Ch. 7

GULLS, SEA-RAVENS, AND ALBATROSSES

I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked Roman bill sublime . . . Through its inexpressible, strange eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God.

Ishmael, “The Whiteness of the Whale”

The Pequod approaches the Cape of Good Hope. Ishmael has established Ahab’s mad mission and constructed the historical, cetological, and oceanographic details to establish the story’s realism. After their first dramatic taste of action fails in a flurry of a squall during “The First Lowering,” trying to kill their first sperm whale, the next close encounters with marine life are of a far different tone. These are with seabirds.

A discussion of birds on the ocean in any Anglophone literature must begin with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798). It’s a poem that’s crucial for Moby-Dick because of its connection to the sailor’s oral tradition and to understand several of Ishmael’s references to the ballad. How we read an environmental message in “The Ancient Mariner” today also aligns and informs how we interpret environmental messages in Moby-Dick.

Coleridge wrote “The Ancient Mariner” in a verse form that evokes the Scottish narrative songs of earlier centuries, the ones passed down in the oral tradition. Coleridge was among a posse of English nature writers that included Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, and Percy and Mary Shelley—the collection of young literary idealists now known as the British Romantics who exulted in the experience of the outdoors and the sublimity of mountains and oceans, while also embracing darker and more spiritual worlds. In many ways, Melville seized the tiller of sea writing from the British Romantics and infused it with marine biology and period nautical realism in order to create a unique style of sea story.1

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is told through the eyes of an unnamed lone survivor of a disaster, an old sailor with “a long grey beard and glittering eye” who accosts the best man on his way into a wedding. The wedding guest is spellbound, forced to sit and listen. The mariner begins his yarn explaining how his ship sailed south all the way to Cape Horn, where among stunning icebergs, the crew is terrified—until:

At length did cross an Albatross,

Through the fog it came;

As if it had been a Christian soul,

We hailed it in God’s name.2

For over a week, the bird follows the ship, which, now with a favorable wind, makes progress through the ice. The mariner is suddenly struck with horror by the memory as he tells the story, startling the wedding guest, who says:

“God save thee, ancient Mariner!

From the fiends, that plague thee thus!—

Why look’st thou so?”—With my crossbow [says the mariner]

I shot the ALBATROSS.

The mariner gives no reason for why he shot the seabird. As the ship sails north toward the equator, the ocean and all its spirits begin to avenge the gratuitous killing. In the doldrums, an area of no wind between the trades, the sailors nearly die of thirst: “Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.” The mariner’s shipmates blame the whole thing on the mariner, hanging the dead bird around his neck. Soon a pair of ghosts cast a spell to convert all the sailors into what we’d now call zombies. The mariner is left to suffer by himself: “Alone, alone, all, all alone/Alone on a wide, wide sea.” He is wretched. He wants to die. He knows he should pray, but he cannot. Finally, after several days, he peers over the rail and sees some water snakes. The mariner is struck with a love and beauty for all living things. Unaware of what he’s doing, he blesses these snakes. This is the climax of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”3

After the blessing of the sea snakes, the dead albatross falls off the mariner’s neck into the water. A set of good spirits takes over and the zombie sailors work the ship as it’s rushed home. Within view of his home port something comes up from beneath the surface and cracks the hull. The ship goes down in a vortex. A couple men in a rowboat rescue him. Then for the rest of his life the Ancient Mariner is doomed to travel the world and find those that need to hear his story.

For good reason did Coleridge spark the disaster in his “Ancient Mariner” with a sailor’s interaction with a seabird. A mariner on open water, in Ahab’s time or today, sees birds more than any other type of animal. Captain Lawrence aboard the Commodore Morris, for example, often wrote about birds. In his logbook in 1849, while southbound to Cape Horn, he wrote: “First part pleasant gales from the NW and fair weather . . . gony[e?]s and speckled haglets [petrels] first made their appearance.” Several weeks later just after making it around the Horn, he wrote: “Thick and foggy . . . at about 10 oclock run into water very green many birds indications of land at no very great distance tacked ship.” Prudent navigators, especially before the age of GPS, used seabirds to help them find their location. They understood which bird species were more coastal and which were more common over water far out to sea. They watched the direction of their flight. Seabirds are regularly found around whales, too, feeding off a carcass or on the same concentrations of plankton and smaller fish that attract the whales. Experienced whalemen and fishermen knew to look for birds on the water as a sign of activity below the surface. At the end of Moby-Dick in “The Chase—First Day,” Tashtego spots a line of seabirds flying toward Ahab’s whaleboat—“their vision was keener than man’s,” warning them that the White Whale is ascending.4

