404 The Frigate Bird 



gelder, secure in his knowledge of what Yates had 

 written of those snakes, and calm in his faith in the 

 great authority, proceeds to examine the snake alive. 

 He is bitten and dies, but with his latest breath he 

 moans : ' Yates haf lied in brint.' Very sad, but quite 

 understandable. A new series of books will presently 

 deal with facts of natural history, wherein shall not 

 appear one single statement based upon the wild 

 romancings of the ancient naturalists, but all verified 

 by personal observation, with the names of the authors 

 given for easy reference. 



Not that, except in the interests of truth, it matters 

 very much whether one speaks of the Man-of-War 

 Bird as subsisting on the wing through life and floating 

 calmly over hundreds of leagues of ocean remote from 

 land, or whether he be compared with the condor 

 of the Andes for power of vision and spread of wing, 

 or any other tale that might occur to so essentially 

 fanciful a raconteur as the romantic Michelet. Only 

 if we are to have facts, let them be facts ; if fiction, 

 let us understand and enjoy it as such. The Frigate 

 Bird is wonderful enough to excite all our admiration, 

 without one scrap of fiction being tacked on to him, 

 elegant and withal rapacious enough to be called 

 the eagle of the sea, although his size is so small that 

 hawk would be the better synonym. In common 

 with multitudes of other sailors, I have had many 

 ample opportunities of being quite familiar with 

 the Frigate Bird, and in what I have to say about 

 him I shall only state that which I know from personal 

 observation. 



I first knew the Frigate Bird in the West Indies, 

 afterwards about Ascension, and after that again 

 all over the Gulf of Mexico and around its sandy 

 bays. And as I read Michelet's effusion after I had 



