The Rarest of the Rare: Vanishing Animals, Timeless Worlds

  Albatrosses often sail right up to a boat, to feast on cooking scraps or to fish in the freshly churned wake, and sailors welcome them. Of all the birds on earth, albatrosses have enchanted people of all countries through the ages. For one thing, they have colossal wingspans of over thirteen feet and can weigh twenty-five pounds. An eagle or a condor is a runt compared with an albatross. Exquisitely colored, they gleam like satin and are serene, gentle, regal. No wonder they appear in the magic and myth of many countries, as Coleridge knew when he turned one loose in his “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” a poem that has done much to shape the albatross’s image as a bird of ill omen. Coleridge had never actually seen an albatross. In 1797, when he and Wordsworth went on a walking tour of Somerset, they decided to finance the trip by each one writing a narrative poem. But Coleridge fretted over a subject. Wordsworth, a lover of natural history, who had recently read an explorer’s account of sailing through Drake Passage, gave Coleridge the idea for his “Rime.” Baudelaire also wrote about this “monarch of the clouds,” which he saw as a metaphor for the poet, so often clumsy in the pedestrian world, but only because of his powerful, huge wings. In Ida, Gertrude Stein admired the ceremoniousness of albatrosses: “She had once heard that albatrosses which bird She liked the name of always bowed before they did anything.” The Maoris of New Zealand carve albatrosses into the bows of their boats to guarantee a peaceful voyage.

  Albatrosses do nest, preferring out-of-the-way places, but they spend most of their lives on the wing, wandering the world’s oceans. Nomadic, ever-moving, full of the wind’s eloquence and swing, they are creatures bound inextricably to the sea. Amazing as it sounds, they can fly for four or five years without ever returning to land. In low winds, they stretch their wings out full like canvas sails. In high winds, they partly fold their wings and hold them in at an angle to decrease the sail area. Rough weather is an albatross’s delight. It can even catnap while it flies. Because it has a small wind-speed recorder in its bill, it can doze while its brain goes on autopilot; a sudden gust of wind will send a quick signal to draw the wings in or stretch them out. In fact, an albatross has been known to hit the side of a boat while asleep. But when they do return to land, they use its green stage for all it’s worth. Their courtship involves long, elaborate, Oriental-looking dances, full of kissing and caressing and posing like Kabuki dancers, and symphonic mating calls, which echo from the hillsides where they nest. Observers become enchanted with their beauty and their customs. Their Latin names reflect the majesty and romance people have found in them, translating into such marvels as “pale-backed moon goddess.”

  The first published account using the word “albatross” was a collection of letters by Dr. John Fryer, published in 1698, in which he describes a voyage around the Cape of Good Hope, en route from South Africa to the East Indies. He spelled the word “albetross,” as a corruption of the Portuguese word alcatraz, which was used for any large seabird (probably from the Arabic al-ghattas: white-tailed sea eagle). In 1744, when Sir William Halley made a voyage to South Georgia, he wrote of the albatross as the harbinger of the Cape. Because albatrosses like to feed over shallow water where there are upwellings, a gathering of albatrosses may well be the first sign that land is near. So they became important symbols of hope. To sailors, they symbolized something more mythic. Albatrosses, as noted, are habitual ship followers, and there is nothing eerier than standing on the deck of a ship, looking up, and seeing a bird as large as, say, a wandering albatross, with a wingspread of almost fourteen feet, sailing up to you, floating absolutely motionless on outstretched wings, looking down and cocking its head sideways as though it knew you. Superstitious men claimed that albatrosses were the reincarnated spirits of dead sailors who were searching for their friends. Lighter than air, formed of wind and whitecaps combined, they floated like restless transmigrated souls. Nonetheless, sailors have killed albatrosses and found uses for most of their body parts. The oily vomit was used to waterproof boots, the downy breast feathers to make muffs or capes, the sewn-together skins to make feather rugs. Rendered carcasses produced fertilizer and oil. Sailors fashioned tobacco pouches from the webbing of the feet and pipestems from the hollow wing bones.

