62 



By Albatross Mail. 



ture, name and position of ship, etc., and 

 let them go; and a labeled bird might pos- 

 sibly be recaptured in the same way , but 

 if it were too wary to take the hook, it 

 would be only during a calm that a ship's 

 officers would shoot a labeled bird with the 

 object of reading the inscription. Under 

 no other circumstances would the commu- 

 nication be considered of sufficient import- 

 ance to justify the lowering of a boat to 

 recover the body. 



That the dead body of the bird should 

 have been found on the South Australian 

 beach a few weeks after the message was 

 attached to it is little short of miraculous. 



There is scarcely an instance on record 

 of man finding the body of an albatross that 

 had died a natural death. Wild birds always 

 steal away to die in secret, and the albatross, 

 being essentially a water bird, and almost 

 utterly helpless on land, would certainly 

 never go ashore to die. A sick albatross, 

 incapable of maintaining itself on the wing, 

 would alight on the water, on the surface of 

 which it can rest with ease and comfort, 

 and we may be sure that the messenger 

 from the Crozet Islands found dead on 

 the Freemantle beach, was either washed 

 ashore, or had been wounded and fell sud- 

 denly dead while flying along the coast. 



The Crozet Islands are a little group of 

 four or five very small uninhabited islands 

 away south of Madagascar, in fact far south 

 of the usual track of vessels, and are the 

 breeding grounds of albatrosses, penguins, 

 and other sea fowl. As a consequence they 

 afford an abundant supply of food of a sort. 

 The crew of the sealer Strathmore lived a 

 long time on one of these islands, subsist- 

 ing chiefly on penguin flesh and eggs. 

 Efforts have been made to rescue the un- 

 fortunate castaways. The French Minister 

 of Marine at once sent instructions to the 

 commander of the naval division in the 

 Indian Ocean, to despatch the transport 

 Meurthe to the Crozet Islands without de- 

 lay, and to take the unfortunate mariners 



to the Island of Reunion for return to 

 France by steamer. Her Britannic Majes- 

 ty's ship Thalia, on its way from England 

 to Australia, also has orders to touch at the 

 Crozet Islands ; so we may expect soon to 

 hear of the rescue of the shipwrecked mar- 

 iners, and to see the albatross allotted a 

 niche in the Temple of Fame. 



The Crozet Islands are only about two 

 thousand miles from Australia, and as the 

 albatross is capable of flying sixty miles an 

 hour, and probably of sustaining its flight 

 for twelve hours or more, the messenger 

 might have done the distance in three days; 

 but six weeks elapsed between the date of 

 the despatch, and the discovery of the bird's 

 body on the South Australian coast. In 

 that interval he could have gone round by 

 Cape Horn, and circumnavigated the globe 

 in southern latitudes, visiting every whale 

 boat that came within reach of his piercing 

 eye, and all without painful effort. These 

 birds rest on the surface of the water at 

 night, and oftentimes for hours during the 

 day, and many of them must be inevitably 

 swallowed by sharks. 



Since the above was in type, further in- 

 formation has been published to the effect 

 that the French transport Meurthe had 

 touched at the Crozet Islands, in compli- 

 ance with instructions from the French Na- 

 val authorities, and that on the small island 

 of Cochous they found traces of the miss- 

 ing crew, who had left a written statement 

 to the effect that they had been some months 

 on the island, and having two boats with 

 them, would try to make Possession Island, 

 eighty miles distant. The Meurthe called 

 at that island without finding any traces of 

 the crew. At one of the other islands 

 of the group the Meurthe spoke some 

 whalers who had been there some weeks, 

 but they knew nothing of the shipwrecked 

 crew, and for the present it is impossible 

 to determine whether they were lost on the 

 passage from island to island or picked up 

 by some passing whaler. 



