Chris Pascoe’s Fun Tales

Chris honours the memory of a very strange, historic seafaring cat…

Last week’s column dealt with one of the great seafaring heroes of all time, Nelson. In my view there was only one greater mariner than Lord Horatio Nelson, and that was… Mrs Chippy. In the “most likely to be a hero” stakes, Mrs Chippy had been dealt a disadvantageous hand – or in fact, no hands at all, but rather four paws, pointy ears and a tail.

Sharper readers (although not sharp enough to have stopped reading) will have noted that either Mrs Chippy was a very strange chap indeed, or possibly a cat. He was definitely a cat, and the words “chap” and “he” were not typos – Mrs Chippy was a boy cat. His owner was a ship’s carpenter, and so some jolly sailor immediately awarded the cat the honorary position of “chippy’s wife”. How dignified was that? If I was Mrs Chippy I’d have waited until that sailor was in the rigging, darted up after him with catlike skill, and bitten his tarry hands until he fell into the Antarctic ocean.

Yes, that’s right, the Antarctic. Mrs Chippy’s husband had decided it’d be a splendid idea to leave the warmth and safety of Britain and head for the coldest, most inhospitable place on Earth. Hence Mrs Chippy and co sailed away aboard one of history’s truly iconic ships, The Endurance, bound for the South Pole.

Mrs Chippy turned out to be a popular shipmate, but not necessarily a bright one. One day, as the ship sailed through the freezing cold Southern Ocean, he suddenly and inexplicably launched himself straight through a porthole. The crew stared aghast as he dropped like a stone into the icy water. By the time they hauled him back aboard, he was almost dead. So, not very clever.

The Endurance fared badly. Approaching Antarctica, it became trapped in ice, never to be freed. Hundreds of miles from anywhere across an empty, frozen sea, the crew were stranded, hungry and miserable. Mrs Chippy decided that this would be a smashing time to wind-up a pack of desperately hungry sled-dogs. He was rescued from the resulting melée but this cat was most definitely a danger – if only to himself.

But he became a huge comfort to the crewmen and many believe that his mere presence and total lack of concern for the precarious situation was an inspiration, vital to the crew’s chances of survival. With this in mind, they shot him.

Yes, unfortunately, Mrs Chippy ended up being the only crewmate casualty of Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated attempt on the Pole.

This may well have had something to do with his putting on weight while everyone else starved, but nevertheless, as Mrs Chippy’s biggest fan, I’ll never forgive Shackleton. He may have shown “excellent leadership” in bringing everyone else back alive, but in my opinion, not the crew member that mattered most.

So here’s to you Mrs Chippy, Britain’s greatest seafaring hero! And while the names of all those serving with you, bar Shackleton, are hard to recall, yours will be remembered in the annals of history forever.

Mrs Chippy was a popular shipmate, but not a bright one

Chris Pascoe is the author of ACatCalledBirmingham and YouCanTaketheCat OutofSlough, and of Your Cat magazine’s column Confessions of a Cat Sitter.