The name of the main character is Gloria Scott, a parody of the famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. "The Adventure of the Gloria Scott ", one of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is one of 12 stories in the cycle collected as The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. It is chronologically the earliest case in Sherlock Holmes canon. Gloria Scott in that short story is in fact the name of a ship.
It took almost 15 years to produce this animated short. There were two very different designs of main characters made by two other artist (Magda Dulcic & Stjepan Bartolic) before production finally settling down with final version. There were also several different versions of the script portraying adventures of Gloria Scott before this "Murder in the Cathedral".