Originally published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine (Harper and Brothers) vol.14 #84 (May 1857).
The wanderer about the docks of London or Liverpool will have noticed, no doubt, an old, gray-haired, bent, and poorly-dressed man, with generally an unshaven face, a broad-brimmed felt hat, and thick, solid shoes, and always a broad leather belt, worn sashwise, and decorated in front with a brightly brazen figure, which any cockney will inform you is meant to represent a rat, and which, in fact, bears about as much resemblance to a rat as the heraldic lion does to the lion of John Anderssen or Jules Gérard. It is this man's sole business to relieve vessels or houses of those pests whose image he bears upon his breast. The professional rat-catcher is an institution in the large cities of Europe, and the superstitious, shoresmen as well as seamen, in England, delight in stories of charmed rats, and devoutly believe the rat-catcher to be the most charming of mortals. Some years ago there was in Liverpool one of these professional rat-annihilators, of whom we have often heard it related that, by some potent charm, he could remove, without killing or maiming, the entire rat population of a ship or house whose owner had properly subsidized him. Of course, in this case, the nuisance was not abated, but simply removed. The rats were colonized upon some unlucky neighbor, who was in turn forced to buy over the controlling power, to be rid of the annoyance.
"The whiskered vermin race," as Grainger called them, are reckoned among the disagreeables by most people. Every man's hand, and foot, too, is against a rat; little dogs bark vociferously at sound of his squeal; little boys shout delightedly at sight of his death-struggle; little girls hold the rat in equal abomination with the more fatal rattlesnake; and young ladies—young ladies climb up on chairs at the very mention of the hated name. Traps, ferrets, poison, cats—these are but a few of the means used to rid the civilized world of him; and yet, with a perseverance which a stump orator would declare "worthy of a better cause," the rat keeps his place as a household brute, and composedly nibbles the rich man's cheese, the farmer's corn, the sailor's biscuit (and even his greasy trowsers), or the West Indian's sugar-cane.
"Only a rat," says the business man, looking out to ascertain the cause which has brought together such a motley assemblage of street urchins, terrier dogs, and rough men in shirt sleeves. Little does he think of the possible adventures of this rat, who is thus publicly expiating the crime of having lived. The ancestors of that just defunct animal came from Persia. They there lived in burrows under ground, and in large communities, governed, no doubt, by the Rat King of whom old writers on natural history tell such wonderful stories. We read that the first emigrant rat company was formed on occasion of an earthquake, which, causing the rat community to think itself unsafe, induced its members to abandon their homes, march westward, swim the Volga, and enter Europe by way of Astracan. This took place in 1727.
The aunts and uncles, in a remote way, of that rat, coming no one knew whence and disappearing no one knew whither, overran different parts of Northern Europe during the first half of the 18th century, emptying granaries of their contents, destroying fields of standing grain, and even ravaging houses, and attacking men and women.
His cousins emigrating to Jamaica, there increased so rapidly that, at one time, not many years ago, it was computed that they consumed a twentieth part of the entire sugar crop; and when a war of extermination was declared against them, 30,000 were destroyed in one year.
His relatives, in various removes, have traveled to and peopled—if that expression is applicable here—many of the remotest islands of the Pacific, circumnavigating the world with Cook, exploring with Wilkes, or making the India voyage with Smith the adventurous.
And looking at home, his nearer kinsrats exist in myriads in house and field, but especially in the cities, where they swarm in the vast net-work of sewers underfoot, and, through subdrains, gain free access to cellars, basements, floors, and even roofs, mingling intimately in all our concerns, and perhaps sharing, in some slight, ratlike way, our joys and sorrows.
Let us look at some of the qualities of the rat. He is a cannibal. The black rat, native to England, lives at war with the Norwegian interloper, and being the weaker, is, when caught, devoured by the foreign enemy. We read that where equal numbers of the two species are placed in a cage without food, the blacks will invariably be eaten before morning. And even when well fed, the brown monsters will eat off the long and finely-tipped ears of their black brethren—by way of relish it may be supposed.
