Nesting with them, in some of these haunts on the wild west coast of Scotland, is found the stormy-petrel, the tiny bird which sailors, in the old days of sailing-ships, held in such superstitious dread, and which are still called Mother Carey’s chickens. Who Mother Carey was Jack probably did not care, thinking only that she was a personage of very evil intentions towards ships and those “who go down to the sea” in them, and wishing, when he saw the little things running along the waves that held the ship in chase, that she had kept her chickens at home. But wiser bookmen tell us that the name comes from Mater Cara, quoting in proof of it, that the French call the petrels “les oiseaux de Notre Dame,” which may or may not be the explanation—most probably not. For in the same dull way they tell us that Davey Jones’ locker means the locker of the ghost of the prophet Jonas, because West Indian negroes happen to call a ghost “duffy!” All of which reads very much like nonsense, worse nonsense indeed than Jack’s own phrases—which, like all good fairy-tales, have most meaning when they have none at all.
However all this may be, the salts of the past thought the stormy-petrel a bird of ill-omen, and they were not far wrong, for when all the other birds, dreading the coming tempest, had left the ship, the chickens remained.
“Still ran the stormy-petrels on the waves.”
Being alone, they became conspicuous, and though they had been there all along, but unobserved when flying with larger birds, the sailors, noticing them for the first time, thought they had just arrived as heralds of the squall. For no weather, however bad, will drive the petrels to shelter, and so deft are they with wing and foot, that when the seas are driving “mast high” they may be seen paddling and skipping, on tip-toe as it were, over the green curves of the breakers, or running along them sheltered from the gale under their lee. And though it is no larger, this tiny scoffer of the hurricane, than a starling, it is curious to think how many hundreds of brave men have felt a sinking at the heart when they saw the black diminutive bird skimming the furious billows that pursued the vessel. Nowadays, going under steam instead of canvas, the seaman does not trouble
