This is a chapter of changes, the reader may say. From the dreary scene I have just tried—in all too feeble language—to describe, wafted on the wings of a favourable breeze, the Gloaming Star sailed northward and west, and ere many weeks had elapsed the good ship was once more sailing over summer seas, with the dangers they had escaped in the Antarctic regions dwelling in their minds only like dreams of yesterday.
Ah! but soft, sweet, and balmy was the breeze that now filled the sails, and wondrous were the curious creatures they saw day after day. Some may think that when a ship is far away at sea, with no land nor sail in sight, there can be little to look at and admire. But there is, for nature is everywhere in this bright world of ours, and real solitude nowhere.
Not a day now passed without strange birds coming about the ship. Sometimes these were evidently winged wanderers from some far-off land, that had been blown to sea by a gale, for they were sadly tired, and looked woebegone as they alighted on the yards. Others were curious, dark birds of the swallow tribe. They alighted on the ship quite as a matter of business, and chirped little songs to the crew as they perched aloft, as if thankful and joyous because of the rest. Then away they went again, south or north as the case might be.
There were Cape pigeons, and great cormorants, and wild gannet-like birds, that it was pleasant to watch as they descended from the clouds, swift almost as a thunderbolt, and disappeared beneath the waves, presently, perhaps, to emerge with their prey. Then there were fulmar petrels, that went darting about the waves, and were said by the sailors to catch the flying-fish, and to forebode the coming of storms, the lovely, pearly-white bird, which once seen can never be forgotten, the molly hawk, and the great dusky albatross itself, of which—built upon the superstition of sailors—Coleridge writes so charming a tale, and which the ancient mariner shot so cruelly, causing such dire and terrible sorrow to the vessel and all on board; albeit, it had brought them the best of good fortune, for it saved them from the ice, and—
“A good south wind sprung up behind,
The albatross did follow.
And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariner’s hollo!
“In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
It perched for vespers nine,
Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,
Glimmered the white moonshine.”
The albatross is a stately and noble bird, and the stretch of its wings has been known to be fully twelve feet from tip to tip. The creature, they tell me, will devour the dead, but never touch a living man.
The fish and marine monsters they saw on this sunny voyage were sometimes most lovely, sometimes hideous in the extreme. Giant rays, the skins of which would have been big enough to have carpeted a schoolroom; great whales and sharks innumerable,—the blue shark, the white shark, and the large basking shark, which really seems to go asleep on the warm surface of the water.
Land ho! was the hail from the masthead one beautiful morning, and they had all been so long at sea that they certainly were not sorry to hear it.
But what land was it? And could they find water, fruit, and fresh provisions on it?