Flinders and Trim board the Cumberland and sail for England. They drop anchor in Port Louis, Mauritius, on 17 December for emergency repairs, and are made prisoners.
•1804–1810
In 1804, when Flinders is transferred to Maison Despeaux, Trim is dispatched to the home of a French lady to be her daughter’s companion. He disappears shortly afterwards.
In 1809, Flinders records his grief at Trim’s loss in his A Biographical Tribute to the Memory of Trim. He is released on parole in 1810 and, back in England, publishes A Voyage to Terra Australis with accompanying atlas on 18 July 1814. He dies the next day aged 40.
Notes
Matthew Flinders: Trim’s Shipmate and Bedfellow
1.Matthew Flinders, Private Journal, p. 150.
2.Private Journal, p. 149.
3.Samuel Richardson, letter to Miss Mulso, quoted in Miriam Allott (ed.), Novelists on the Novel (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959), p. 41.
4.George Eliot, quoted in Andrzej Gasiorek, Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After (1995), p. 10.
5.Stephen Murray-Smith, ‘Introduction’, A Biographical Tribute to the Memory of Trim by Matthew Flinders (Sydney: John Ferguson; Halstead Press, 1985), p. 5.
6.Matthew Flinders, letter to Ann Flinders, 25 June 1803, in Personal Letters from an Extraordinary Life, ed. Paul Brunton (Sydney: Hordern House, 2002), p. 100.
7.Matthew Flinders, Letter to Ann Flinders, 4 November 1804, in Brunton Personal Letters, p. 121.
8.Matthew Flinders, Letter to Philip Gidley King, 24 September 1803, in Brunton Personal Letters, pp. 109–110.
9.Murray-Smith, ‘Introduction’, p. 5.
10.George Gordon McCrae, ‘Historical Sketch of Captain Matthew Flinders’, Victorian Geographical Journal, 28 (1911), p. 13.
11.Matthew Flinders Memorial Statue website (http://www.flindersmemorial.org/the-matthew-flinders-memorial-statue/).
My Seafurring Adventures with Matt Flinders
Incident 1
12.Henry Waterhouse, letter to Viscount Sydney, 20 August 1797, sold at Christies, London, 29 April 1999 (https://www.christies.com/lotfinder/Lot/captain-henry-waterhouse-rn-1770-1812-1657199-details.aspx).
Incident 2
13.James Cook, Journal, 6 May 1770, from James Cook: The Journals, selected and edited by Philip Edwards (London: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 128.
14.Matthew Flinders, ‘Memoir Explaining the Construction of the Charts of Australia,’ TNA ADM 55/76/36–88, quoted in Dany Bréelle, ‘Matthew Flinders’s Australian Toponymy and its British Connections,’ Journal of the Hakluyt Society, November 2013 (https://www.hakluyt.com/PDF/Flinders_Toponymy.pdf).
Incident 3
15.Matthew Flinders, A Voyage to Terra Australis in the Years 1801–1803, Volume 1 (London: Nicol, 1814), p. 36.
Incident 6
16.Ken Shilling and Cynthia Hunter, Huntington’s History of Newcastle and the Northern District (Lambton, NSW: Newcastle Family History Society, 2009), quoted in ‘Seizure of the Norfolk’ (https://www.jenwilletts.com/seizure_of_the_norfolk.htm).
17.William Burney (editor), A New Universal Dictionary of the Marine (T. Cadell and W. Davies, London 1815).
Incident 7
18.‘the Country itself, so far as we know’: James Cook, Journal, 6 May 1770, from James Cook: The Journals, selected and edited by Philip Edwards (London: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 175.
Acknowledgements
This book owes its existence to Matthew Flinders RN, who put pen to paper when detained in Plaines Wilhems, Mauritius, and turned his sadness at the loss of ‘the most affectionate of friends, – faithful of servants, and best of creatures’ into an utterly timeless tale of a ship’s cat – A Biographical Tribute to the Memory of Trim. We are most grateful to Lisette Flinders Petrie for giving us her permission to embark on this new edition based on our complete and faithful transcript of the six-page manuscript safely lodged in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. We would also like to thank Nigel Rigby for his support and for helping us navigate the permissions hoops at the museum, and Helen Whitington, who meticulously checked our transcript.
