The Portent: Instinct, or Starvation?

We were discussing old maritime life on the New Zealand coast, and talk turned on ships that went missing after departure, from one or other of our ports. There was the story of rats leaving a doomed ship, a sea-tale so often derided yet firmly believed in by many seafarers. Undoubtedly there have been many authentic cases of this kind, a strange manifestation of animal instinct—or was it simply that the rats had been starved out?

I mentioned a story told me by an old frieend, a shipmaster in the Shaw-Savill sailing clippers. He was an officer in a wool-ship lying at Lyttelton, and his younger brother was an apprentice in another ship there. The brother's ship sailed first, for London. The night before he left the wharf, the lad saw the rats walking ashore along the hawsers; they were deserting her for good. He told his elder brother, who strongly advised him to leave the ship. “Give her the slip,” he begged. “She's doomed,” he said, “I've never known that sign to fail.” But the boy, though strongly impressed, thought it would be unfair and cowardly to desert his ship like a rat. “No, I'll stick to her, Tom,” he said. He sailed next day; and neither the ship nor he was ever heard of again. Struck an iceberg, caught fire, foundered in a hurricane? No one ever knew.

One of our group narrated the mystery story of the Kentish Lass. This vessel, a barque engaged in the timber and coal trade between New Zealand and Australia, was owned in Wellington. After discharging a cargo of coal she went up to Hokianga and loaded kauri for Sydney. A night or two before she sailed all the rats came on shore. That fact was observed by people on the wharf as well as on the ship. She sailed out into the Tasman and vanished from human ken. Hers was the Port of Missing Ships.

Why this often-verified habit of “ratting” from a ship on the eve of a last voyage? Had the rats some uncanny sense of foreboding, or was it simply because they were tired of sailing in a hungry ship? Who knows?