So it makes sense that over the centuries birds at sea have been weighted with meaning by mariners and writers. Ishmael explains how after spending so many months and years alone on blue water, whalemen are the most superstitious of any sailors. Melville was aware, too, of the long-held conceit that birds hold the souls of drowned sailors, a superstition that Coleridge played into as well: “As if it had been a Christian soul,” says the Ancient Mariner. Early in Typee, Melville wrote of a captain who killed seabirds for sport. The sailors were “struck aghast at his impiety” and believed their long passage around Cape Horn was due to “his sacrilegious slaughter of these inoffensive birds.”5

Ishmael speaks generically of “gulls,” “sea-fowls,” and “seabirds” in Moby-Dick. Beyond these, he specifies four distinct seabirds in the novel, using the sailors’ common names: cormorants, which he calls “sea-ravens”; frigatebirds, which he calls the “sky-hawk” or “sea-hawk”; albatrosses, known also as “goneys”; and storm petrels, which Ahab calls “Mother Carey’s chickens.” All of these birds have meaningful cameos in the drama and tone of Moby-Dick. At this point along the path of the Pequod, we’ll discuss the gulls, the sea-ravens, and the albatrosses.

GULLS AND SEA-FOWLS

This might have been an accident, but it’s a lovely bit of accurate ornithology that after comparing the heroic Nantucketer to a “landless gull” and inserting a “screaming gull” as the Pequod left the island, Ishmael does not again refer to seeing gulls specifically while at sea. Gulls (family Laridae) are coastal birds that tend to stay within a dozen or so miles of land. Their populations along the US East Coast are larger today than they were in Melville’s time, due to factors such as the reduction of hunting for eggs and feathers and the increase in human garbage and discards from fishing vessels. In various later scenes in the novel, Ishmael speaks of “white sea-fowls” or “sea-fowls” or just “fowls” on the water, usually involving a dead whale. The birds that Melville would’ve seen in southern latitudes, opportunistically snapping up bits of whale-meat, could be from several families, all in the order Procellariiformes, which are the truly pelagic seabirds, including albatrosses, petrels, shearwaters, and prions—the latter known by sailors at the time as “whale-birds.” Dr. Bennett did some identification of offshore seabirds, but then, as now, offshore ornithology is a difficult field of study because the birds are usually seen far in the distance and their plumages can be so similar and variable, even within species. Melville often dabs generic birds, “sea-fowls,” into his ocean scenes in the way a painter strokes a few v-shapes into a seascape to bring some activity and variety.6

SEA-RAVENS

Melville’s “sea-ravens” set a different mood. These birds have a literary tradition of evoking gloom and death. Melville placed his sea-ravens in “The Spirit-Spout,” immediately before the Pequod’s meeting with the Goney. Just as the departure from port in “The Lee Shore” signals a shift to a deeper, more dangerous story, “The Spirit-Spout” flags that the entire yarn is moving toward a more fantastical and spiritual tone. The sea state is changing. They are leaving the Atlantic. The ghostly white spout lures them ominously in the distance as the ship turns east into rough seas to round the Cape of Good Hope. Evoking Coleridge’s water snakes, Ishmael says: “Strange forms in the water darted hither and thither before us; while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable sea-ravens.”7

