Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/17

 cat as you tell of the smart tricks of your dog. While his ship was once tied up at the London docks, the cat was prowling around other vessels, and one of them carried it three miles away, to another loading-dock. The crew mourned the cat as dead, but one day he turned up: he had found his way back to the ship through three miles of London's streets The captain says there is nothing in the story that rats will desert a sinking ship; he never knew a ship to go down that was not full of rats. In the Indian ocean he once came across an abandoned ship, and went aboard of it. He found the deck covered with rats that had starved to death. He tried to burn the ship, as it was a menace to navigation, but failed. Six months later, two thousand miles away, he ran across the same dangerous, drifting hulk. This time he succeeded in burning it Captain Trask says that in the old days of wooden sailing ships the rats frequently gnawed holes in the bottom, in seeking water. They could hear the rush of water outside, and, not knowing it was salt water, worked toward it. When a ship was known to be full of rats, they were watered regularly, to prevent their sinking it.

Captain Trask says that on one of his voyages in a sailing ship, he was in company every day with another vessel forty-seven days. The ships were of about equal size, and bound in the same direction. On another occasion, he left New York with a cargo of wheat, bound for Liverpool. Another sailing ship went out of the harbor at the same time, bound also for Liverpool. They did not sight each other during the entire