When did the cat who was aboard the same ship as Commander Stuart Hett die?
28 November 1949
Title: James Paton (seaman)
Passage: James "Scotty" Paton (1869–1917 or 18) was a Scots-born seaman who sailed to the Antarctic in several major expeditions between 1902 and 1917.  His first venture was from 1902 to 1904 as a crewman of "Captain William Colbeck"'s SY Morning.  This expedition consisted of two voyages and was sent as a relief ship for the Captain Scott's Discovery Expedition.  During the first voyage the ship was briefly stalled in the ice between Cape Bird and Beaufort Island.  Scotty Paton took the opportunity to leave ship and jump floes a distance of one mile to 'land' of Beaufort Island, the first man to do so.  This accomplishment was received with a reprimand.  In 1907–09 he was a crew member of Sir Ernest Shackleton's Nimrod Expedition during each of "Nimrod's" two southern voyages.  From 1910 to 1913 he was a seaman aboard Captain Scott's "Terra Nova" during her two voyages between New Zealand and Cape Evans, in support of Scott's ill-fated expedition.  In 1914 he joined the Ross Sea party section of Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition as boatswain on the "Aurora".  He was aboard ship on 7 May 1915 when "Aurora" was torn from her Cape Evans moorings, drifting in the pack for nine months before limping back to New Zealand.  Paton's last Antarctic voyage was with "Aurora" on the mission to relieve the stranded Ross Sea party in January 1917.
Title: Soyuz TM-29
Passage: Soyuz TM-29 was a Russian manned spacecraft launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard a Soyuz 11A511U rocket.  It docked with Mir on February 22 at 05:36 GMT with Cosmonauts Viktor Afanasyev of Russia, Jean-Pierre Haigneré of France, and Ivan Bella of Slovakia aboard.  Since two crew seats had been sold (to Slovakia and France), Afanasyev was the only Russian cosmonaut aboard.  This meant that Russian engineer Avdeyev already aboard Mir would have to accept a double-length assignment.  After the February 27 departure of EO-26 crew commander Padalka and cosmonaut Bella aboard Soyuz TM-28, the new EO-27 Mir crew consisted of Afanasyev as Commander, Avdeyev as Engineer and French cosmonaut Haigneré.
Title: Queequeg
Passage: Queequeg is a fictional character in the 1851 novel "Moby-Dick" by American author Herman Melville.  The son of a South Sea chieftain who left home to explore the world, Queequeg is the first principal character encountered by the narrator, Ishmael.  The quick friendship and relationship of equality between the tattooed cannibal and the white sailor shows Melville's basic theme of shipboard democracy and racial diversity.  Once aboard the whaling ship "Pequod" Queequeg becomes the harpooner for the mate Starbuck.  At the end of the novel he "casts the runes", which say he will die.  He therefore builds a coffin and refuses to eat or drink, but ultimately decides to stay alive and then recovers.  The coffin is later converted to a lifebuoy after the ship's original one is lost.  When Moby-Dick sinks the ship, Ishmael survives by clinging to it until another ship arrives to pick him up.
Title: Complement of HMS Bounty
Passage: The complement of  , the Royal Navy ship on which a historic mutiny occurred in the south Pacific on 28 April 1789, comprised 46 men on its departure from England in December 1787 and 44 at the time of the mutiny, including her commander Lieutenant William Bligh.  All but two of those aboard were Royal Navy personnel; the exceptions were two civilian botanists engaged to supervise the breadfruit plants "Bounty" was tasked to take from Tahiti to the West Indies.  Of the 44 aboard at the time of the mutiny, 19 (including Bligh) were set adrift in the ship's launch, while 25, a mixture of mutineers and detainees, remained on board under Fletcher Christian.  Bligh led his loyalists 3500 nmi to safety in the open boat, and ultimately back to England.  The mutineers divided—most settled on Tahiti, where they were captured by  in 1791 and returned to England for trial, while Christian and eight others evaded discovery on Pitcairn Island.
Title: Simon (cat)
Passage: Simon (c. 1947 – 28 November 1949) was the ship's cat who served on the Royal Navy sloop HMS "Amethyst".  In 1949, during the Yangtze Incident, he received the PDSA's Dickin Medal after surviving injuries from a cannon shell, raising morale, and killing off a rat infestation during his service.
