Between Humboldt’s Current of Peru and the great equatorial flow, there
is “a desolate region,” rarely visited by the whale, either sperm or
right. Formerly this part of the ocean was seldom whitened by the sails
of a ship, or enlivened by the presence of man. Neither the industrial
pursuits of the sea nor the highways of commerce called him into it.
Now and then a roving cruiser or an enterprising whalesman passed that
way; but to all else it was an unfrequented part of the ocean, and so
remained until the gold-fields of Australia and the guano islands of
Peru made it a thoroughfare. All vessels bound from Australia to South
America now pass through it; and in the journals of some of them it
is described as a region almost void of the signs of life in both sea
and air. In the South-Pacific Ocean especially, where there is such a
wide expanse of water, sea-birds often exhibit a companionship with a
vessel, and will follow and keep company with it through storm and calm
for weeks together. Even the albatross and Cape pigeon, that delight
in the stormy regions of Cape Horn and the inhospitable climates of
the Antarctic regions, not unfrequently accompany vessels into the
perpetual summer of the tropics. The sea-birds that join the ship as
she clears Australia will, it is said, follow her to this region, and
then disappear. Even the chirp of the stormy petrel ceases to be heard
here, and the sea itself is said to be singularly barren of “moving
creatures that have life.”