  Soon the sun slides behind a thick wall of coriander clouds and finds one small hole, where it hangs, a perfect ruby above the horizon, vanishing at last in a shimmying lager of mauve clouds. After sunset, we climb down to the poop deck and crawl into the low-ceilinged cabin, cluttered and dim, which looks like a room that a truculent child has refused to tidy up. Twelve feet long and six feet wide, it is only about three feet high. On a gas hotplate, a green enamel kettle is corralled in stainless steel. Next to it sits a white porcelain rice steamer, under a calendar whose photographs show Japanese fishermen at work. Although this cave is much too small and low to sit up in, all manner of electronic gear is crammed into the space—a VCR, a TV, a weather-fax receiver, navigation screens—and there is even a wooden shrine. Six of us stretch out on blue and green blankets in the hot cabin, which is thick with cigarette and cooking smoke. The sencho passes out bowls of rice, yams, fried tofu, eggs, shrimp, and squid. As the others eat heartily, I get violently seasick into my bowl, turning away into a corner as much as possible. With nothing inside to nourish me for over twenty-four hours, I will have to drink a lot of water when I get to Torishima. But soon it feels good to be so empty, so ready to be nourished again. After dinner, the crew chat quietly among themselves in Japanese, and Peter and I speak in English. Our languages flow with such different tempos and inflections that each drifts easily through the open weave of the other. At times I feel that we are time travelers, stepping between the tick and tock of mere chronicity into a world where we live at last by seasonal time.

  Arranging his shoulders against the wall, Peter tucks a rolled-up jacket beneath his back and tries to find a place for his legs in the jumble of limbs. The sencho passes him a can of beer on whose label a mythical animal prances, half horse, half dragon. In the glow of a single lightbulb, we sit thoughtfully as the tiny fishing boat slides down the ocean’s hills of glass. The sea looms dark as the inside of the earth, no matter which way I look across its flat expanse. There is only our one light burning. We are such fragile entities to be adrift on this vast ocean. I am reminded of the sailor’s prayer: “Protect me, Lord, for the ocean is so large, and my craft is so small.” A hard swell rocks the boat, rolls sleepers into one another, and hurls loose pots and pans from their moorings.

  “Typhoon season,” I say. “Now I understand why they’re called the ‘high’ seas. But I bet you’ve met some wonderful folk on them.”

  Bracing one arm against the ceiling, Peter just keeps from rolling over a sleeping crewmember.

  “You know,” he says, “ocean people are without doubt some of the brightest, funniest, and in some ways saddest characters that you could ever hope to meet. I think the ocean brings out the best or the worst in people, and there are some hilarious times, and there are times, of course, when you’re in peril and so on, but basically speaking, you can have a better time on the ocean than you can ever have on the land. You meet more bizarre people. They have a rhythm of life that is like the ocean. It’s rarely placid—it’s either blowing hard or blowing incredibly hard. There doesn’t seem to be any lull—there is always something going on within their lives, whether they’re fishermen or researchers like myself.

  “Two of the most colorful characters I ever met were people who lived down at Bluff, on South Island in New Zealand. When we traveled around in our Land Rover, we often had to work illegally, without work permits, and it was a question of my knocking on people’s doors and asking for a job. I worked for very low wages, but I hoped to be able to work with seabirds. Money was always a problem. I must have had about two hundred dollars to my name at that stage, and here we were halfway around the world with no jobs, trying to find work in a fishing port. And Bluff is New Zealand’s equivalent, say, of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. There were wonderful
characters. The language was awful. I’ve never heard such language in my life. I’d been going around the three bars in Bluff—all of them what I call spit-and-sawdust places—frequented just by fishermen. So I’d been going around for about three weeks, and I knew that I’d been to all of the skippers, and they’d all said no. They could hear that I was English, and of course that was not necessarily a good thing, because I was not a local. But if I’ve got anything in life it’s perseverance. I went into this bar, which I’d gone into many times over the previous weeks, and I saw two people sitting there who had always impressed me, just because of the disparity between them. There was one chap who was smaller than myself but broader, with a great mop of fair hair, and he was George West. The guy with him was as big as George was small. He must have been about six foot five or six foot six, equally as broad as George, with a great mop of black hair. Both were Maoris. The reason that George was fair was that his father was a Russian sealer who had jumped ship and had married the chief’s daughter.

