not titled at this time

Captain Cooks Rats

Ch.1 – intro

            Hello, my name is Albert, Albert Gabriel Finnigan XXXVI to be precise, and I have a story to tell.  It is a tale of courage and hardship, comradery and loss on the high seas.  I’ve sailed to the end of the earth and traveled the deep blue road.  I’ve ridden the wind to ports unknown, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself, as I am old now and tend to forget things if I don’t relate first things first.  Let me start at the beginning.

I am a rat, born of a proud and long line of rats.      I was birthed in Plymouth, England on January 26, in the year of our lord, 1766.  I am the oldest son of a small family of eighteen brothers, and twenty-three sisters.  My Father was born in Plymouth also, like his father before him, and great grandpa Finnigan before that.  Our line in Plymouth stretches as far back as anyone can remember.  Some say that we originally came from Ireland, but I don’t believe it, we’ve been warf rats in the south of England for the whole of our recorded history. Irish rats my hairy backside!  Finnigan is an English name through and through and if any of my father’s family could read, they would prove it.

            My mother’s history is not as clear cut.  She was born in Oxford, of a large family of inland rats.  Despite it’s size, no one in her family seems to know or care where they came from, only where they are going.   In mom’s case, she was going to Plymouth or bust. 

            My father doesn’t like to make the trip north to visit mom’s family.  They are well educated, and dad thinks they are academic do nothings.  Too much book learning, and not enough do learning, but you should see the kind of nest they can build with a few pages and a little know how.

             Mother’s parents think he is a flea bitten warf rat.   I guess dad is smart in a warf sort of way.  He could never take a bite out of Chaucer, or digest Homer, but he has his own way of doing things.  No one can chew through a wall faster, or tie a tangle better than good old dad.

            My childhood was normal enough.  I did the same things that all of the regular warf runts do.  We searched out scraps of food and gnawed on things.  We were always up for a swim in the Big Water.  My brothers and I loved to play a game with the humans who infested our house. We called it clear the kitchen.  This consisted of running across the kitchen floor and trying to make the cook jump. That was worth one point.  If she screamed, you got two.  If she hit you with a pan or the broom, you lost a point, (and quite possibly more).  The play that earned the most points was when she would jump, scream, and drop some fine morsel of people food, (Mmmm, people food – how sweetly I remember it).  This was the hail Mary of clear the kitchen.  You won the game, and everyone ate well that night.  Our parents frowned on this activity, but parents can’t watch you all the time. Runts will be runts.  Now that I look back on it, I can see how dangerous the game was, but humans are notoriously slow and stupid in the face of an organized rat attack.  We knew it even at that tender age.  The practice served me well later in life.

            My days consisted mostly of exploring along the water front for new resources to exploit.  I would start at the fish market and find breakfast, then work my way along the front until I reached the docks.

             The docks always had something new and exciting to find and investigate.  There was grain from the mainland, all bundled up in sacks – so conveniently stored, and so easy to chew through. Lunch was always a pleasure at the docks.  There were great bolts of cloth from France, sugar from the Americas, and spices from I knew not where.  There were black dusty rocks, and black acrid powder. The humans used the rocks to heat their homes, and the powder to make thunder.  All of this, and so much more, coming and going daily.  A great wooden ship would sail into harbor, disgorge it’s glorious cargo onto the docks, and then wait to be filled again with more treasure.  Once full, it would would catch the wind in it’s great wings and drift away to some other place across the Big Water.  The humans would scurry about their business, and pay no attention to us rats.  We would hide in the shadows of the great plank crates, and the humans were blind to us, too busy to care what we did. Ah, the docks at lunch time – there is no better place for a rat to be.

            My brother Amis Brandon Finnigan, and my best friend Boris, would loiter at the wooden piers until the sun dipped into the Big Water – far, far to the west.  The sky would turn red and pink, purple and yellow. This is how we knew it was time to go home.  We would wind our way through the mud streets and dark alleys of Plymouth, looking for distraction, but rarely find it.  Sometimes, the three of us stopped at the tavern to snatch a piece of pork fat, or a fresh scrap of bread that had carelessly fallen to the floor. Such was the life of a warf rat.  It was the life we knew and loved – what rat in his right mind would want anything different (or dare to imagine it)? It was on just such an evening that our lives were changed irrevocably, and forever.  Nothing would ever be the same for us.

Ch.2

            It was a warm, late August dusk in the year of 1768, that Boris, Amis, and myself left the waterfront to start our journey home.  We stayed on the docks a little longer than usual on this evening, as we were unwilling to give up the last golden rays of daylight.  We watched a single lonely ship drift into port and tie off to the docks.  H.S. Bark Endeavour was painted on the side in the brightest of white pigments.  Humans are so pretentious.  Endeavour to what?

            Boris lived in the tool shed next to the main house, so he usually accompanied us home.  He, being a little older than Amis and I, would walk us to the small hole just to the right of the front door, that served as the main entrance to my humble abode.

             No so tonight.  Tonight, we were going out.  It had been a few days since the last time we made an appearance at the Brown Bovine Inn, and the humans who perpetually inhabited the place would have long forgotten about the chaos we wrought on our last visit.  They are such predictable creatures, the humans.  Out of sight, out of mind, as they say.  I bet it took them less than a day to forget that I chewed the toe off one patrons imported Italian boots.  Or that Boris went for a swim in the pot of chowder.  He emerged from that thick stew with the slicked back look that so many inland rats were adopting in those days, his fur shiny and pressed tight to his sides.  Boris was a large, healthy rat, and tight fur looked good on him. I would never dream of doing such a thing. 

            We made our way to the tavern just as the last hint of daylight was fading from the air.  It would cool quickly, and we wanted to get inside.  The humans didn’t know much about the world or its ways, but they did know how to keep warm.  It was easy enough to sneak in undetected, people were such easy creatures to hide from.  We simply waited for a visitor to leave, and then bolted through the open door, across the room, and right under the heavy wooden counter.  From there we made our way directly to the kitchen.  The three of us  made it there unseen, and unheard, me in the lead, and Boris and Amis following close behind.

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