The rat possesses, notwithstanding his unfavorable cerebral development, powers of a comparatively high order. In proof of this we will not here recall the story of their removing eggs by one fellow lying on his back and holding the egg in his paws while his companions pull him along by the tail; or of their drawing oil from a flask by dipping in their tails; or of blind rats being led from place to place by means of a stick carried in the mouth. It is sufficient to note that he knows what part of the elephant's tusk abounds most with animal oil, and attacks that part in preference; that he will climb the rigging of a ship to the sails, knowing, somehow, that there, after a rain or a heavy dew, he will be most likely to find moisture; that he will enter the vessel by way of the hawse-pipes; and that, having found a good berth, he straightway calls about him all his friends, and forms a colony, which increases with a rapidity almost alarming when we take into consideration the appetites and the destructive powers of the colonists.
A pair of rats happily situated and undisturbed, will, in three years, have increased to 656,808. Calculating that ten rats eat as much in one day as a man, which, we think, is rather under than over the fact, the consumption of these rats would be equal to that of 65,680 men the year round, and leave eight rats in the year to spare. Multiplying in this way, it is providential that the rat has so many natural enemies. All these to the contrary, notwithstanding, he often proves sufficiently troublesome to make the community conspire against him. In Ireland they singe the hair of a rat which has been caught, but is otherwise unharmed. In Germany they let one loose with a small bell attached to his neck. The tinkling of this, as the belled rat chases his friends, produces a panic among them, and causes them to flee the premises. In America diverse means are resorted to to destroy the disagreeables. Yankee ingenuity has been for years more or less successfully brought to bear upon the important subject of rat-traps. Arsenic is freely and very carelessly used by persons evidently ignorant of the important fact that this poison produces in the rat an intense thirst, to slake which he rushes off frantically to the nearest water-course. An instance of such wholesale poisoning is yet fresh in the public mind. A recent American anti-ratite recommends the following treacherous expedient against the rats which eat the farmer's corn: "I build my corn-crib on posts about eighteen inches high, made rat-proof by putting a broad board or sheet of iron on the top of the posts. Make every thing secure against rats except the granary, and have this rat-proof except at one of the back corners. Here, where they will like it best, make a nice hole, with a spout, five inches long, on the outside, where they can go in and out and eat at pleasure. Then, if I think the rats are too numerous, I take a bag, after dark, and slip the mouth over the spout on the outside of the granary. Then send 'Ben' in at the door with a light, and the rats and mice will all run into the bag. Then slip the bag off the spout, and slap it once or twice against the side of the granary. Turn out the dead, and in an hour or two repeat the process. After all are killed, stop up the hole till new recruits arrive, which catch in the same way."
At Bangkok, the Siamese capital, the people are in the habit of keeping tame rats, which walk about the room and crawl up the legs of the inmates, who pet them as they would a dog. They are caught young, and attaining a monstrous size by good feeding, take the place of our cats, and entirely free the house of their own kind.
In Paris the skins are valued for gloves, and the rats are accordingly hunted by a company who have, we are told, the exclusive privilege of the sewers. It is not unlikely that many a fair lady, who would scream with horror at the sight of a rat's keen eyes, does daily endow her delicate hands in the tanned skins of her aversion.
The favorite stronghold of the rat is that portion of the house-drain which opens at right angles into the main sewer. Here he sits like a sentinel, and, in security, watches with his keen but astonished eyes the extraordinary apparition running with a light. The moment he sees the light he runs along the sides of the drain just above the line of the sewerage water; the men follow, and speedily overtake the winded animal, which no sooner finds his pursuers gaining upon him than he sets up a shrill squeak, in the midst of which he is seized with the bare hand behind the ears, and deposited in the bag. In this manner a dozen will sometimes be captured in as many minutes. When driven to bay at the end of a blind sewer, they will often fly at the boots of their pursuers in the most determined manner.
The rat is a social animal. Communities of rats are very exclusive, and repel strangers, vagabond rats, or estrays from other communities with much sternness. Even on board ship there are cabin rats and forecastle rats; and woe to a poor denizen of the cabin who should venture among his enemies before the mast!