  “Well, I walked up to them and without being invited sat down next to them. They didn’t even look up. I introduced myself. I said, ‘Since I last saw you I’ve tried every damn fishing vessel in the fleet, and I’m not getting anywhere. I’m not getting any work offers whatsoever. Although I don’t know crayfishing boats, I have worked on trawlers, I’ve filleted fish, and I’m pretty handy on a boat. There’s no way that I can convince you guys of this, but I’m so confident of my ability that I know that if you just take me out for one voyage, you’ll see. Don’t even pay me—but at the end of the voyage, if you think I’m worth anything, let’s sit down and talk about it.’ There was still no response. Big John sort of looked up and took a swig from a glass, which really was a half-pint glass at least a quarter filled with whiskey. They were hard drinkers and hard workers and men of the ocean. And George looked up and he started talking about something completely different. Started talking about the fact that the fish weren’t running, and whether they should try farther south, and I realized that I wasn’t getting anywhere at all. I looked at the bartender and I asked for a glass, and he came and put a glass down which was equal in size to theirs, and George looked up and he said, ‘Do you want a drink?’ And I said, ‘Sure, I would like a drink, but mostly I would like a job.’ George disregarded that remark completely and took hold of the whiskey bottle, which was placed on the table in front of us, and started to pour. Not into my glass, but first into his and then into Big John’s glass, and he paused just long enough to at least have considered not giving me a drink, and then he started to pour. He poured as much into my glass as he had into their two glasses. Then he put the bottle down with rather more of a thump than was necessary, and I rather suspected that we were going to have some bravado in store for us. He picked up his glass and he looked straight into the eyes of Big John—and as I got to know George, I found he had a wicked sense of humor—and he said, ‘Well, let’s hope the next trip is better than the last one.’ He raised his glass and in one movement swallowed a quarter of a pint of whiskey, and then put his glass down on the table. Big John took up his glass and, without so much as a word, raised the glass and tossed his head back and the whiskey was gone. There wasn’t any exclamation, there wasn’t a gulp, it just disappeared, as though he was pouring it down a pipe. My father used to talk in lots of little sayings, and one of his favorites was When you’re with men, act like one. I was only about twenty-seven years old, but I raised my glass, looked both of them in the eye, and said, ’And I hope that I’m with you.’ And I tossed that whiskey back. I have never, ever felt worse in my life than at that point—from embarrassment, from retching. That whiskey hit me and before it was even past my throat my stomach was protesting. It was convulsing, my throat was burning. But I held that glass out, and I could see that they could see that I was shaking. My whole body was shaking, and the glass went down and hit the table and there were tears streaming out of my eyes and I looked both of them in the face, and George looked at Big John with a sideways look and a sheepish grin and he said, ’You know, this bastard is all right. I think we’ll take him.’ The time was just after five in the evening, and I don’t know how long I lasted, but shortly thereafter they took me out and threw me into the back of a pickup as though I was a dead sheep or something, and they drove me out to the campsite, which is where we were living. They knocked on the door of the Land Rover. My wife opened the door and was horrified to see one huge bloke and another man, a dwarf, almost, holding me, who was by this time absolutely unconscious and reeking of whiskey. They threw me in on the floor. George turned to my wife and said, ’Tell that bastard if he sobers up and still wants to go, we’re leaving at six in the morning.’ And that was the start of two and a half of the most wonderful years of my life.

  “It was a wonderful time, being a crayfisherman at Bluff with George and Big John. They used to sit telling stories at the end of every day’s fishing. We would be working about eighty or so miles out of Bluff, off the end of Stewart Island, down south in the fifties. It was cold and there was ice on the rigging. You’d have to spread salt on the decks to keep the decks from freezing up. I was the winch man and the cook and the pot baiter. I’ve always been a reasonably good cook so there was no problem in that, but the other two jobs were very hard, especially handling the winch. We used to work on a crayfishing trawler which was made of quarter-inch steel plate. Must have been about sixty-five to seventy feet long, so it was a fairly big boat. John and George were like chalk and cheese in many ways, but both of them had a very good sense of humor and both of them, I guess because they were Maoris, didn’t think in terms of a Christian God. They were people that lived more by natural signs and a natural way of life. And they both had been working, as their families had before them, on those islands. We were in a place called Big Mogey—and if you can imagine a horseshoe-shaped island and the indentation facing to the east and all the weather coming from the west, you’ll see that we had a wonderful safe anchorage. We were always working between storms, and some of the days were incredibly rough, and waves would be breaking over us as we were on the deck, and there’d be the odd times when you’d be literally wiped off your feet and smashed against the gunwale. On a couple of occasions Big John would pick me up like a terrier, shake me, put me back down on the deck. He was immensely strong.

