Two years later another ship was added to the list of those whose bones rest in the sands of the Frying Pan Shoals. She ran on the outer breaker during the night, and in the morning the keeper saw a floating object on the shore. He went to it and found the body of a man whose peculiar figure he recognized. A life-buoy was strapped about his waist, and in his great crooked fingers was a line. The keeper hauled it in, and on the end of it he found the dead body of the yellow beast that had stolen his fowls. They had gone to their end together.
THE CAPE HORNERS
THE CAPE HORNERS
To the southward of where the backbone of the western hemisphere dips beneath the sea rises a group of ragged, storm-swept crags and peaks,—the wild rocks of the Diego Ramirez. Past them flows the current of the great Antarctic Drift, sweeping from the father of all oceans—the vast South Pacific,—away to the eastward, past the bleak pinnacles of Cape Horn, to disperse itself through the Lemaire Strait and Falkland Channel northward into the Atlantic Ocean.
With the wild snore of the great west wind sounding over them, and the chaotic thunder of the Pacific Ocean falling upon their sides, they are lonely and inhospitable, and are seldom, if ever, visited by man. Only now and then he sees them, when the wind-jammer fighting to go past the last corner gets driven close in to the land of fire. Then, on some bleak and dreary morning, when the west wind is roaring through downhaul and clewline and under the storm topsails, the heavy drift may break away for a few minutes and show the wary navigator a glimpse of the death-trap under his lee that will add a few gray hairs to his head, and bring the watch below tumbling on deck to man the braces.
Bare of vegetation and desolate as they are, the rocks are inhabited. To the leeward of the great Cape Horn sea that crashes upon them, the ledges and shelves are full of life. In the shelter, the strange forms sit and gaze seaward, peering this way and that, squawking and scolding in hoarse voices that might be heard above the surf-thunder. They appear like great geese sitting on their tails, for they sit upright, their feet being placed well down on their long bodies, giving them a grotesque look that is sometimes absurdly human.
They have no wings,—only little rudiments covered with fine hairlike feathers that serve as side fins when swimming. They never flap them, as do their cousins, the Cape pigeons and albatrosses. In fact, their bodies are covered with short, close, hairlike feathers, very minute, seldom wider than a pencil’s point, and lying tight to the skin, like scales on a fish. These figures have birdlike heads, not unlike those of diver-ducks, and they have beautiful black eyes, with red rings around them. They are the creatures that hold sway over the barren crags, waddling and walking about in their absurd way until a great man-seal shows his bristling whiskers close to the ledge. Then they gave forth the loud, long-drawn, wild cry that is so well known to the Cape Horner, waddle to the brink, plunge headlong into the sea, and disappear.
They are the penguins of the southern zone, half bird, half fish, and, one might say, half human, to judge by their upright waddle on their webbed feet.