mauritius, near where Matthew lived for nearly five years while he was detained on the island. There is a statue of Matthew in the town square of his home town of Donington, Lincolnshire, with Trim winding around his left leg. It was erected in 2006.

  The most recent major statue of Trim and Matthew is in the concourse outside Euston Station in London, not far from St James’s Churchyard, where Matthew was buried. It was designed and created by Mark Richards for an international committee determined to erect a permanent memorial in the city where Matthew spent his last few years. Prince William unveiled the statue on the bicentenary of his death, 19 July 2014.

  In 1911, George Gordon McCrae described his ideal for a statue of Matthew:

  “The figure, of course, of heroic size, and in a working undress of the period, the pose easy and natural, the feet planted on a coralline rock, with a few sea shells and weed, and perhaps a star-fish ‘en evidence’ – his quadrant laid against the inner surface of his flexed left arm, while he reads off the bearing from the vernier of the instrument, the fingers of the right hand grasping the pencil, with which he is about to record it.10”

  Matthew Flinders, Capt. R.N. 1809, author of Trim, George Gordon McCrae. National Library of Australia.

  McCrae’s notion for a statue of a working chartmaker rather than a uniformed hero had to wait for nearly a century to be realised – and Mark Richards went one better, by adding Trim sitting patiently behind Flinders while he works. According to the Matthew Flinders Memorial Statue website, ‘Richards was struck not so much by his representing the grand ambitions of king and country as by the day-to-day reality of his seafaring life; the discipline, organisation, unimaginable privations and determination… With all this in mind, Mark Richards presents Matthew not as a distant heroic figure, but as a man among us.’11

  Whenever I’m in London, I visit Matthew and Trim at Euston, and I enjoy watching childre
n stroking and patting Trim while their parents drink coffee at the surrounding café tables.

  Full-sized copies of Mark Richards’ statue of Flinders and Trim have now been installed at Flinders University and in Port Lincoln, both in South Australia. There are also dozens of miniature versions (maquettes) around the world, bought by Flinders’ enthusiasts, local councils, educational institutions and historical societies. When Barack and Michelle Obama visited the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in London in June 2015, the publicity photo shows Trim and Matthew just over Michelle’s shoulder.

  My Seafurring Adventures with Matt Flinders

  TRIM

  Isle of France

  Preface

  There was never a dull moment with Matt, first on the Reliance, then on the Norfolk to Moreton Bay and then on the Investigator, lapping and mapping Australia’s coastline. As if that wasn’t enough for a CV, we were then shipwrecked in the Porpoise on Wreck Reef when Matt was hurrying home with all his charts and journals, and finally we were taken prisoner on Mauritius when we simply stopped by in the Cumberland for essential repairs and provisions. How were we to know a war was on?

  It’s nice to have had someone write a Biographical Tribute to me, but the announcement of my death was rather premature. Matt should have had more faith in my true grit and survival skills. That’s why I thought it important to set the record straight (for posterity) by rounding out the stories he tells in the Tribute, filling in the gaps, and making the odd correction or three.

  It seemed to me that an ‘incidental memoir’ approach using snippets from the Tribute as a springboard for my tale would be the best way to share my story (and marry it with Matt’s version of events). I roped in the services of a couple of scribes to help me pull all this together, but the opinions are entirely mine, and I have clearly signposted them as ‘according to Trim’ so there’s no misunderstanding.

  Trim

  Incident 1

  ‘This good-natured purring animal was born on board His Majesty’s ship the Roundabout in 1799 during a passage from the Cape of Good Hope to Botany Bay.’

  The ‘1799’ is either a slip of the pen or a slip of the memory. I was born two years earlier in 1797 on the Reliance (called the Roundabout by Matt). By 1799, Matt was in command of the Norfolk, completing the circumnavigation of Van Diemen’s Land with George Bass, then heading north with me and Bongaree (our indispensable guide on all local matters) to Glass-House Bay and Hervey’s Bay on the lookout for a large river system so he could explore the interior. Spoiler alert: no luck there.

  My parents had signed on as ships’ cats on the Reliance under the command of Henry Waterhouse for the 1795 Botany Bay trip, taking Captain John Hunter out to his new job as second governor of the fledgling penal colony. Bennelong was also on board, heading home after three years in England, and the crew included the dynamite Lincolnshire duo George Bass (surgeon) and Matthew Flinders (master’s mate). Waterhouse had already been to Botany Bay – he was a First Fleeter (a midshipman on the Sirius). So he knew where he was going. And had some idea what it was like out there.

  They left Plymouth on 15 February, arrived in Sydney seven months later and, after repairs to leaky planks and a round trip to Norfolk Island, set sail for Cape Town in September 1796 – Waterhouse had a commission to buy livestock for the colony there. He certainly stocked up, stowing 109 head of cattle, 107 sheep and three mares on board plus fodder. He wasn’t exaggerating when he claimed: ‘I believe no ship ever went to sea so much lumbered.’ While a typical navy supply ship might carry 60 or 70 head of cattle, the Reliance was carrying nearly four times that.

  Thus ‘lumbered’, they left Cape Town in April 1797 bound for Botany Bay, and somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean I arrived on the scene, hence Matt’s throwaway line about my roots, ‘Indian by birth’.

