Mrs Chippy

Mrs Chippy was a tabby cat — actually male, despite the name — who sailed with Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition aboard the Endurance in 1914. The cat belonged to the ship's carpenter, Henry "Chippy" McNish, and was named for the way he followed the carpenter around like an attentive wife. By all accounts Mrs Chippy was a remarkable shipboard companion — confident, agile, and prone to walking along the ship's rails in any weather. He became a beloved figure among the 28-man crew. When the Endurance became trapped in pack ice in the Weddell Sea in early 1915 and was slowly crushed over the following months, Shackleton was forced to make extremely difficult decisions about which animals could survive the planned overland trek. On 29 October 1915 — Mrs Chippy's last day — Shackleton ordered the cat and several sled dogs to be shot, judging that they could not survive the conditions ahead. Henry McNish never forgave Shackleton for the decision, and the rift between them was reportedly one factor in McNish being denied the Polar Medal that the rest of the crew received. In 2004 — eighty-nine years later — a life-sized bronze statue of Mrs Chippy was placed on McNish's grave in Karori Cemetery, Wellington, by the New Zealand Antarctic Society as a long-overdue gesture of reconciliation.