Trim

Birth and adoption

Trim was born aboard HMS Reliance in 1799, on the long return passage from the Cape of Good Hope to Botany Bay. As a kitten he fell overboard, swam back to the ship, and climbed aboard by gripping a rope dragging in the water — an early demonstration of self-preservation that the 25-year-old lieutenant Matthew Flinders recorded as the moment Trim "endeared himself to all the crew." Bicolour with a black coat and four white paws, white chin, and white chest, he became the ship's favourite cat among the half-dozen kept aboard for rodent control.

The Investigator voyage 1801–1803

When Flinders took command of HMS Investigator for the British Admiralty's mission to chart the entire Australian coastline, Trim went with him. Across two years of survey work the cat lived through the first complete circumnavigation of the continent — the voyage that established the place name "Australia" in subsequent maps and dispatches, an etymology Flinders himself promoted. Flinders later wrote of Trim attending him in his cabin during writing, sitting on his shoulder during deck inspections, and being given the run of the ship's rigging.

Shipwreck and French detention

The Investigator was condemned as unseaworthy at Sydney in 1803. Flinders re-embarked for England aboard HMS Porpoise, which struck Wreck Reef in the Coral Sea on 17 August 1803. Trim and Flinders survived two months on a sandbank before rescue. On the homeward leg via the French-held Isle de France (Mauritius), Flinders was detained on suspicion of espionage despite carrying a French scientific passport. He was held under house arrest from December 1803 until June 1810. Trim shared the detention until disappearing in 1804 — Flinders attributed the loss to a hungry slave who had eaten the cat, though this remained speculation.

The biographical tribute and modern statues

While imprisoned in 1809, Flinders composed a biographical tribute to Trim — a personal manuscript which survived in the family papers donated by his grandson to the State Library of New South Wales in 1925. In 1996, on the 200th anniversary of Trim's known service, sculptor John Cornwell created a bronze statue installed on a window ledge of the Mitchell Library directly behind a 1925 statue of Flinders himself. Subsequent castings of a separate Mark Richards 2014 sculpture of Flinders-with-Trim now stand at Donington in Lincolnshire (Flinders's birthplace), Euston Railway Station in London (near where Flinders is buried beneath the platforms), Port Lincoln in South Australia, the Flinders University campus in Adelaide, and inside Lincoln Cathedral.