We always knew that in illustrating Trim, The Cartographer’s Cat we wanted to make the most of the treasure trove of drawings made by the Investigator artists during the circumnavigation of Australia. We also knew we would need more than that, so we turned to Ad Long, who took our briefest of briefs and created delightful images that complement the drawings of the Investigator artists perfectly. Of course, that would not have been possible without the ever-patient Fynne, who took time out from his busy feline schedule to be Trim’s body double, or without his human, Nicola Beveridge, who carried out numerous photo shoots.
When we decided we wanted a map that showed Flinders’ and Trim’s circumnavigation of Australia and other explorations, we turned to John Frith of Flat Earth Mapping, who not only recreated Flinders’ map and added in the extra voyages and place names we requested, but helpfully delivered more than we were looking for.
We would like to thank Mark Richards, who generously sent us the photographs of his Flinders and Trim sculpture which is installed in three places – at Euston Station in London, at Flinders University, Adelaide, and in Port Lincoln in South Australia. Interestingly, three is the limit set by Mark regarding the number of copies of the sculpture allowed – there won’t be any more.
We didn’t solve the mystery of when or where George Gordon McRae read A Biographical Tribute to the Memory of Trim, which inspired him to draw ‘Trim’s short cut, glass all smashed to “Flinders”’. But Dr Rosemary Richards (who has written about Georgiana McRae, his mother) and the State Library of Victoria staff were enormously helpful in our quest.
Jenny Clark, Commissioning Editor at Adlard Coles Nautical (an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc), immediately got what we were trying to do with our Flinders and Trim manuscript and wanted it. Thank you. And thank you for giving us such a great editorial and production team to bring the book to life:
… bringing the book to life:
our Managing Editors, Jonathan Eyers and Oonagh Wade, kept us on track.
our Designer, Lee-May Lim, created pages we wanted to turn.
as for Cover Designer, Sutchinda Thompson, she got it. In one.
Publishing needs people who make it happen.
Thank you to Rachel Murphy and Brett Rogers.
Books need people to know they are out there on the shelves.
That’s where Marketing and Publicity come into the picture and Alice Graham has been awesome.
Picture Credits
Augustus Earle, c.1826. Portrait of Bungaree, a native of New South Wales, with Fort Macquarie, Sydney Harbour, in background. National Library of Australia. PIC T305. NK118.
Ferdinand Bauer. Cheilopogon sp., flyingfish. Plate 37 from Zoological drawings. Natural History Museum, London. ALM-DTF762.
George Gordon McCrae, c.1860. Trim’s short cut, glass all smashed to ‘Flinders’. National Library of Australia. PIC Volume 1008 #R8203.
William Westall, 1814. View in Sir Edward Pellew’s group, Gulph [sic] of Carpentaria; engraved by John Pye. National Library of Australia. PIC Solander Box B31 #S2276.
William Westall, 1802. Wreck of the Porpoise, Flinders expedition. National Library of Australia. PIC Solander box B30 #R7062.
Toussaint Antoine de Chazal de Chamarel, Mauritius, 1806–1807. Portrait of Captain Matthew Flinders, RN, 1774-1814. Art Gallery of South Australia. 20005P22.
George Gordon McCrae, c.1860. Matthew Flinders, Capt. R.N. 1809, Author of Trim. National Library of Australia. PIC Volume 1008 #R8205.
Mark Richards, 2014. Statue of Matthew Flinders and Trim, Euston Station, London. Photo courtesy Mark Richards.
Samuel Calvert, 1865. Captain Cook taking possession of the Australian Continent on behalf of the British Crown, 1770, under the name of New South Wales. National Library of Australia. PIC Solander Box B7 # 54632.
William Westall, 1814. View of Port Ja
ckson taken from the South Head; engraved by John Pye. National Library of Australia. PIC Solander Box B31 #S2275.
William Westall, 1802. Thistle Island: a snake. National Library of Australia. PIC Solander Box B17 #R4272.
