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Updated: June 7, 2025
This is simple advice, but I reckon it the first great secret which my nomadic experience enables me to put down for the benefit of my fellow-creatures; especially on board of a ship, leave off with an appetite. We passed our time not having the fear of the Ancient Mariner before our eyes in shooting albatrosses, Cape pigeons, and the like; in picking up a porpoise, a bonnitta, or a dolphin.
Then Captain Solomon went on to say that albatrosses often followed ships for days together, and the sailors never could see that they had to move their wings, but they sailed along just as fast as the ship sailed. He had seen lots of them in his time, but he had never seen them do anything else but sail, just as that one was doing then.
It being the winter of the southern hemisphere, the members of the petrel family, at other times so abundant in the South Pacific, were by no means so numerous as I had expected to find them, and in the higher southern latitudes which we attained before rounding Cape Horn, albatrosses had altogether disappeared, although they had been abundant as far to the southward as 41 degrees South.
The colonies that remain are in a sadly decimated condition.... Over a large part of the island, in some sections a hundred acres in a place, that ten years ago were thickly inhabited by albatrosses not a single bird remains, while heaps of the slain lie as mute testimony of the awful slaughter of these beautiful, harmless, and without doubt beneficial inhabitants of the high seas.
He shot several of the huge albatrosses that floated fearlessly over the deck, but was not successful in his efforts to catch the fish that were seen coming to the surface of the troubled sea. The sea was made so boisterous by rain and snow, and such a stiff wind blew from the west, that for two or three days the Rose could not double the Cape.
There were the wings of the condor, of the bald and the golden eagle, of the duck-hawk, pigeon-hawk, squirrel-hawk, of the sap-sucker, of the eider duck, and a Zenaider-like dove. Higher up were long wings of swans and albatrosses, heads of horned owls, and beaks of the laughing goose.
At last, on the 12th February, in S. lat. 64 degrees 10 minutes albatrosses, penguins, and whales were seen in large quantities; and on the 15th land was seen in the south a long distance off. The next day this land was ascertained to be a large island, to which the name of Adelaide was given, in honour of the Queen of England.
Our path led us under some cliffs which were literally crowded with penguins and young albatrosses, or mollimauks. There was a regular encampment or rookery of them, extending for five or six hundred yards in length, and from one to two dozen in breadth. The nests of the albatrosses were nearly a foot high, and of a cup-like form.
There were almost every day great numbers of pintada, albatrosses, blue petrels, and other oceanic birds about us; but it was observed that if the wind came from the northward, only for a few hours, the birds generally left us, and their presence again was the forerunner of a southerly wind. Sunday 13.
A few white albatrosses skimmed and sailed below, and before, seaward, the sheets of turf, falling away, stretched into a shoreless headland, fringed with black rock and snow-white surf. She stood there, flushed and excited with the exercise, her bright hair dishevelled, waving in the free sea-breeze, the most beautiful object in that glorious landscape, her noble mate beside her.
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