Jasper Republican, Volume 1, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 January 1875 — Rats on Board of Ship. [ARTICLE]

Rats on Board of Ship.

Rats greatly infest ships, and are by them carried to every part of the world. So industriously do they make homes for themselves in the numerous crannies and corners in the hull of a ship that it is almost impossible to get rid of them. Ships take out rats as well as passengers and cargo every voyage; whether the former remain in the ship when in port is best known to themselves. When the East Company had ships of their own, they employed a rat-catcher, who sometimes captured 500 rats in one ship just returned from Calcutta. The ship rat is often the black species. Sometimes black and brown inhabit the same vessel, and, unless they carry on perpetual hostilities, the one party will keep to the head of the vessel and the other to the stern. The ship rat is very anxious that his supply of fresh water shall not fail; he will climb on deck when it rains, and climb up the wet sails to suck them. Sometimes he mistakes a spirit cask for a water cask, and gets drunk. A captain of an American merchant ship is credited (or discredited) with an ingenious bit of sharp practice as a means of clearing his ship from rats. Having discharged cargo at a port in Holland, he found his ship in juxtaposition to another which had just taken in a cargo of Dutch cheeses. He laid a plank at night from the one vessel to the other; the rats, tempted by the odor, trooped along the plank and began their feast. He took care that the plank should not be there to serve them as a pathway back again; and so the cheese-laden ship had a cruel addition to its outward cargo.— All the Tear Bound.

According to a Washington paper all the gentlemen at a recent party there wore “ striped silk stockings and low shoes, with buckles and rosettes.” —Next spring will find the American Tract Society half a century old. During these fifty years it has published over 1,000 volumes.