The Saving of the Cat

At the tremendous battle of Trafalgar

with thousands of poor seamen killed

by cannonballs and musket fire

(Admiral Nelson one of them)

a cat was saved by a British tar

clinging to the muzzle of a lower-deck gun

when the mighty Santissima Trinidad

("Most Holy Trinity") went down.

Alas, Noel Mostert would later rail—

"the finest warship created under sail."*

Was Moggy put ashore at Cadiz

with the Spanish wounded? Or taken to Blighty

on the Revenge?** In the madness of that fight something, at any rate, must've gone right!

Far off in Germany the same day at Ulm,

Napoleon harvested a fresh hecatomb.

If Boney in the end had won,

and the Révolution left us less dismayed,

might history have been more fun?

Who knows? At least the cat was saved!

*Noel Mostert, The Line upon a Wind: The Great War at Sea, 1793–1815 (New York: Norton, 2008), 508. Of the combatants on both sides, 8,602 are reported killed or wounded at Trafalgar. Of these, 4,853 were killed.

In British usage, "tar" = (esp. Royal Navy) sailor; "moggy" = (unpedigreed) cat; "Blighty" = (from the Bengali bilētī, Indian Persian wilāyatī) England, home.

**Most likely, of course, it simply became the cat of the Revenge.

Wednesday, October 14, 2026