I read the black “sea-ravens” as cormorants (Phalacrocorax sp.), a family of dark deep-diving birds found all over the world. (See fig. 20.) In “The Spirit-Spout” they perch in the Pequod’s rigging where they “clung to the hemp.” In Paradise Lost (1667), the epic poem that had great influence on Moby-Dick, John Milton compares Satan to a cormorant sitting, looming, looking down from the limbs of the tree of life, “devising death/To them who liv’d.” The word cormorant likely derives from the Latin corvus marinus, which translates to sea-raven. Their long thin neck over the surface is snakelike. In “The Spirit-Spout” Ishmael describes these dark sea-ravens up in the rigging as the Pequod sails into the black waters off the Cape, “as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had bred.” The Pequod is in tormented seas, “where guilty beings transformed into those fowls and these fish.” What the sailors believe to be the White Whale’s eternal spout is off in the distance, a “snow-white . . . fountain of feathers.”8

ALBATROSSES

In the next scene, in “The Pequod meets the Albatross,” Ishmael moves from this black bird of ill omen, to a white one that is far more famous. A few of Melville’s connections to “The Ancient Mariner” hit you over the head with an oar. The vessel’s name in Moby-Dick, unlike the chapter title, is the Goney—the sailor’s name for the albatross (and today a common name for the smaller, northern albatrosses). This whaleship of “spectral appearance” that approaches the Pequod, the first whaleship with whom they gam at sea, is “bleached like the skeleton of a walrus” and manned by old, forlorn, “long-bearded” sailors at each masthead. The schools of fish that had been following under the hull of the Pequod ominously swim away to the safety of the Goney.

Just as in “The Ancient Mariner,” the narrator of Moby-Dick is a sole survivor, a wanderer, telling his story. Ishmael is also rescued in a rowboat after watching his ship go down. His ship is also split and sunk by an aquatic nonhuman force. All of Ishmael’s shipmates also die, and also, arguably, because of their passive aid in the attack of a single, magnificent animal on the open ocean. In the ballad the Ancient Mariner’s shipmates physically rise up to heaven as angels; in Moby-Dick all Ishmael’s shipmates sink to the bottom of the sea.

Ishmael’s most direct engagement with the albatross and the ballad is in the footnote to “The Whiteness of the Whale,” which sets up this later scene. In the note, Ishmael explains that before this voyage on the Pequod he’d seen an albatross on a ship’s deck. He was on another ship in sub-Antarctic waters when he came up on deck to find an albatross, “a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked, Roman bill sublime.” It was only after that experience, Ishmael says, that he read “Coleridge’s wild Rhyme.” Significantly, Ishmael explains that it was not Coleridge that “first threw that spell; but God’s great, unflattering laureate, Nature.” In the other words, the beauty, the sublimity is intrinsic to the animal. Yet seeing it for himself in life did “burnish a little brighter the noble merit of the poem and the poet.”9 This is exactly what that sperm whale I saw from the royal yard of my first ship, the Concordia, did for me for Moby-Dick.

If Melville saw an albatross for himself in the Southern Ocean, which is almost certain, he observed one of the six species of the wandering albatross group (Diomedea spp.). These are by far the largest of the approximately twenty-one albatross species globally. Albatrosses can live to be sixty years old in the wild. The male wandering or snowy albatross (Diomedea exulans) has been reliably measured to have a wing span of up to 11.5 feet. Ishmael describes in the note that the albatross had “vast archangel wings.” After explaining the emotional effect the bird had on him, he emphasizes the importance of the white plumage, because he had not been as spiritually moved by “grey albatrosses”—which could have been juvenile wandering albatrosses, a few other albatross species, such as the sooty albatross (Phoebetria fusca), or even one of the large petrels.10

William Wordsworth said he originally gave Coleridge the idea for “The Ancient Mariner” after he read George Shelvocke’s A Voyage Round the World by the Way of the Great South Sea (1726), in which a “disconsolate black Albitross” followed their ship off Cape Horn for several days. An officer “imagin’d, from his colour, that it might be some ill omen.” So the officer shot the albatross, hoping the weather would improve. It didn’t.11

