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Updated: June 7, 2025
The French call these birds damiers, as their black and white feathers on their back and wings are disposed like the squares of a draught-board. These were also attended by albatrosses, the largest of all sea-fowl, some of them extending their wings twelve or thirteen feet from tip to tip. While passing the mouth of the Rio.
Almost invariably I have found in the stomach of the many kinds of albatrosses, petrels, and shearwaters, which I have examined, the undigested horny mandibles of cuttlefish, which would thus appear to constitute their principal food; and, as all the petrel family are to a certain extent nocturnal, it seems probable that the small cuttlefish on which they feed approach the surface only at night.
There is a special trade name for the feathers of almost every kind of bird known in the millinery business. Thus there is Coque for Black Cock, Cross Aigrettes for the little plumes of the Snowy Egret, and Eagle Quills from the wings not only of Eagles, but of Bustards, Pelicans, Albatrosses, Bush Turkeys, and even Turkey Buzzards.
Yesterday some of the men went out in a boat to shoot albatrosses, and shot seven. These birds are so large that it is as much as a woman can do to bring up one from the shore slung on her back. Once they nested on the island, but now nests are not to be found nearer than Inaccessible. I have been making fresh efforts to teach Edith Swain her letters.
It is well known that this bird cannot fly while under the influence of fear, and so it appeared in this instance, for, while we were passing it, a shark thrust its head out of the water and took the unfortunate bird down with him. On the 16th we landed at Tea-qua-san, where we captured great numbers of albatrosses, ferns, and boobies. They actually refused to move at our approach.
On the 12th, we passed the south cape of New Zealand, but the weather being very hazy and squally, we did not attempt to make it, but kept a degree and a half to the southward of it; here we met with vast numbers of birds of various kinds, mostly aquatic, such as albatrosses, pentada birds, divers, peterels, and a variety of gulls; some of a kind I had not before seen during the voyage, very large, of a dark brown or mouse colour; and another sort not quite so large, with a white body, dark wings, and the head of a light blue or lead colour: much sea-weed was also seen here in very large patches.
The albatrosses, of the black or sooty variety, had watched with hard, bright eyes, and seemed to have a quite impersonal interest in our struggle to keep afloat amid the battering seas. In addition to the Cape pigeons an occasional stormy petrel flashed overhead.
I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird chiefly lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in this, that by a solecism of terms there are birds called grey albatrosses; and these I have frequently seen, but never with such emotions as when I beheld the Antarctic fowl. But how had the mystic thing been caught?
We continued to ply till two o'clock the next morning, when we bore away east, and at eight E.N.E.; at noon, observed in latitude 54° 35' S., longitude 47° 56' W., a great many albatrosses and blue peterels about the ship.
"Haul a bowlin', the 'Mary Anne's' a-rollin'. Haul a bowlin', a bowlin' haul; Haul a bowlin', the good ship's a-rollin'; Haul a bowlin', a bowlin' haul." The chant is sung out in stentorian notes by the leader, and on the word in italics every man joins in a tremendous and united pull. Crowds of Cape pigeons and albatrosses accompanied us all across the South Pacific.
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