  “Well, one day we had a warning of bad weather. Now we were always having gales coming through, so people didn’t worry about the normal force-ten gale; we worked in that. But we had warnings over the radio that there was a really big storm coming and that everyone should try to get back to port. Port was about eighty miles away and we realized that we really couldn’t outrun the storm, so all the boats in the area went down to an island called Pukenai, about eighteen miles to the south. There must have been about forty boats all running down to Pukenai. But George wasn’t going to run. As he said, his grandfather hadn’t been, as he called it, ass-holed out of Mogey, and his father hadn’t been, and sure as hell George West wasn’t going to be assholed out just because there was a puff of wind coming. So we stayed put. We dropped anchor and got stern and bow lines out and got everything sort of ready. Then the storm hit and it was absolutely horrendous, so we sheltered in a little bay. The island was all around us on three sides, but we had this window at the back of us, where we could see the storm and the waves going by, wall after wall of water, fifty feet high, wiping the island, ripping up trees that had been on that island for eighty years. As the waves went past, a suction effect started on the back of the island that was incredible. So we were going up and down and the albatrosses were hurled past—royal albatrosses, wandering, black-browed, gray-headed, sooty—it was just fantastic. There were penguins around us, and other birds getting blown all over the place in the gale. It’s really wonderful to see a twelve-foot bird like an albatross picked up and blown around. This storm blew and blew and blew for one entire day. As it started going into the second day, it actually got worse. In storms of from for
ce ten onwards, the water gets lifted up off the surface of the sea. When you look out, it’s almost as though there’s a blizzard. Huge waves are coated in spray and white foam—we call that steaming or smoking. And when the sea is steaming or smoking, then you know you really are into something. We stayed there and kept radio contact with the guys on Pukenai. They were behind a big island, and perfectly safe. George was telling these people down at Pukenai: ‘You chickenshit little assholes’—I apologize for the language, but this is how he used to speak—‘You’re not men. You’re supposed to be men of steel in wooden boats,’ he said. ‘There’s not a man amongst you!’ I knew from the outset that he was openly courting disaster. You cannot make those sorts of comments and get away with it all the time. We got through the second day, and it was on the third day that this storm just sort of settled over the southern end of Stewart Island. It was howling. Whole trees blew right across the sky, and all the water was muddy from the soil that had been torn off the island. It was just incredible. I’ve never seen a storm like it. We were trying to have breakfast and suddenly the boat just twitched slightly to port and George and Big John were up and over the table. And I was left sitting there, thinking, What the hell’s going on? Big John, the engine man, cranked up the engine fast, and as he was cranking it I saw George struggling with the fire ax, which was almost as big as George. He was going out the wheelhouse door with this ax, and I was thinking, What on earth is going on? Of course, I ran out after them. The engine kept missing and wouldn’t start, and George was on the stern of the boat, swinging the ax, cutting through the two-inch-thick mooring ropes. In four or five hits, he took the second stern line out. It was then that I looked around and saw what had happened. One of the bowlines had broken. Both George and Big John were so finely attuned to the boat and the ocean that they knew there was no way we were going to get that line back on again. George then ran up to the bow—we were facing with the stern pointing out towards the sea—and he ran up to the bow and he waited until the engine fired, and as soon as the engine fired, in one sweep he cut the last rope. And we were washed straight out of that little bay. We had no time to warn the guys at Pukenai that we’d been assholed, as George put it. And as soon as we were out, he got on the radio and made contact. It was about seven or eight in the morning, and of course suddenly everyone was tuning in. The seas were absolutely horrific. It took my breath away. The waves were mountains. Sometimes you can be in waves that are fifty to sixty feet high, but they’re long. You might have three hundred yards between them. But these things—it was like being put into a small canyon. The wave crests were only about thirty to fifty yards apart, and they were anything from forty to sixty feet high. The whole sea was smoking. George was radioing, saying, ‘We’ve been assholed.’ And to start with everyone was laughing and calling him names, saying, ‘So you’ve been assholed! We told you, you son of a bitch.’ And then abruptly there was a change. George said, ’We can only do one thing; we’ve got to run with the waves to you.’ And they knew that was about eighteen miles. Suddenly, instead of all the banter and lampooning that was going on, there was a quiet, a lull, a serious concern. They were saying things like ‘Stay in radio contact,’ and ‘If you get in any sort of difficulty we’ve got a boat started up and we’ll try to come out.’ We knew that was impossible, of course. But it was wonderful to be on the bridge and to know that there were about forty ships all tuned in over the radio, listening to our progress. And George gave them one hell of a progress report. He’d be screaming, ‘Here’s another one of these motherfuckers, it’s sixty feet high, it doesn’t scare me. You stupid shit. There’s no God out there, there’s nothing big enough to take my boat. I might have been assholed out of Mogey, but I’m not going down to Davy Jones. I’m not being taken out by Davy Jones.’