William Westall, 1803. View of Wreck Reef bank taken at low water, Terra Australis. National Library of Australia. Rex Nan Kivell Collection NK9938.
William Westall, 1801. King George’s Sound, view on the peninsula to the north of Peak Head. National Library of Australia. PIC Solander Box B16 # R4265.
About the Authors
‘I have too much ambition to rest in the unnoticed middle order of mankind, and since neither birth nor fortune have favoured me, my actions shall speak to the world.’ They certainly did. Matthew Flinders RN (16 March 1774 – 19 July 1814), one of the world’s most accomplished navigators and cartographers, was the first to circumnavigate Australia and was the man who gave the continent its name. His A Voyage to Terra Australis, with an accompanying atlas (2 vols) was published on 18 July 1814. It had taken him four years to complete it. He died the next day at forty years of age. He also contributed to the science of navigation, including carrying out research on tide action and on compass deviation due to the presence of iron in ships. Ill health, homesickness and loneliness did not deter him from his focus on his goals. In A Biographical Tribute to the Memory of Trim, he transforms his grief over the loss of his beloved seafurrer shipmate who sailed with him for many years into the world’s most timeless tale about a ship’s cat.
Editor, writer, singer, librarian and other stuff like that, Gillian Dooley PhD is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Flinders University, South Australia. She has published widely on various literary and historical topics, often with a particular emphasis on music. When not hard at work cataloguing every dance and ditty in Jane Austen’s personal music collection or editing books on the philosophy of Iris Murdoch or the novels of Rabindranath Tagore, she is an inveterate conference traveller: in 2018 alone she gave presentations in Hyderabad, Kyoto, Kuala Lumpur, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, Parramatta, Adelaide and Perth. She has published two monographs and several scholarly editions, including Matthew Flinders’ Private Journal 1803–1814, and in 2014 presented the Royal Society Matthew Flinders Memorial Lecture at the Royal Society of Victoria to mark the bicentenary of Matthew’s untimely death.
Philippa Sandall is a writer and the founding editor of the online health newsletter GI News, which, with Alan Barclay and Jennie Brand-Miller, she has built up to have 100,000 subscribers worldwide. Of the numerous books she has co-authored, her favourites are: Sticks, Seeds, Pods & Leaves (Hardie Grant), Recipes My Mother Cooked (Allen & Unwin), The Ultimate Guide to Sugars & Sweeteners (The Experiment) and The Good Carbs Cookbook (Allen & Unwin). She sailed solo with Seafurrers: The Ships’ Cats Who Lapped and Mapped the World (The Experiment). The essential ABCs of her life include family and friends, taking a walk on the beach, writing, history and her Seafurrers website (www.seafurrers.com), which she has fun working on with Ky Long (designer) and Ad Long (illustrator), fuelled by regular team catch-ups over coffee at Gertrude & Alice café/bookstore, Bondi Beach.
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* The rights and titles of the parish of Stepney were the English registers of births, marriages and deaths from 1538 to 1815.
† ‘Uncle Toby’s honest, kind-hearted, humble companion’ was Corporal Trim in Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy (published in nine volumes from 1759 to 1767).
* Angora cats, originally from Ankara in central Turkey, were popular pets in eighteenth-century Europe – Marie-Antoinette had six who, the story goes, escaped the guillotine and emigrated to America.
* While Dick Whittington’s cat starred in ballads, plays, pantomimes and puppet shows, there’s no evidence the Lord Mayor of London ever had a cat.
* Lilliput is the fictional island in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) which was ruled over by an emperor and inhabited by very small people, who were roughly the size of Trim.
* The ticking time-keeper that engaged Trim’s earnest attention was the marine chronometer used to determine longitude at sea. It was invented by one of Lincolnshire’s famous sons, John Harrison. Flinders, another of Lincolnshire’s famous sons, had five time-keepers on the Investigator, and he had a favourite one – Thomas Earnshaw’s E520. ‘This excellent timekeeper,’ he called it. He had E520 with him when he was detained in Port Louis in 1803, and gave it to Mr Aken, master of the Investigator, to take back to England when he was released in 1810. ‘E520 has been delivered to the Greenwich Observatory,’ announced the Astronomer Royal, Neville Maskelyne, to the Board of Longitude on 12 December that year. It now resides in the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in Sydney.
