These illustrations are a set of maybe twelve. All illustrations by Oliver Mercer based on the artist’s storyline of what might have happened when the first cat came to PNG.
Sailing Ship
Long, long ago
After Tambuna time
But before now
When big sailing ships - (floating villages)
Traveled and traded
A first time visitor
Made their way to
Papua New Guinea
This is how
Thief
The sailors were careful —
The Captain liked his clean ship.
But somewhere in the deep still night
A thief must have crept aboard.
Holes were filled in bags of grain.
Not holes from knives—
These were chewed by teeth.
Champ
The captain was prepared.
As part of the crew, he employed a cat.
One pound was the price of a proven mouser. Not the usual 30 shillings rate.
The crew were hungry. The captain was fed up with thievery. They called for the ships mascot. To catch the squeak thief.
But as time would prove, this was not the work of mere ravenous mice.
The culprit, as evidenced by the size of the scat, was the extraordinary, enormously beastly,
King Rat!
Battle
While the ship followed the wind over the sea,
Champ fearlessly tracked his quarry above and below decks
from crow’s nest to galley.
Skirmishes occurred
No cabin was safe. There was no neutral ground.
The battle continued day and night
Twixst Champ and King Rat.
The crew could not sleep. Tempers grew raw.
Ink spilled on the Captain’s map
Was the last straw.
Land
Up on the crow’s nest
The lookout called out —
“Cloud!”
“Volcano!”
“Land -ho!”
And the captain changed course.
Into The Drink
When King Rat smelled the land,
He knew what to do.
Overboard he jumped and swam-
With Champ right behind!
Excitement
After hitting the beach,
The chase continued.
Day and night.
Into the bush,
Through every village,
Past every garden.
And the people talked.
“I know what a rat is - but what was that chasing it?” asked Handape.
Jukilee didn’t know, and neither did Kleena.
Warriors gathered, garden girls whispered with some afraid. Even the animals on the island were upset.
Stories were told and pictures drawn of the thing chasing the rat.
“It looked like” said Claude. “No, it looked like this” said Giamalu.
And so all the people in all the villages storied and storied and storied about it.