Late in 1949, a black-and-white cat was buried in the PDSA animal cemetery in Ilford, east London, after a career aboard HMS Amethyst. His name was Simon, celebrated as Able Seacat, and he remains the only cat awarded the PDSA Dickin Medal. He was not a mascot invented for a press photo. He was one of the last members of a working profession that lasted, in some form, for roughly two thousand years. Ship’s cats could be workers as well as companions, and the story of how they got on board (and how they were thrown off) covers Viking trade routes, Antarctic grudges, hygiene regulations, and a genetics paper that rewrote when cats reached Europe at all.
Table of Contents
- What Ship’s Cats Actually Did on Board
- How Ship’s Cats Spread the Species Across the World
- Trim, the Cat Who Circumnavigated Australia
- Superstition, Weather, and Extra Toes
- Mrs Chippy and the Cost of the Endurance
- The Wartime Cats: Blackie, Convoy, and Simon
- Why Ship’s Cats Disappeared
- Frequently Asked Questions
What Ship’s Cats Actually Did on Board
A wooden sailing ship is, from a rat’s perspective, an unusually generous environment. Dark, sheltered, full of provisions. Rodents could damage equipment and stores as well as eat the food. Royal Museums Greenwich’s account of animals at sea describes cats and dogs among the animals used to keep those unwelcome passengers under control.
The rat problem was an economic problem
Grain cargo eaten in transit is money gone. Damaged rope and contaminated stores are practical problems, not merely unpleasant company. That made a resident hunter useful. But “useful” did not mean maintenance-free: a ship’s cat still needed care, and sailors valued companionship as well as whatever mice disappeared from the hold.
Cats versus terriers, an argument that never ended
Cats were not the only candidate; ships carried dogs too. A small climbing predator could reach awkward corners, but a large rat is not an effortless meal. A 2018 study of cats and rats at a New York recycling site found little actual predation on the large rats. That is not a test of every historical ship’s cat, but it is a useful brake on the idea that one tabby automatically makes a vessel rat-proof.
How Ship’s Cats Spread the Species Across the World
The most interesting thing about ship’s cats is that they are not a footnote to cat history. They are a large part of the mechanism. In 2017, a team including Claudio Ottoni and Thierry Grange published a study in Nature Ecology & Evolution analysing mitochondrial DNA from 209 cats recovered at more than 30 archaeological sites across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, with the wider sampling spanning the Mesolithic to the twentieth century.
One finding stood out. Cats carrying Egyptian maternal lineages turned up at Ralswiek, a Baltic trading settlement associated with the Viking Age. Egyptian-derived cats had reached a northern European port by roughly the seventh century CE, and their expansion accelerated during the Viking era. The authors discuss maritime and overland trade as routes of dispersal. Boats are an important part of that picture, rather than a journey recorded for each individual cat. Cats moved along the same maritime trade routes as amber, silver, and slaves, with pest control offering a practical reason to take cats along. If you want the earlier chapter of that story, Egypt’s much older relationship with cats, we covered it in cats in Ancient Egypt.
Then, in late 2025, the picture got complicated. A paper in Science titled “The dispersal of domestic cats from North Africa to Europe around 2000 years ago” analysed 87 ancient and modern cat genomes and argued that domestic cats did not arrive in Europe with Neolithic farmers at all. The older European remains in that dataset matched European wildcats, even when their mitochondrial ancestry had previously suggested a different story. The domestic cat, on this reading, came out of North Africa and spread through Europe with Roman traders and settlers about two thousand years ago. The evidence supports human-assisted dispersal, but does not identify the first domestic cat or prove a sea passage for every lineage. Cats travelled through human networks; they did not leave passenger manifests.
Trim, the Cat Who Circumnavigated Australia
According to the National Museum of Australia’s account, Trim was born aboard HMS Reliance in 1799, during a passage from the Cape of Good Hope to Botany Bay. As a kitten he went over the side, swam back to the ship, and climbed a rope to get himself back on deck, which is the sort of introduction that gets you a name. Matthew Flinders named him after a character in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.
