Unsinkable Sam

• Bismarck Sank May 1941
• HMS Cossack Sank October 1941
• HMS Ark Royal Sank November 1941

The legend goes like this. A black-and-white cat was aboard the German battleship Bismarck when she sank. British sailors on HMS Cossack fished him out of the sea and adopted him. Five months later Cossack was torpedoed. Sam survived, and was moved to the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal. Which was torpedoed. Sam survived.

At this point someone sensibly decided he should work ashore. He spent his retirement in Belfast at a home for sailors. Some historians think the story has been embellished, possibly by several different cats. We think a cat who survives three shipwrecks is entitled to a little embellishment.

Able Seacat Simon

In 1949 the British frigate HMS Amethyst was trapped on China's Yangtze River for months, under fire, during what became known as the Yangtze Incident. The ship's cat, Simon, was badly wounded by shrapnel. He recovered and went straight back to his duties: catching the rats that were raiding the dwindling food stores, and sitting with injured sailors in the sick bay.

He was promoted to "Able Seacat" and awarded the Dickin Medal for gallantry. More than seventy years later he is still the only cat to have received it. He also received so much fan mail that an officer was appointed to answer it.

Mrs. Chippy

When Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance left for Antarctica in 1914, the carpenter Harry McNish brought his cat. The cat followed "Chippy" (sailor slang for a carpenter) around so devotedly that the crew named him Mrs. Chippy. Then they discovered he was a tom. The name stayed.

Mrs. Chippy was famous aboard for strolling along the ship's narrow rails in heavy seas, and for once falling overboard and being rescued. When Endurance was crushed by the ice the crew had to abandon the ship and almost everything on it, and Mrs. Chippy did not come home. McNish reportedly never forgave Shackleton. In 2004 a life-size bronze of Mrs. Chippy was placed on McNish's grave in Wellington, New Zealand, so the two are together again.

Trim

Trim was born at sea in 1799 and grew up aboard ships with the navigator Matthew Flinders, who later took him along on the first circumnavigation of Australia. Flinders described him as black with white feet and a white star on his chest, an excellent sailor, and a thief of food from forks on their way to people's mouths. Flinders even wrote a tribute to him. Trim's statue now sits on a windowsill outside the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney.