The poet who sang,
'Oh, stormy, stormy peterel!
Thou art a bird of woe,
Yet would I thou could'st tell me half
Of the misery thou dost know!'
has, however, misunderstood the feeling with which that little harbinger is regarded. So have many other persons. The petrel is not a bird of woe, but a bird of warning.
The Virgin Mary—Mater Cara—was the special protectress of the early Christian seamen, just as Amphitrite had been the tutelary genius of his Greek, and Venus of his Roman, progenitors, and just as Isis, the moon goddess, had been the patroness of the Egyptian navigators. The Catholic mariner still believes that the Virgin has especial power over the winds and the sea.
At Marseilles is the shrine of the Nôtre Dame de la Garde, greatly venerated by all the Provençal sailors; at Caen is the shrine of Nôtre Dame de Deliverance; at Havre, that of Nôtre Dame des Neiges. Brand tells, in his book of Antiquities, that on Good Friday Catholic mariners 'cock-bill' their yards in mourning and hang and scourge an effigy of Judas Iscariot. The practice still continues, and as recently as 1881 a London newspaper contained an account of the ceremony performed on board several Portuguese vessels in the London Docks. The proceedings always closed with a Hymn to the Virgin Mary.
In Rome, at the Church of Santa Maria della Navicella, there is a small marble ship which was offered by Pope Leo the Tenth in execution of a vow after his escape from shipwreck. The first thing done by Magellan and his crew after their safe return to Seville was to perform penance barefooted, clad only in their shirts, and bearing lighted tapers in their hands, at the shrine of Our Lady of Victory. And it is related of Columbus, that on safe arrival after a storm at the Azores, 'The Admiral and all the crew, bearing in remembrance the vow which they had made the Thursday before, to go barefooted, and in their shirts, to some church of Our Lady at the first land, were of opinion that they ought to discharge this vow. They accordingly landed, and proceeded, according to their vow, barefooted, and in their shirts, toward the hermitage.'
Countless instances might be cited, but these will suffice to show the estimation in which Mater Cara was held by Catholic seamen.
How it came to be supposed that the smaller Procellariæ are only visible before a storm is not very apparent. In point of fact, there is no more reason for associating the petrel specially with storms than there is for the belief expressed in the old Scotch couplet quoted in the last chapter:
'Seagull, seagull, sit in the sand;
It's never good weather when you're on the land!'
As a matter of fact, seagulls do fly far inland in fine weather, and especially during ploughing-time. And also, as a matter of fact, the petrel lives at sea both in fine weather and foul, because he is uncomfortable on land. It is only the breeding season that he spends on shore; while the seagull is just as much at home on the land as on the sea.