But if leaving the cabinet we visit Nature herself, penetrate into the heart of the forests, climb the rocks, or visit the shores and the ocean, then our admiration grows stronger and more deep.
Of all birds there is none which exercises a greater influence over the mind of man, or causes greater astonishment, than the albatross, so celebrated by voyagers from the earliest times. The albatross! The word recalls to the navigator a thousand souvenirs; as the name of some bloody battle in which he has taken part, or of some general who has led him to victory, awakens those of the soldier. It recalls to the memory of the sailor the principal incidents of an existence passed between calm and tempest; he feels himself transported in thought to the time when the first albatross was signalled, and passengers and sailors turned their gaze eagerly towards the spot where, like a proud man of war, cradled by the rolling waves, advanced the powerful sailer against whom the storm rages in vain, and who, far from avoiding, seems to court it.
To this first souvenir succeed many others; there is the dead calm, which in the tropics has often detained his vessel inactive for weeks, as though chained under the burning sky, where the eye seeks in vain for a cloud, and the only sound that meets the ear is the heavy flapping of the sails against the masts as the ship rocks; a calm often more to be feared and more dangerous than the most terrible tempest, for it renders the crew inactive, impatient, and bad-tempered. But the first sight of the albatross indicates a coming change and wind to be expected. There is also the memory of painful and too sudden transitions from equatorial heat to the cold of high latitudes; that also of hours of dreadful anxiety when the storm broke out in all its violence, of the contest between winds and waves, and of the albatross hovering over the latter, as though chosen an umpire between these two formidable antagonists. The albatross inhabits the southern hemisphere of the Atlantic Ocean from the 25° or 26° of latitude, also both Pacifics, but is rarely seen farther north, and has never been known beyond the tropics; it is in the seas which bathe the three southern capes that they are seen in the greatest numbers.