In the ballad, Coleridge never actually states the color of the bird, although most readers today imagine a white wandering albatross. Although mostly white, the wandering albatrosses have at least some gray and black on the wings. As they age and molt, albatross plumage grows whiter. Ishmael assumes that the Ancient Mariner’s albatross is a white wandering giant, too. This serves his narrative and metaphoric purposes in Moby-Dick, so it’s not without meaning that in the last scene of the novel Melville placed a black bird going down with the ship as the white whale swims off. If trying to ascribe a feather of realism to Coleridge’s wildly fantastical ballad, it does seem a stretch that the Ancient Mariner not only recovered the bird that he shot, but that the man can walk around the deck for a couple weeks with, hanging from his neck, a decaying wandering albatross with wings nearly as long as a person is tall. Even Nathaniel Hawthorne commented on his surprise as to the bird’s size in relation to the ballad when he was in England and first saw a taxidermed albatross. Then again, after all, it was Coleridge himself who when describing his creation of the poem, coined the phrase “the willing suspension of disbelief.”12

In “The Whiteness of the Whale,” Ishmael continues in the footnote, which is by far the longest note in the novel, explaining that after his fellow whalemen fished up the albatross, the captain tied a note around its neck. “But I doubt not, that leathern tally, meant for man, was taken off in Heaven, when the white fowl flew to join the wing-folding, the invoking, and adoring cherubim!” This was not Melville’s fabrication. Nineteenth-century sailors did indeed catch albatrosses, both before and after the publishing of “The Ancient Mariner.” For example, whaleman-artist John F. Martin, on his third voyage into the Pacific, wrote in 1842 when sailing toward the Cape of Good Hope:

This morning we caught an Albatross with a Dolphin [mahi-mahi] line baited with a piece of fat pork. It was a considerable of job [sic] to haul him on board. We put a leather label around his neck with the Ship’s latitude & longitude, with the number of days from home marked upon it & let him go. He measured upwards of 12 feet from tip to tip. It’s a beautiful sight to see them skimming over the water without apparently moving their wings. In the afternoon the mate shot one in the head. He was brought on board & skinned for next days dinner. They are webbed footed & make very handsome reticules [purses] for Ladies.13

Several other firsthand accounts show that sailors, even in the twentieth century, shot or hooked albatrosses occasionally for food, but more commonly just for the entertainment of hunting and hoisting the birds on board. Few referenced Coleridge’s poem. Albatrosses have a keen sense of smell, allowing them to regularly detect fishy scents or a dead whale from over three miles away, perhaps even much farther. Sailors not only ate the birds, but they made wallets and tobacco pouches from albatross feet, rugs from their pelts, and needle-cases and pipe stems from their beaks. In Omoo, Melville’s sailors use an albatross feather for an enormous mutinous quill.14

Nor was it without precedent that the crew of Ishmael’s merchant ship and John Martin’s whaleship sent an albatross off like a carrier pigeon. In 1847, for example, a captain named Hiram Luther shot an albatross off the coast of Chile. When he pulled it in he found the bird had a vial tied around its neck. It held a note from another captain, who complained in the message, “I have not seen a whale for 4 months.” Based on the position and the date of the note, that albatross had flown over 3,150 nautical miles in twelve days.15

Melville’s fish documents contain regular reference to catching albatrosses in the Southern Ocean. In Two Years before the Mast, Dana wrote of catching a couple albatrosses with a hook, the birds “which had been our companions a great part of the time off the Cape [Horn].” In a revised edition Dana tucked in a reference to Coleridge in this scene, yet with no irony about catching them. Browne wrote that at the latitude of Good Hope they caught an albatross with a twelve-foot wingspan. They set it loose with a note that had the ship’s name and the date. Francis Allyn Olmsted, a naturalist-observer who sailed as a passenger on a whaleship and came home to publish Incidents of a Whaling Voyage in 1841, described catching seven albatrosses off Cape Horn. Olmsted described how the crew ate a “young albatross,” which was likely a smaller species. It tasted like veal, he said, served in an “excellent ‘sea pie’”—although some sailors would not eat it because “this bird has no gizzard.”16

So, some sailors certainly did look to birds as omens and perceive killing or eating certain seabirds as bad luck, but the prevalence of this concern for these animals has been overstated. Albatrosses did not seem to be singled out as all that more significant, and the influence of Coleridge’s ballad to those at sea seems fairly minimal—even among classically educated author-sailors. Albatrosses were, however, recognized for their stunning size and their ability to glide so effortlessly in the heaviest of weathers. Yet some nineteenth-century observers found themselves disappointed when they saw the albatrosses acting like scavengers or when witnessing the birds’ awkwardness while waddling on deck—hence the “goney” name, derived from goon, a fool. Sailors often played cruel tricks on these birds, such as pitting one against the ship’s dog or giving a piece of pork to two albatrosses on either side of a string.17