Trim then sailed with Flinders on HMS Investigator during the 1801 to 1803 voyage that circumnavigated the Australian continent and produced the charts that made Flinders famous. Trim disappeared on Île de France (now Mauritius) while Flinders was detained there by the French. Flinders, still a prisoner in 1809, wrote a tribute to him that begins: “To the memory of Trim, the best and most illustrious of his race. He made the tour of the globe, and a voyage to Australia, which he circumnavigated, and was ever the delight and pleasure of his fellow voyagers.”
In 1996 the State Library of New South Wales installed a bronze Trim by sculptor John Cornwell on a window ledge of the Mitchell Library in Sydney, behind the statue of Flinders. The cartographer looks out. The cat sits on the sill behind him, which is exactly where a cat would sit.
Superstition, Weather, and Extra Toes
Working animals attract belief systems, and sailors built an elaborate one. Cats were read as barometers: grooming, sneezing and friskiness could all be interpreted as weather signs. Those are examples of folklore, not a validated forecast. A cat may notice things a distracted human misses; that does not turn its next sneeze into a shipping bulletin.
The rest was straightforward omen management. A cat approaching a sailor on deck was lucky. A cat that came halfway and turned back was not. Throwing a cat overboard was catastrophic, believed to summon a storm capable of sinking the ship, with nine years of bad luck for anyone who survived it. Fishermen’s wives kept black cats at home on the theory that the animal protected a husband at sea, a belief that sits oddly against the European history of black cat superstitions, where the same animal was evidence of witchcraft.
Why so many New England cats have extra toes
Polydactyl cats, born with extra digits, became associated with sailors and good luck. Extra toes were said to improve balance and grip, but that belief is not evidence of superior performance at sea. The exact history of how the trait spread around Atlantic ports is less secure than the familiar story suggests. One well-documented connection survives at the Hemingway Home and Museum: it traces some of its resident cats to Snow White, the six-toed cat given to Hemingway by a ship’s captain. The toes are real. The nautical résumé needs more than a paw inspection.
Mrs Chippy and the Cost of the Endurance
Mrs Chippy was a tiger-striped tabby, and also male, the name having stuck before anyone checked. He belonged to Harry McNish, carpenter on Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, “Chippy” being standard slang for a ship’s carpenter. The Endurance sailed in 1914 and was caught in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea.
When the ship was crushed, Shackleton ordered Mrs Chippy and several dogs to be shot; the cat died on 29 October 1915. McNish reportedly never forgave him. The carpenter later helped prepare the James Caird for its open-boat voyage to South Georgia, an essential part of the rescue of the Endurance party. He was nevertheless denied the Polar Medal, generally linked to his earlier confrontation with Shackleton over orders. New Zealand’s Ministry for Culture and Heritage recounts both his contribution and the disputed relationship. In 2004 the New Zealand Antarctic Society added a bronze Mrs Chippy to his grave in Wellington: a very slow reunion, but a reunion nonetheless.
The Wartime Cats: Blackie, Convoy, and Simon
The two world wars left a rich photographic record of ship’s cats. Imperial War Museums preserves photographs of Convoy, asleep in a miniature hammock aboard HMS Hermione, and Blackie with Churchill. An Admiralty photograph of Tiddles on HMS Victorious in July 1942 places him at his favourite capstan and credits him with 30,000 miles after being born aboard HMS Argus. The U.S. Naval Institute’s photographic archive also includes Pooli in her old uniform, described in the caption as a veteran of an attack transport with three service ribbons and four battle stars. The photographs are evidence of both the cats and the affection invested in them.
Blackie belonged to HMS Prince of Wales, which carried Winston Churchill across the Atlantic in August 1941 for the secret meeting with Franklin Roosevelt off Newfoundland that produced the Atlantic Charter. As Churchill left the ship, Blackie moved toward the gangway and the American destroyer beyond it, and Churchill bent down to stop him. The photograph ran worldwide and the cat was renamed Churchill. He survived the sinking of the Prince of Wales by Japanese aircraft in December 1941 and was landed at Singapore with the other survivors, after which the record goes quiet.