* Adam Walker (1731–1821) built an ‘eidouranion’ (a large transparent ‘orrery’, or mechanical model of the solar system with back projection) measuring 27 feet in diameter to provide his renowned astronomical lecture demonstrations with dazzling stage effects. It was accompanied by the other-worldly tones of a ‘celestina’, the glass organ that he had patented on 29 July 1772, and audiences at places like the Royal Theatre and the Lyceum Theatre in London were enthralled.
* While Flinders may be tacking down the wrong classical track, sorting out mythology’s ’Who’s Who’ can be challenging. Not even the F.A.Ses (Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries) got it right all the time. The ‘divinity’ from antiquity unquestionably associated with the cat is Egypt’s Bastet. As Bast, she was originally a maned lion goddess, revered for her ferocity, but she was later transformed into the adored household favourite and goddess of fertility, Bastet – female cats were noted for their fecundity. When the Greeks discovered her, they called her ailuros (Greek for ‘cat’) and, since cats weren’t household favourites in Greece, likened her to Artemis, their goddess of hunting and wild animals (Diana is the Roman equivalent). No wisdom or owls. However, in Classical Cats, Professor Donald Engels says some Greek sources (he doesn’t specify which) state that the cat was sacred to Athena Glaukopis (Athena of the Shining Eyes), and her Roman equivalent is Minerva, the wise one with an owl on her wrist. Challenging.
* Flinders and Trim dined in the gunroom, the junior officers’ mess (for officers below the rank of lieutenant) on the Cape Town to Botany Bay voyage. In January 1798, Flinders obtained his lieutenant’s commission, and he and Trim moved up to
the wardroom, where the commissioned naval officers ate.
* Trim enjoyed officer privileges such as fresh milk and fresh mutton at mealtimes. No salt beef for those dining in the gunroom or the wardroom. At the start of a voyage, navy ships often sounded and smelled like a farmyard, with animals stowed in odd corners of the decks to provide fresh food for the officers. Not all were eaten. Seaman George Watson, remembering life on board HMS Fame, wrote in his Narrative of the Adventures of a Greenwich Pensioner: “We had live stock on board of every kind, in abundance: bullocks, pigs, sheep, goats, geese, ducks, turkeys, chickens &c; many of these creatures becoming domesticated, were spared the general slaughter, and had names given to them by the Tars, there was Billy the goat; Jenny the cow; Tom, the sheep; Jack, the goose; and many others, which I shall not mention; Jenny the cow, after being two years on board, ran dry, and therefore, was killed … poor Tom the sheep was killed by lightning.”
* Bongaree (Bungaree, c.1775–1830) was the first Aboriginal to circumnavigate mainland Australia as far as we know. He was possibly more familiar with Australia’s coastline than anyone else at the time, since he had taken part in more voyages of exploration than anyone else. He dipped his exploration toe in the water with Henry Waterhouse in the Reliance on a round trip to Norfolk Island in 1798. Then he sailed with Flinders in the Norfolk in 1799 to examine the northern parts of the coast of New South Wales, and in the Investigator ‘to explore the whole of the coasts’ of New Holland (1802–03); with James Grant in the Lady Nelson to Port Macquarie (1804); and with Phillip Parker King in the Mermaid to survey Northwest Cape and Arnhem Land (1817).
† A ‘kid’ is a small wooden tub for grog or rations.
* In the Tribute, Flinders includes numerous references to books that were popular reading at the time. Joseph Addison’s essay ‘Adventures of a Shilling’ refers to ‘imaginary adventures of your guineas, shillings, or half-pence’, while the Turkish spy is a nod to Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy. This was an eight-volume (fictional) collection of letters by Mahmut, an Ottoman spy at Louis XIV’s court, probably penned by Giovanni Paolo Marana, then translated into English, and running through fifteen editions by 1801.
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