32 THE VOYAGE. 



flesh of this sea-bird. Petrels were ever with us, 

 like flights of martins round the habitations of 

 man ; always on the wing, never resting, or roost- 

 ing either, as far as I could see ; watch them in 

 their easy graceful flight, till the last lingering ray 

 of light sank away beneath the watery horizon ; 

 and, as night wrapped them in her sable mantle, 

 they were still on the wing. Be on deck as the 

 first blush of early dawn crept drowsily over the 

 sleeping sea, and with the rosy light came the 

 petrels, still flying, as they had vanished in the 

 darkness. "We tried to catch them by loosing 

 long threads over the stern, and tangling them, 

 like human spiders; we did trap one, but the 

 sailors were mutinous at such unheard-of bar- 

 barity ; injuring the chickens of ' Mother Carey ' 

 was an offence not to be tolerated, even in a 

 zealous naturalist ; so, at the captain's request, 

 the cotton webs were abandoned. The one taken 

 was the black stormy petrel, Thalassidroma 

 melania (C.Buonaparte) : upper plumage entirely 

 black (as are the wing- coverts), below feluginous ; 

 tail deeply forked, and very short. 



It is a well-marked species, and readily dis- 

 tinguished from all its kindred by the absence 

 of white on the rump and wing-coverts. We 

 caught a huge turtle with a hook and line : a 