Title: Action of 28 November 1751
Passage: The Action of 28 November 1751 was a naval engagement of the Spanish-Algerian conflict, fought off Cape St Vincent between a squadron of two Spanish ships of the line under Captain Pedro Fitz-James Stuart and an Algerian squadron of equal strength.  Captain Pedro Fitz-James Stuart's ships pursued one of the Algerian privateers and managed to force it to surrender it after a fierce exchange of fire.  The ship, badly damaged, had to be scuttled, but its surviving crew and 50 Christian slaves were rescued and taken aboard Stuart's flagship.
Title: Ilford Animal Cemetery
Passage: Ilford Animal Cemetery is an animal cemetery in Ilford in London, England, United Kingdom that contained over three thousand burials.  It was founded in the 1920s and is operated by the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals.  The cemetery was closed to new burials in the 1960s and gradually became neglected and overgrown.  In the early twenty-first century it was restored with the assistance of a £50,000 grant from the National Lottery.  Headstones were repaired or replaced, the entrance gate was repaired, the graves were numbered and a visitor's map was created.  The cemetery re-opened in 2007 with a ceremony that included a performance of the Last Post by a bugler from the King's Royal Rifle Corps and a pigeon fly-past (although the birds actually took fright at the assembled crowd and flew in the opposite direction).  It was attended by two holders of the PDSA Gold Medal, Jake (an explosives detection dog) and Endal (an assistance dog).  Also present was Commander Stuart Hett, who had been an officer aboard HMS "Amethyst" and had been tasked with responding to the many letters received by the ship's heroic cat, Simon, who is buried at Ilford.
Title: Fyodor Yurchikhin
Passage: Fyodor Nikolayevich Yurchikhin (Russian: Фёдор Николаевич Юрчихин, Greek: Θεόδωρος Γιουρτσίχιν του Νικόλαου; born 3 January 1959 ), is a Russian cosmonaut of Greek descent, engineer and RSC Energia test-pilot who has flown on five spaceflights. His first spaceflight was a 10-day Space Shuttle mission STS-112.  His second was a long-duration stay aboard the International Space Station (ISS) as a Flight Engineer for Expedition 15; for this mission he was launched in the Soyuz TMA-10 spacecraft.  He has undertaken two further long-duration stays aboard the ISS, as a crew member of Expedition 24 / 25.  For this mission he was launched with the spacecraft Soyuz TMA-19, and he landed in November 2010, also with the TMA-19 spacecraft.  He served as Soyuz Commander for his fourth mission aboard Soyuz TMA-09M, as Flight Engineer for Expedition 36 and ISS Commander for Expedition 37.  In April 2017, Yurchikhin launched on Soyuz MS-04 for the fifth spaceflight of his career, a six-month mission to the ISS as part of Expedition 51 and 52, for which he was the Commander.
Title: Thelma Bendler Stern
Passage: Thelma Bendler Stern (b. December 7, 1923; married name: Neubauer) is the first woman assigned to perform duties aboard a United States Navy ship as part of her official responsibilities.  Stern was a civilian employee at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard during World War II, working in the engineering department.  Her job as a ship's draftsman included taking measurements of ship features as required by her engineer colleagues to allow them to designate the placement of upgrades such as new anti-aircraft guns.  Stern’s first assignment aboard ship occurred June 29, 1943, aboard the USNS "Escalante", a tanker (hull number AO70).  This was followed by assignments aboard a further 229 ships before her career at the Navy yard ended in January 1946.
Title: São José Paquete Africa
Passage: The São José Paquete Africa (also, "São José-Paquete de Africa") was a slave ship from the Kingdom of Portugal that sank in 1794 off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa.  Close to shore, but in deep water, 212 of the 400 to 500 African slaves who were aboard died when the ship sank.  In 2015, the Smithsonian's African American History Museum, South Africa's Iziko Museums, the Slave Wrecks Project, and other partners, confirmed discovery of the wreck near where it sank.  The ship and its slaves were headed from Portuguese Mozambique to Colonial Brazil, during the height of the international African slave trade.  Few other former slave ships have been found, but the "São José" is the first and only shipwreck discovered, as of June 3, 2015, of a working slave ship, which sank in transit with its human cargo aboard.
Ilford Animal Cemetery Simon (cat)