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Updated: June 13, 2025
A few days after we left Java, we saw boobies about the ship for several nights successively, and as these birds are known to roost every night on shore, we thought them an indication that some island was not far distant; perhaps it might be the island of Selam, which, in different charts, is very differently laid down both in name and situation.
Besides their finny enemies, the former had to encounter in their flight armies of boobies, gannets, and other tropical birds, which hovered over them, and secured many of them before our eyes. Notwithstanding this, I do not suppose that flying-fish are more unhappy or more persecuted than their less agile brethren; and while they live they probably have a keener enjoyment of existence.
But previous experience of boobies' eggs in other places had not disposed me to seek them where others were to be obtained, and as I had seen many of the well-known frigate or man-o'-war birds hovering about, we set out to the other side of the island in search of the breeding-place. These peculiar birds are, I think, misnamed.
After rowing round the lake in search of fresh adventures, and finding none, we amused ourselves by cutting off several branches of the mangrove trees strung with oysters, and being tired of rowing where there was so little novelty, we turned the boat’s nose towards the river, on reaching which we again startled numerous flocks of screaming birds, five of which we shot; but as they were only noddies and boobies, we did not take the trouble to pick them up.
Before it has touched the water the graceful thief has intercepted it, and soared slowly aloft again, to repeat the performance as occasion serves. When we arrived on the outer shore of the island, we found a large breeding-place of these birds, but totally different to the haunt of the boobies.
There on the floor, bound hand and foot and gagged, lay Greg and Dan. These two members of Dick & Co. had been overpowered and placed here, but only one look at their faces was needed to show that both still had their fighting blood up. "Now, don't let us hear anything from you boobies," commanded Fred Ripley, "or I'll send a committee out here to attend to you in mighty short order!"
You get them out of the novels you read, or out of the operas we sing. Nonsense that poets write and callow boys swallow like so many boobies and try to transplant into real life! The trouble is we singers are in the secret, and laugh at such bosh. Well, now you know good friends, and the soft pedal on sentiment and drama, eh? In that way we'll get along very well and the house will be yours."
But there were some boobies and bumpkins there, who, by their intense greenness, must have come from the heart and centre of all verdure. Queequeg caught one of these young saplings mimicking him behind his back. I thought the bumpkin's hour of doom was come.
Never did two country boobies play like them; but their figures beggared all description. The fellow near whom I stood was short, thick, and fat, and as round as a ball, with a ruff, and prodigious high crowned hat. Any one, at a moderate distance, would have taken him for the dome of a church, with the steeple on the top of it. I inquired of the host who he was.
We amuse ourselves every morning with looking at the pert little birds, as queer as the boobies, though quite different from them, that sit and nod to each other incessantly, and give each other little hits with their bills, as if these were their morning salutations, a rough way of asking after each other's health. SAN FRANCISCO, July 2, 1865.
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