It is on shipboard that the rat is forced to exert his ingenuity to the utmost to obtain the means of living. Of food he probably never has a sufficiency, however accomplished a thief he may be; for the captain, the mate, the steward, and the steward's loblolly boy—all are leagued against him, and make ceaseless and united efforts to starve him out. As for water, who shall tell the straits to which the rat crew of a ship has been reduced, during a long drought, when the cautious mate has carefully closed the water-casks with tinned bungs, and each thirsting sailor husbands his scant three pints of daily fetid water in his rat-proof sea-chest? The writer of this has seen the water-casks one by one secretly gnawed, beneath, where the attacks were unnoticed, till one hot, tropic day, when the sails hung idly from the yards, and the pitch bubbled up from deck and sides, the cook with scared looks announced that our last cask was emptied, and but a few providential gallons were left in the galley. This remainder was placed for safety, that night, in the long boat, a place till then inaccessible to the rats. How they ascertained its locality we know not. But that night the long boat was taken by assault. To climb the iron gripes was impossible to the vermin. The smooth sides gave them still less foothold. The gunwale was too high to leap from the deck, as was proved to themselves and a few watchful tars, by a series of seltatory attempts. But in the quiet mid-watch a dozen huge rats climbed nimbly up the mainstay which joined the deck near the foremast; and reaching a point immediately over, and some ten feet above the long boat, one by one dropped down into her bottom. Here was a case almost demonstrating the possession of reason by our rats.
The propensity of the rat to gnaw must not be attributed altogether to a reckless determination to overcome impediments, The never-ceasing action of his teeth is not a pastime, but a necessity of his existence.
His teeth are wedge-shaped. On examining them carefully we find that the inner part is of a soft, ivory-like composition, which may be easily worn away, whereas the outside is composed of a glass-like enamel, which is excessively hard. The upper teeth work exactly into the under, so that the centres of the opposed teeth meet exactly in the act of gnawing; the soft part is thus being perpetually worn away, while the hard part keeps a sharp chisel-like edge. At the same time the teeth grow up from the bottom, so that as they wear away a fresh supply is ready. The consequence of this arrangement is, that, if one of the teeth be removed, either by accident or on purpose, the opposed tooth will continue to grow upward, and, as there is nothing to grind them away, will project from the mouth and turn upon itself; or, if it be an under tooth, it will even run into the skull above.
We once saw a newly-killed rat to whom this misfortune had occurred. The tooth, which was an upper one, had in this case also formed a complete circle, and the point in winding round had passed through the lip of the animal. Thus the ceaseless working of the rat's incisors against some hard substance is necessary to keep them down, and if he did not gnaw for his subsistence he would be compelled to gnaw to prevent his jaw being gradually locked by their rapid development.
The ferocity of a rat when attacked and cornered is proverbial. Few know that when petted he is capable of becoming a very faithful companion. A late writer on Natural History says: "An old blind rat, on whose head the snows of many winters had gathered, was in the habit of sitting beside our own kitchen fire, with all the comfortable look of his enemy, the cat; and such a favorite had he become with the servants that he was never allowed to be disturbed. He unhappily fell a victim to the sudden spring of a strange cat."
Another story is told of a rat which belonged to the driver of a London omnibus, who caught him as he was removing some hay. He was spared because he had the good luck to be piebald, became remarkably tame, and grew attached to the children. At night he exhibited a sense of the enjoyment of security and warmth by stretching himself out at full length on the rug before the fire, and on cold nights, after the fire was extinguished, he would creep into his master's bed. In the daytime, however, his owner utilized him. At the word of command, "Come along, Ikey!" he would jump into the ample great-coat pocket, from which he was transferred to the boot of the omnibus. Here his business was to guard the driver's dinner, and if any person attempted to make free with it the rat would fly at them from out the straw. There was one dish alone of which he was an inefficient protector. He could never resist plum-pudding, and, though he kept off all other intruders, he ate his fill of it himself.
Finally, rats are proved to have a latent dramatic talent. A Belgian newspaper not long since published an account of a theatrical performance by a troop of rats, which gives us a higher idea of their intellectual nature than any thing else which is recorded of them. This novel company of players were dressed in the garb of men and women, walked on their hind legs, and mimicked with ludicrous exactness many of the ordinary stage effects. On one point only were they intractable. Like the young lady in the fable, who turned to a cat the moment a mouse appeared, they forgot their parts, their audience, and their manager, at the sight of the viands which were introduced in the course of the piece, and, dropping on all fours, fell to with the native voracity of their race. The performance was concluded by their hanging, in triumph, their enemy the cat, and dancing round her body.