Trim was born in 1799 aboard HMS Reliance on its voyage from the Cape of Good Hope to Botany Bay. As a kitten he fell overboard, swam back to the hull, and climbed a rope to the deck, earning a place as companion to explorer Matthew Flinders. Flinders described him as black with white paws, a white chin and a white star on his chest, and named him after the loyal Corporal Trim in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. From 1801 to 1803 Trim sailed on HMS Investigator as Flinders circumnavigated and mapped the Australian mainland, and in 1803 he survived the wreck of HMS Porpoise on Wreck Reef.

Sailing home in 1803 and 1804, Flinders stopped at Mauritius, then the French Isle de France, during the Napoleonic Wars and was arrested as a spy. Trim stayed with him, taking daily walks into town and returning to the cell. When Flinders was moved to a harsher prison, he left Trim with a local French woman and her daughter, and within two weeks the cat vanished. Flinders advertised a reward in the local newspaper, but Trim was never seen again. In 1809, still in solitary confinement, Flinders wrote a detailed biographical tribute to him, the main source for his story.

• A bronze Trim sits on a windowsill behind Flinders’s statue at the Mitchell Library in Sydney.
• A statue of Flinders and Trim stands at Euston station in London, with casts at Port Lincoln and Flinders University.
• Another statue marks Flinders’s birthplace in Donington, Lincolnshire, with a smaller one in Lincoln Cathedral.
• The Mitchell Library named its cafe after Trim.
• Bryce Courtenay’s 2002 novel Matthew Flinders’ Cat features Trim and his library statue.