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?
Book 3--CHAPTER FOUR.