The Home Run 



a very calm day. They kept their distance, never boarding the 

 vessel as did most of the other species, even skuas and the occas- 

 ional gannet. But Jan w^as surprised. He had thought them almost 

 incapable of flying as high as the mast-top. He learned that, among 

 sea-birds, they were probably unequalled in their powers of sus- 

 tained flight over distances that might exceed a thousand miles in 

 a single journey. But the fulmar was not a fair-weather bird. It 

 delighted in storms. It played games with hurricanes. It loathed 

 a calm. Sometimes Jan imagined he saw it smirking as it lay back 

 luxuriously on the crest of a twenty foot wave, the foam curdling 

 about it as gently as down in a duck's nest, while he and all his 

 shipmates were praying that the deck planking would hold such a 

 vicious weight of water. And its flight too, that did look cumber- 

 some in an inshore calm, became smooth and fast and almost 

 effortless. A slight hitch in the angle of the right wing carried the 

 bird a mile to starboard where a swerving hunch of the shoulders 

 pivoted it upwards and brought it dashing backwards high over 

 the wheelhouse of the ship. Gradually he came to understand why 

 the Iceland fishermen had given this ghost-grey bird the status of 

 a goddess. There was nothing anywhere in the sea to impress men 

 with such stability and permanence, not even the rocks of the 

 Faroe coast. 



The only other petrel that he really got to know was the small- 

 est bird of the oceans and one of the most audacious. Veering in 

 the wind like a black snowflake, the storm petrel would sweep in 

 from nowhere, and not a sign of land within five hundred miles, 

 and then it would rise on the back of the gale to disappear, a 

 diminishing dot that vanished altogether long before it reached the 

 horizon. Sometimes one of these small birds would break a wing 

 as it was flung by the wind against part of the superstructure of the 

 ship and then the fishermen would tend it with more patience than 

 they would have devoted to an injured comrade : for they admired 

 the courage of this sea sparrow that dared to make journeys few 

 men would have undertaken, not even in a luxurious air-liner. 

 But their attentions were always wasted. The bird invariably died 