Simon, the only cat with a Dickin Medal
Simon was found in the Hong Kong dockyards in March 1948 by George Hickinbottom, a 17-year-old ordinary seaman, and smuggled aboard HMS Amethyst. In April 1949 Amethyst went up the Yangtze toward Nanjing and was fired on by People’s Liberation Army artillery. The captain was killed. One of the first rounds tore through the captain’s cabin and badly wounded Simon, and he needed treatment for shrapnel wounds and burns.
Amethyst remained trapped until its escape on the night of 30–31 July, more than three months after the initial attack, as recorded in the official honours account of the incident, food supplies critically short and rats everywhere. Simon’s campaign-ribbon citation credits his service from 22 April to 4 August 1949, including the elimination of one large and persistent rat the crew had nicknamed Mao Tse-tung. He was promoted to Able Seaman and given a campaign ribbon. The Dickin Medal, established by the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals in 1943, was awarded to him in August 1949, and he is still the only cat to receive it. He died on 28 November 1949 in quarantine, probably around two years old, and was buried at the PDSA animal cemetery in Ilford.
Unsinkable Sam, the story that needs qualification
Unsinkable Sam, also called Oscar, supposedly survived the losses of Bismarck, HMS Cossack and HMS Ark Royal in 1941. There is a real historical trail: Royal Museums Greenwich holds Georgina Shaw-Baker’s portrait of the cat associated with Ark Royal. Contemporary newspaper references also exist, so claiming that nobody mentioned a cat in 1941 would be wrong. What remains harder to establish is the complete three-ship biography and the identity of the animal at every stage. Enjoy the story, but keep the documented Ark Royal association separate from certainty about all three sinkings.
Why Ship’s Cats Disappeared
The conditions that made resident mousers attractive changed with shipping, pest-control methods and restrictions on moving animals between ports. That was not a single worldwide retirement day. A naval service’s pet policy is also different from a rule covering every merchant vessel or private boat.
For the Royal Navy tradition, Royal Museums Greenwich dates the ban to the 1970s and identifies concern about rabies. That is more specific than saying the cats simply became unhygienic, and less sweeping than declaring all seagoing cats unemployed in 1975. Restrictions also exist ashore: our article on Longyearbyen and its ban on keeping cats explores a different setting.
They did not vanish from the water. Sail-training vessels and private boats continued the tradition. Chibley of the barque Picton Castle sailed around the world five times. The ship’s own tribute, published on 11 November 2011, credits her with about 250,000 sea miles and records that she died in a road accident in Lunenburg the previous evening. A life spent crossing oceans ended ashore. The naval job had changed; the habit of taking a cat sailing plainly had not disappeared.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did ships carry cats?
Rodent control was an important reason, alongside companionship, morale and superstition. Rats and mice damaged supplies and equipment. Cats could help, but they still needed care and did not guarantee the elimination of every rat aboard.
Is it true the Royal Navy banned cats from ships?
Yes. Royal Museums Greenwich places the end of the naval pet tradition in the 1970s and links it to fear of rabies. That should not be read as a worldwide prohibition on cats aboard every kind of ship.
Which ship’s cat received a medal?
Simon of HMS Amethyst received the PDSA Dickin Medal in 1949 for catching rats and sustaining morale during the Yangtze Incident despite shell wounds. He remains its only feline recipient. His celebrated promotion and campaign ribbon are part of the story recorded by PDSA.
Did ship’s cats really help cats spread around the world?
Ancient DNA supports dispersal through human trade networks, including shipping. The 2017 study identifies an Egyptian-associated maternal lineage at Ralswiek on the Baltic. The 2025 genome-wide study favours a later, North African introduction of domestic cats to Europe. Neither reconstructs the precise voyage of every sampled animal.
Why are polydactyl cats associated with sailors?
Extra toes became associated with good fortune, balance and climbing ability. The maritime association is familiar, and Hemingway’s cat came from a ship’s captain, but the story should not be treated as proof that sailors selected a superior hunter or single-handedly shaped every regional population.
The Last Working Cats
What makes ship’s cats worth knowing about is not only the medals. They joined people on trading voyages, explorations and warships, sometimes hunting for their board and lodging, sometimes simply making a hard life more bearable. Your cat’s family history may contain a great traveller. Its refusal to move from the warm part of the sofa does not rule that out.
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