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Updated: June 3, 2025
This sudden robust life, following the routine of our subdued company on its lonely and disappointed vigils in a deserted sea, the cheery men countering and mocking aloud the sly tricks of their erratic craft, a multitude of masts and smoking funnels around us swaying in various arcs against a triumphant sky, the clamorous desperation of clouds of wheeling kittiwakes, herring-gulls, black-backed gulls and gannets, and all in that pour of hard and crystalline northern sunlight, was as though the creative word had been spoken only five minutes before.
We have cleared away all the old eggs from the gannets' nests, and these prolific layers are now supplying us with fresh. Of fish we can catch none, except by trolling. We have no better success with our turtle nets. Wednesday, December 31st.
"When it cannot catch fish for itself, it watches for the gannets and sea-swallows after they have been out fishing all day, and darting down upon them, compels them in their fright to throw some of their prey out of their crops, when it is caught by the plunderer before it reaches the water.
Thousands and thousands of trees covered the valley, each of them about thirty feet high; but every tree was dead, and extended its leafless boughs to another a forest of desolation, as if nature had at some particular moment ceased to vegetate! There was no underwood or grass. On the lowest of the dead boughs, the gannets, and other sea birds, had built their nests in numbers unaccountable.
As we still ascend from shelf to shelf, we find the tenants of the tower serially disposed in order of their magnitude: gannets, black and speckled haglets, jays, sea-hens, sperm-whale-birds, gulls of all varieties: thrones, princedoms, powers, dominating one above another in senatorial array; while, sprinkled over all, like an ever-repeated fly in a great piece of broidery, the stormy petrel or Mother Cary's chicken sounds his continual challenge and alarm.
Our "perch," as really it should be called, was on numerous ledges on the face of a very steep cliff, and it was a lengthy business getting the Battalion arranged with its different companies respectively in their right places; but by 4 A.M. we were all snug like gannets on the Bass Rock, and quite easy in our minds, except for the uncertainty as to whether dawn would discover the place to be under Turkish machine-gun fire.
A raven that lived along the cliffs near Cape Lisburne became tired of the humdrum life he was leading. He had noticed that his friends, the gannets and murres, with many other acquaintances, were in the habit of going on long trips each fall and not returning again until the warmer weather of spring had arrived.
It is to avoid their enemies under water that they take fin and mount into the air; but the old proverb, "out of the frying-pan into the fire," is but too applicable in their case, for in their endeavours to escape from the jaws of dolphins, albicores, bonitos, and other petty tyrants of the sea, they rush into the beaks of gannets, boobies, albatrosses, and other petty tyrants of the sky.
At nine, we were abreast of a point which rises with an easy ascent from the sea to a considerable height: This point, which lies in latitude 37° 43', I named Woody Head. About eleven miles from this Head, in the direction of S.W. 1/2 W. lies a very small island, upon which we saw a great number of gannets, and which we therefore called Gannet Island.
With him I also took my little flock of gannets, who perched themselves round me, gazing about them with an air of such singular stupidity as they were being propelled through the water, that I could not help bursting out laughing. "Indeed," said Mrs Reichardt, "such a boat's crew and such a boat had never been seen in those seas before.
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