Trim, the Cartographer's Cat
Page 7
* ’There was more than one ambassador from Bantam. Eight arrived in London on 28 April 1682 and were received by the King at Windsor. Bantam was a major trading centre for pepper and other spices; silks and porcelain from China; scented woods and Indian textiles. The East India Company had a factory there. The most likely source for this reference is James Granger’s Biographical History of England from Egbert the Great to the Revolution (1769), a book that Flinders’ father probably had on his shelves.
* On 19 January 1801, a commission was signed at the Admiralty appointing Flinders lieutenant of His Majesty’s Sloop Investigator (Spyall).
* Investigator (Spyall) leaked badly. After passing through Torres Strait, she was careened and the carpenters found so many rotten timbers they reckoned she’d founder in a gale, which forced Flinders to abandon the coastal survey. They made some running repairs in Timor and arrived back in Port Jackson on 9 June 1803 having completed the circumnavigation. Flinders and Trim sailed for Britain in HMS Porpoise (Janty) on 10 August 1803 to organise a replacement ship. They didn’t get far. Seven days later they were shipwrecked on Wreck Reef. Taking command, Flinders and the captain of the Cato, with a ‘double set of rowers’, sailed the ship’s cutter some 700 miles (1127 km) back to Port Jackson to organise rescue.
† ‘The Great Equinoxial Ocean’ is a term Flinders may well have borrowed from A voyage round the world: performed during the years 1790, 1791, and 1792, by Etienne Marchand, preceded by a historical introduction, and illustrated by charts, etc. Translated from the French of C.P. Claret Fleurieu (1801), it was possibly one of the many books on South Seas voyages in his cabin library.
* The small size of the Cumberland (referred to by Flinders as the Minikin) made it necessary to stop at every convenient place on the way to England for water and refreshment, explains Flinders in In Terra Australis. But back in 1803, news travelled very slowly. People on one side of the world had no idea what was happening on the other. That’s why when Flinders dropped anchor in Port Louis on 17 December, he hadn’t heard that Britain had declared war on France seven months earlier and that the Napoleonic Wars were on again. He was detained on Isle of France (Île de France), as Mauritius was then called, for the next six and a half years. The Dutch had established the colony of Mauritius (1638–1710), brought sugar cane and slavery there, and apparently wiped out the dodo. The French took over in 1710 and ruled until the British captured the island in 1810, the year Flinders finally made it home.
* For centuries, the Spanish dollar was the international currency.
* Flinders’ wordplay: Anthropophagi are the ‘man eaters’ of literature from Herodotus onwards; here, Catophagi are the ‘cat eaters’.
† ‘Never, my Trim, to take thee all in all, shall I see thy like again‘ – a nod to Shakespeare: “Take him for all in all. I shall not look upon his like again,” Hamlet, speaking of his father, says to Horatio.