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They seemed, though on a much larger scale, to be hanging upon our track, just as a flock of crows hang over the track of a plough in the field, and doubtless for the same reason to pick up the food thrown up by the mighty keel of our ship. Most of them were ice-birds, blue petrels, and whale-birds, with a large admixture of albatrosses and Mother Carey's chickens.
The weather was hazy, and we passed two bergs, several growlers, and numerous lumps of ice. Staff and crew were settling down to the routine. Bird life was plentiful, and we noticed Cape pigeons, whale-birds, terns, mollymauks, nellies, sooty, and wandering albatrosses in the neighbourhood of the ship. The course was laid for the passage between Sanders Island and Candlemas Volcano.
Some of the officers got out lines and hooks baited with pieces of pork; not to attract fish, however, but to catch some of the numerous birds flying astern and round the ship. Several flights of stormy petrels had long been following in the wake of the ship, with other birds, such as albatrosses, cape-pigeons, and whale-birds.
And so, on and on, these seeming outcasts of God's mercy sailed before the warm breath of the south-east trade wind, above them the blazing tropic sun, around them the wide, sailless expanse of the blue Pacific unbroken in its dreadful loneliness except for a wandering grey-winged booby or flocks of whale-birds floating upon its gentle swell, and within their all but deadened hearts naught but grim despair and a dulled sense of coming dissolution.
Let the little fellow go, and turn the glasses on that big bunch of whale-birds over there. See them flying there's a string nearly a mile long." "I see them! I see them!" called out Rob. "There are thousands and thousands of them. I've seen them before, and one of the sailors told me that there is always most of them where there are whales around.
Just as we had finished coffee, and our attention was drawn to a number of boobies and whale-birds resting upon some floating substance half a mile distant, we discovered a couple of sail ahead, and then another, and another, all whalers, and, as they were under easy-cruising canvas being on the sperm whaling ground we soon began to overhaul them.
The gulls, crows, ravens, and eagles were continually passing, with clouds of shags or cormorants, which nested on the rocks a mile or so down the bay, together with numbers of oyster-birds, whale-birds, and other strange fowl of the outlying coast.
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