Mr. Tom Puss: The ship’s cat of the First Fleet (#387)

Rick LeCouteur
3 days ago
4 min read

In 1787–88 the First Fleet, eleven ships under Captain Arthur Phillip (two naval escorts, six convict transports, and three store ships), sailed from Portsmouth, England, via Tenerife, Rio de Janeiro, and the Cape of Good Hope.

After more than eight months at sea, they arrived at Botany Bay in Australia in mid-January 1788. Finding it unsuitable, they shifted to Sydney Cove, Port Jackson, on 26 January to establish the new colony of New South Wales.

The transports included Alexander, Charlotte, Friendship, Lady Penrhyn, Prince of Wales and Scarborough; the store ships were Borrowdale, Fishburn and Golden Grove, alongside the escorts HMS Sirius and HMS Supply.

Among the roughly 1,400 people on board, including marines, sailors, officials, free settlers and many convicts, were the colony’s first chaplain, the Reverend Richard Johnson, his wife Mary, their servant Samuel Barnes, and two cats. Johnson’s household sailed on the store ship Golden Grove with Mr. Tom Puss and Miss Puss, a small, practical comfort packed for a perilous voyage. Those names appear in the historical notes for Golden Grove, a reminder that even at the edge of the world, people brought small comforts and practical companions.

If you picture the First Fleet, you probably see tall ships, convicts in irons, marines with muskets, and casks of salted pork. Look closer and you’ll find a pair of watchful eyes and a flicking tail: a ship’s cat.

Why a cat mattered on a voyage of survival

Cats weren’t mascots for sentiment’s sake. On wooden ships, rats and mice were more than a nuisance: they chewed rope and sailcloth, contaminated food, and carried disease. For centuries sailors kept cats to control vermin and to steady nerves. Feline routines offered a small island of normalcy in a heaving, creaking world. Maritime archives and naval histories trace this tradition across ages and navies, from merchantmen to warships.

So when Mr. Tom Puss padded along Golden Grove’s deck, he was part of the ship’s working crew as much as any able seaman: a quiet, whiskered insurance policy for the colony’s seed grain, tools, and precious food stores.

The Fleet’s passage from Portsmouth to Botany Bay took roughly 250 days and over 24,000 kilometers. An audacious logistical feat that would have magnified every small advantage. Mr. Tom Puss and Miss Puss tell us something intimate about the humans who sailed: they anticipated rats; they craved companionship; and in the harsh arithmetic of survival, they counted on cats.

From endearing to consequential

As a story, Mr. Puss on the First Fleet is charming. As environmental history, it’s complicated. Those early shipboard cats arrived with people and ultimately helped seed one of Australia’s most consequential invasive populations. Scientific and government sources agree cats were present from the First Fleet onward and, through repeated introductions, spread rapidly across the continent during the 19th century. Feral populations were established near Sydney by the 1820s and had reached most of Australia by the late 1800s.

The ecological bill has been steep. Modern assessments estimate that cats (feral and free roaming) have contributed to the decline or extinction of numerous native species and continue to kill staggering numbers of birds, mammals, reptiles and other fauna each year. The very traits that made Mr. Tom Puss a perfect shipmate, such as stealth, persistence and adaptability, scale disastrously in fragile ecosystems with naïve wildlife.

Holding two truths at once

How should we hold Mr. Puss in our minds?

With empathy and with context.

On the deck of Golden Grove, he was a working animal performing a vital job, a comfort to anxious humans, and a tiny piece of good sense packed into a perilous expedition.

In the broader arc of Australian natural history, he is an origin point in a chain whose consequences we are still managing today. That’s not a moral failing of one cat or of the chaplain who loved him, but a reminder that human logistics always carry ecological freight.

Why this story still travels

Mr. Puss on the First Fleet keeps resurfacing because it threads together three resonant themes:

Survival and care. Cats were part of the kit that kept people alive, like good boots and better bread. They turned chaos into something livable, one caught rat at a time.

Unintended consequences. The same decision that made sense in 1787 makes far less sense in a biodiversity crisis. That dissonance is the core lesson of environmental history.

Cultural memory. Even modern pieces about Australia’s feline history reach back to Mr. Puss as a starting character. Proof that small lives can cast long shadows in a nation’s story.

Rick’s Commentary

I like to imagine Mr. Tom Puss stepping ashore at Sydney Cove, tail held high, inhaling a continent of new scents.