  Incidentally …

  The Cape Town trip was the game changer for the colony. Twenty-six of the sheep stowed on board were ‘Spanish sheep’ (merinos) renowned for producing the finest wool in the world, and Waterhouse owned them – he had snapped them up at four pounds a head after others had knocked them back. That was the easy bit. Getting them back to Botany Bay was the hard bit. It was an appalling trip at times, with ‘the sea breaking over the ship with shocks that are inconceivable, a few more of which I am well convinc’d must have sent her to the bottom,’ says Waterhouse.12 They also ran out of fodder for the livestock, so ‘we fed them – or rather forc’d them – to eat the seamen’s biscuit, & any other messes we could make up’. Despite this, he landed 24 of his 26 merinos, kept some to breed on his Parramatta River property, and sold the rest to John Macarthur (who had offered 15 guineas a head for the lot), Samuel Marsden and Captain Rowley. Within forty years, the colony was ‘riding on the sheep’s back, producing more than two million kilos (4.4 million pounds) of wool a year.

  How did the King of Spain’s ‘not-for-export’ prize merinos get to the Cape in the first place? In 1789, the Spanish king gave William of Orange some sheep from his Escoriale Merino Stud, and William, in turn, ‘gave’, as an experiment, a couple of rams and four ewes to Colonel Jacob Gordon, military commander at the Cape, to see if they would fare better there than they had done in the wet, cold Netherlands. Gordon, who probably couldn’t believe his luck when six prize merinos arrived, sent them off to breed on the Dutch East India Company farm, Groenekloof. But he didn’t live to build himself a wool empire in South Africa; he committed suicide in 1795 after copping substantial abuse for surrendering the Cape to the invading British. His widow gave six merinos away, sold the rest to Waterhouse, and left the Cape for good.

  BACKGROUND BRIEFING:

  Bound for Botany Bay

  The American War of Independence had put an end to Britain’s efficient and effective system of sending its felons elsewhere since the 1717 Transportation Act. Everywhere they had tried to send them since had said no thanks very firmly, including the local authorities in Belize (British Honduras), Jamaica, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, Cape Coast Castle (Ghana), and Tristan da Cunha. And when the dust had settled after the American War of Independence, the Maryland Government turned them down flat. The felons of course kept coming, the gaols were full to overflowing and the hulks – the temporary prisons on unseaworthy ships moored offshore – were massively overcrowded. It was a problem. Then Botany Bay was ‘discovered’. Now that would be the perfect place for a penal colony, reckoned the British Government.

  Someone did some sums that showed transporting convicts to Botany Bay would be cheaper than building more jails at home. Others noted the bonus: returning would be difficult, so they’d more than likely be gone for good. Best of all, unlike everywhere else that had turned them down, Botany Bay was open for business. There was no one there to say no. It was terra nullius, they said, ignoring the fact it was actually already inhabited. So that’s why Captain Arthur Phillip’s First Fleet was bound for Botany Bay in 1787. He dropped anchor on 19 January 1788, had a look around, gave the thumbs-down and sailed north round the next headland, proclaiming the new colony of New South Wales on 26 January from the landing site at Port Jackson in what he called Sydney Cove (after the man who drafted his instructions). But people had in their heads that Botany Bay was going to be the name of the new penal colony, so it stuck.

  Stepping ashore on Port Jackson, Phillip probably raised the flag with some relief. But it wasn’t the first time the English colours had fluttered over Terra Australis. Captain James Cook had hoisted the flag on Possession Island on 22 August 1770 when, following Admiralty orders, he took possession of the eastern coast of New Holland in the name of His Majesty King George the Third. In his heart of hearts, he probably couldn’t see the point as he noted in his Journal that the country produced nothing that ‘can become an Article in trade to invite Europeans to fix settlement upon it.’ But it wasn’t trade they needed in 1788. It was a dumping ground for convicts.

  Captain Cook taking possession of the Australian Continent on beh
alf of the British Crown, 1770, under the name of New South Wales. Samuel Calvert. National Library of Australia.

  Incident 2

  ‘In playing with his little brothers and sisters upon deck by moonlight, when the ship was lying tranquilly in harbour, the energy and elasticity of his movements sometimes carried him so far beyond his mark, that he fell overboard; but this was far from being a misfortune; he learned to swim and to have no dread of the water.’

  The harbour that the Reliance was lying tranquilly in was Port Jackson, where she was undergoing repairs after that rough voyage from Cape Town. Captain Cook had spotted its entrance when sailing past on 6 May 1770 and named it. He reckoned it looked like a good anchorage. ‘Spot on!’ said First Fleet Captain Arthur Phillip, who, on 15 May 1788, proclaimed it ‘the finest harbour in the world, in which a thousand sail of the line may ride in the most perfect security’ and a far better option than sandy, swampy Botany Bay that was lacking in fresh water and way too shallow for ships.

  And that’s where I ‘learned’ to swim. Though of course I didn’t ‘learn’ to swim. I already could swim. I was doing what comes naturally to most land animals, who can swim if they have to/want to; people and apes are the notable exceptions. They have to learn.

  Felines have a natural buoyancy, so all we have to do when we hit water by design or accident is keep our nose above the waves, keep breathing, keep paddling and keep calm (or as calm as possible in big seas). Unlike the dogs on board, however, we generally don’t choose to swim, because getting wet is a problem for us. Fur takes hours to lick dry once water soaks through both the top coat and the undercoat. Turkish van cats, known as ‘swimming cats’, are different. They don’t mind getting wet because they don’t have an undercoat like regular cats and their top coat is virtually moisture resistant.