In September, 1893, grouped on the Fall River Line pier at the foot of
Warren Street, New York, there stood a party of twenty-three sailors
waiting for the Puritan to take them on to Boston. The central figure in
the group--a short, thickset man, with bronzed and grizzled
moustache--stood erect with arms folded over his chest. Upon the solid
foundation thus made nestled a little white kitten. The man and the
kitten were the Boston contingent of the crew of the steamship City of
Savannah, which had been wrecked the week before on Hunting Island, off
the South Carolina coast.
[Illustration: THE LITTLE SAILOR CAT.]
The story of the beaching of the steamship and of the taking off of her
crew by the City of Birmingham had been told in all the newspapers, but
nothing had been said about the cat, so the Boston Herald said. Before
the shipwreck the cat was nothing more than an ordinary ship’s cat, and
the captain had named him Mascot; but that was the end of his
distinction. After the disaster, nevertheless, all the sailors swore
that the kitten was as good a sailor as any of them.
“He’s a wonder,” said the short, thickset man, surveying the cat
proudly; “nobody thought of him in the rush, but he got there just the
same. He climbed the rigging in that gale like an old tar and held on
for hours. He wasn’t a bit frightened either. Only he would ‘caterwaul’
when he got hungry. We were on board of the boat fifty hours after she
struck before the sea was such that we could be taken off in boats. At
night the captain ordered all the crew into the rigging and made us stay
there. We each took a piece of rope and lashed ourselves on, so as to
keep from falling off when asleep. That’s what the captain said the
string was for, but I never slept at all. I don’t think many others did.
The cat got along without any rope, and she was there in the morning all
right. When we got away at last, nearly crazy with thirst and so faint
that we could hardly climb down the ‘Jacob’s ladder’ into the
Birmingham’s boats, that little fellow climbed out of his nest in the
rigging and wanted to go too. We were glad to take him.”
[Illustration: Advice to Little Christians]