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 
