When our mariners first landed there, their only difficulty was to pierce through the mass of curious and kindly-natured phocæ which came to gaze upon them. The penguins of Australian lands, the auks and razor-bills of the Arctic shores, peaceable and more active, made no movement. The wild geese, whose fine down, of incomparable softness, furnishes the much-prized eider, readily permitted the spoilers to approach and seize them with their hands.
The attitude of these novel creatures was the cause of pleasant mistakes on the part of our navigators. Those who from afar first saw the islands thronged with penguins, standing upright, in their costume of white and black, imagined them to be bands of children in white aprons! The stiffness of their small arms—one can scarcely call them wings in these rudimentary birds—their awkwardness on land, their difficulty of movement, prove that they belong to the ocean, where they swim with wonderful ease, and which is their natural and legitimate element. One might speak of them as its emancipated eldest sons, as ambitious fishes, candidates for the characters of birds, which had already progressed so far as to transform their fins into scaly pinions. The metamorphosis was not attended with complete success; as birds powerless and clumsy, they remain skilful fishes.
Or again, with their large feet attached so near to the body, with their neck short or poised on a great cylindrical trunk, with their flattened head, one might judge them to be near relations of their neighbours the seals, whose kindly nature they possess, but not their intelligence.
These eldest sons of nature, eye-witnesses of the ancient ages of transformation, appeared like so many strange hieroglyphics to those who first beheld them. With eyes mild, but sad and pale as the face of ocean, they seemed to regard man, the last-born of the planet, from the depths of their antiquity.
Levaillant, not far from the Cape of Good Hope, found them in great numbers on a desert isle where rose the tomb of a poor Danish mariner, a child of the Arctic Pole, whom Fate had led thither to die among the Austral wastes, and between whom and his fatherland the density of the globe intervened. Seals and penguins supplied him with a numerous society; the former prostrate and lying down; the latter standing erect, and mounting guard with dignity around the lonely grave: all melancholy, and responding to the moans of Ocean, which one might have imagined to be the wail of the dead.
Their winter station is the Cape. In that warm African exile they invest themselves with a good and solid coat of fat, which will be very useful defences for them against cold and hunger. When spring returns, a secret voice admonishes them that the tempestuous thaw has broken and rent the sharp crystalline ice; that the blissful Polar Seas, their country and their cradle, their sweet love-Eden, are open and calling upon them. Impatiently they set forth; with rapid wings they oar their way across five or six hundred leagues of sea, without other resting-place than occasional pieces of floating ice may, for a few moments, offer them. They arrive, and all is ready. A summer of thirty days' duration makes them happy.
With a grave happiness. The happiness of discovering a profound tranquillity separates them from the sea where their sole element lies. The season of love and incubation is, therefore, a time of fasting and inquietude. The blue fox, their enemy, chases them into the desert. But union is strength. The mothers all incubate at one and the same time, and the legion of fathers watches around them, prepared to sacrifice themselves in their behalf. Let but the little one be hatched, and the serried ranks conduct it to the sea; it leaps into the waters, and is saved!