Cat among the pigeons by David Muirhead

Author:David Muirhead
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781775845140
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Published: 2018-06-25T16:00:00+00:00

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ALBATROSS

The albatross was inducted into the realm of the magical and mystical by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His classic poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, tells of a disaster that overtook a ship’s crew when one of them raised his bow and shot a black albatross.

As the bird dies, the wind drops, the sea settles to a dead calm, and the ship then stagnates for many dry days and weeks. In a bid to fend off the inevitable, the superstitious sailors fasten the bird’s carcass around their guilty shipmate’s neck. That doesn’t help, though it’s difficult to understand why any of them could think it might. They all die of thirst, the rotten ship goes down, and only the killer survives, compelled by fate to endlessly repeat his sorry tale to strangers equally compelled to listen.

Coleridge drew inspiration for the poem from the story of Simon Hatley, the sole survivor rescued from the wreck of the Speedwell, a ship that foundered in the southern ocean early in the 17th century. Hatley shot an albatross shortly before the sinking, and presumably blamed this for the subsequent disaster. By an odd twist of literary fate, at some point in his piratical career, Hatley had been a shipmate of William Dapier and Andrew Selkirk, respectively the models for Gulliver (of Gulliver’s Travels) and Robinson Crusoe.

As seafarers in the southern ocean, all three men would have been familiar with the albatross and probably aware of the superstitions surrounding it. The great birds routinely followed sailing ships as they voyaged across the vast and featureless expanses of deep, cold sea. With a background chorus of wind in the rigging, it would have been easy for mariners to imagine that a big white bird circling in the twilight was really the soul of a drowned sailor. It’s little wonder that the netherworld got upset if you killed one.

The real reason for the bird’s close attendance is more prosaic. People on ships, then as now, routinely chuck rubbish overboard, some of it edible. Ships came to exert an even greater fascination for albatrosses, and other seabirds, when large-scale whaling and commercial fishing began in the southern ocean. Over the years and decades, huge quantities of offal were routinely dumped into the sea, and even the mighty wandering albatross was frequently seen venturing close to the southern and eastern shores of South Africa to secure its share of the bounty.

Those days of plenty are long gone, for the birds and for us, but from time to time the smaller albatrosses still hang hopefully above the stern of fishing boats. Many discover that turning up for free meals can prove expensive. Getting hooked on a baited long line is invariably fatal, and the chunkily built black-browed albatross, in particular, is still sometimes deliberately snared, and finds its way into the cooking pots of fishermen.

Scavenging food from the surface of the sea is standard practice for an albatross, especially the wandering albatross which, with a wingspan in excess of 3.

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