Today, our first association with albatrosses is usually an image that evokes sympathy bordering on pathos: red plastic gun shells, blue fishing line, and yellow plastic bottle caps are in the nests and stomachs of thousands of these seabirds who have ingested the objects, mistaking them for food and even feeding them to their young. Now about 175 years since Melville stood up at the masthead, the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) Red List classifies three albatross species as critically endangered, six as endangered, and six as officially vulnerable. Like nearly all seabirds, albatrosses are struggling due to habitat loss and a difficulty in raising chicks because of introduced mammals on their island rookeries. Since the 1960s and ’70s, albatrosses are also drowned by the hooks of longlines. Though this problem seems to be improving somewhat due to adjusted fisheries practices and materials, a study in 2013 estimated that at least 100,000 albatrosses had been dying each year due to longline fisheries.18

For my part, I first saw wandering and black-browed albatrosses (Thalassarche melanophrys) off Cape Horn. It was difficult for me to get a sense of their size, even though they occasionally soared quite close to the ship. Nevertheless, I was awestruck. This is a description in Moby-Dick where I do not think Melville went overboard with his extravagance about an animal’s glory. The albatrosses flashed pure white plumage on the underside when they wheeled perpendicular to the sea, like the blades of a modern windmill. I watched them glide astern of our ship, which rolled on towering slate blue swells. The wings of these albatross remained motionless regardless of the cold and wind. No photograph or video I’ve seen has matched the experience. Poetry comes closer.

Recent biophysics research on these enormous birds has only increased their sublimity. Albatrosses evolved specialized tendons to lock their wings in place. Modern racing ocean yachts now have enormously tall and thin sails, like albatross wings. Albatrosses soar and glide by “dynamic soaring,” turning and dropping to use their own momentum and gradients of wind closer to the water, as well as “slope soaring” in which they use slight breezes by skimming just above waves and swells.19

The Ancient Mariner’s final words to his wedding guest are:

He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all.

For twenty-first-century readers, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is a clear appeal to value the rights of animals, or, taken more broadly, to not heedlessly destroy our natural environment. In 1798 Coleridge did not think of himself or his Ancient Mariner as a proto-environmentalist. His mariner preaches about the need to be kind to animals, but more within the thinking of natural theology, rather than twentieth- and twenty-first-century ideas about conservation. The Ancient Mariner’s albatross is an expression, even an agent, of God. The mariner’s arrow at this seabird was a shot at Faith, aimed at His good works. In The Island World of the Pacific (1851), for example, Reverend Henry T. Cheever wrote a lengthy description of albatross, in which he discusses the moral and Christian lessons to be learned from Coleridge’s poem.20 (See fig. 21.)

This doesn’t mean it’s unreasonable to read “The Ancient Mariner” or Moby-Dick as an environmentalist work of literature today. In 2016, scholar Robert Louise Chianese wrote of the guest in the ballad in a way that we might also consider Ishmael: “Apparently he needs time to recover before he resumes his participation in society and its cultural traditions, such as marriage. He may not go off on an expedition to save albatrosses, but he may ask himself if he loves all creatures great and small. Such is the effect of powerful stories of personal transgression and transformation.”21

In 1849 when Melville first left New York on that passage to London before composing Moby-Dick, the day after he climbed up to the masthead to remember the old feelings and the very same day that a passenger jumped overboard to drown himself, he wrote in this extraordinary journal of walking the decks with a new friend named George Adler, an accomplished German linguist and scholar. Melville wrote that night, seemingly encapsulating his own natural theological perspective that he would infuse into Moby-Dick as he diverged from the likes of Agassiz and even Maury: “[Adler’s] philosophy is Colredegian: he accepts the Scriptures as divine, & yet leaves himself free to inquire into Nature. He does not take it, that the Bible is absolutely infallible, & that anything opposed to it in Science must be wrong.”22