Far out in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, often two thousand miles and more from the nearest land, sails the albatross in its graceful and powerful flight; now following in the wake of the ship, to catch any chance morsel that may have fallen from the cook’s waste-basket; now skimming along the water, and occasionally snapping up some small ocean-waif from the crest of a wave; or with a few vigorous strokes of its broad wings, gliding easily round and round the vessel, though she may be going at the rate of a dozen knots an hour.

No passenger to southern lands can have failed to note the extraordinary powers of flight of this magnificent bird, and the wonderful ease with which it sweeps for some minutes together through the air on expanded motionless pinions, rising and falling slightly, and taking advantage of the gravity of its own body and the angle at which the wind strikes its feathered sails to prolong the course of its flight with the least possible effort. Seldom, except in very calm weather, may it be seen to alight upon the water, from which it rises with difficulty, running for some distance along the surface. The ends of the wings clear of the water, it turns towards the breeze, and rises into the air in a gentle curve, in exactly the same manner as a paper kite. That the albatross follows a ship for many days in succession, sleeping at night upon the water, and coming up with her in the morning, there can be no doubt. We have watched them for several consecutive evenings during fine weather, in the latitude of the trade-winds, settling down on the water at sundown, and preening their feathers, until they became mere specks in the field of the telescope; but they were with us again in the morning soon after sunrise; some strangers among them perhaps, but several which, from some peculiarity of marking, we knew to be our companions of the day before. In one instance, a conspicuous mark had been made by a pistol-bullet in the wing of an old brown-headed and curiously pied bird, by which he could be identified beyond doubt. The second or third flight-feather had been shot away, leaving a clearly defined gap in the wing as it came between the light and the eye; and this bird followed us for three days after having been fired at, though we had been sailing an average of nearly eight knots an hour. One of the most striking examples of their endurance on the wing, however, is the fact, which we have more than once observed, that the same birds which had been unweariedly following us in the day, accompanied us throughout the whole of the succeeding night, as could be easily verified by the light of the moon.

It is a not uncommon practice with passengers to endeavour to catch these noble birds by a bait fastened to a hook and buoyed with corks. That such a cruel practice should ever be tolerated, even ‘to relieve the monotony of the voyage,’ is to us inconceivable, and can only be accounted for as the last resource of a brutally morbid fancy.

The albatross is essentially the scavenger of the ocean, and we doubt whether it makes any attempt to capture living fish unless when very hungry, for we have seen flying-fish rising in quantities while the albatrosses made no attempt to catch them. That the nautilus is sometimes eaten is evident, for we have taken it from the stomach; but the chief food is dead fish and other refuse. In the South Atlantic we passed the dead body of a small whale, on and around which were at least a hundred of these birds, either gorged or gorging themselves with the blubber; and guns discharged at them failed to induce many of them to take wing. We had on one occasion an opportunity of observing how rapidly these birds collect about a carcase. Like vultures or ravens, when an animal dies they discover it very speedily, and flock to the scene of the banquet. On a hot still evening in the South Atlantic a horse died, and when cast overboard next morning, the gases already formed by decomposition enabled it to float. The few albatrosses in our company immediately settled down upon it; but in less than an hour we could see through the telescope a great cloud of the birds on the sea and hovering round the unexpected prize, the almost entire absence of wind having kept us within two or three miles of the spot. It may be that the (usually) white plumage enables stragglers, far out of human ken, to see their fellows gathering in the neighbourhood of food; others again from still more remote distances may see them, and so on; until stragglers over hundreds of miles of space may be gathered to one common rendezvous.

The greater part of the year is passed by them at a distance from land; but they flock to barren and almost inaccessible rocks to breed. There the female lays her one dirty-white egg in a slight depression upon the bare earth, the sitters being frequently so close together that it is difficult to walk without touching them. They are totally indifferent to the presence of man, and merely indicate their resent of his intrusion into their nursery by snapping at him as he passes. The parents share the labour of incubation and rearing the young, and when this is over, they all go seawards together, and silence and solitude once more reign where all had lately been clamorous and busy life.

The range of the albatross is very considerable, and it may be met with to the extreme limits of the temperate zones of both hemispheres, in the South Atlantic and North and South Pacific Oceans, both at sea and near headlands and isolated rocks. During the months of May and June in the northern, and the months of November and December in the southern hemisphere these rocks are tenanted by countless numbers of albatrosses and their smaller brown relations, known to sailors under the name of ‘Mollymawks.’ No one who has visited an albatross nursery will readily forget the scene. Placidly sitting upon the one precious egg is the parent, male or female as the case may be; and as far as the eye can reach over the surface, the rock is crowded with the sitters, indifferent to the presence of the human visitor. They know nothing of man’s destructive nature, and they fear him not. Many of them have never seen that curious biped before, and those which have chanced to see him on his ships and to have suffered from his guns, are more likely to have then regarded him as a part of the white-sailed monster which traversed their ocean domain, than a separate creature; and fail to recognise him as he ‘molests their ancient solitary reign.’

While viewing the interminable white forms thus crouching upon the earth, above wheel in graceful circles hundreds of their mates, sending congratulations in a hoarse piping voice to those beneath on the progress of the all-important business of rearing the family. Here and there sit callow uncouth nestlings; and from seawards come the parents to discharge the contents of their maws into the insatiable stomachs of the expectant young. Now and again one of the ‘bread-winners’ of the family swoops past the observer on its twelve feet of outspread wings, so near that he feels the shock of the divided air, and can realise the immense strength of the muscles which propel the creature, who, however, is a coward in spite of his size; for the skua gull, a bird many times smaller than himself, will often attack him and compel him to disgorge the product of his last foraging expedition.

As soon as the albatross has reared its young, a penguin frequently takes possession of the deserted nest, and in the very cradle of a bird destined to traverse the ocean on unwearied wings lies a nestling whose wings will never develop into anything more than a pair of paddles! Great numbers of albatrosses are caught by the natives of the North Pacific coasts, who use the inflated intestines as floats for their fishing-nets, and barter the hollow wing-bones with traders for the European markets—these bones being familiar to us as pipe-stems. The large webbed feet when inflated make good tobacco-pouches. We have also seen the quills of the flight-feathers converted into floats for roach-fishing; and many a Thames angler patiently watches from his chair in the punt a feather which has probably helped to carry its former owner over the length and breadth of the Pacific.