264 MANX SHEARWATER 
that time is turned into oil ; by reason of the backward 
situation of their legs they sit quite erect. 1 They quit the 
isle the latter of August ox beginning of September; and, 
from accounts lately received from navigators, we have 
reason to imagine, that like the storm finch, they are dis- 
persed over the whole Atlantic ocean.' 2 
Townley, on his arrival in the island, desired to see 
something of the ornithological curiosity of which he had 
heard, and was told at Douglas that for this purpose he 
must go to the Calf. He visited the islet on 11th June 
1789, but does not seem after all to have seen the Shear- 
waters, and adds little to our information concerning them. 
His account of the Calf, however, is interesting. 
'When we had got safely landed ... we ascended a 
very steep hill up towards the herdsman's house ; the only 
one now in the solitary isle ; and that inhabited by only 
one old man and his old wife, each having attained the age 
of seventy and upwards. The old man was gone out upon 
his bird-catching business, but soon returned with his booty 
of eight sea- parrots. . . . Nightly plunderers are the only 
people they have either to fear or guard against. Their 
visits being for the injurious purposes of destroying the 
rabbits and puffins, two main articles of traffic and profit, 
belonging to the island. ... I found myself quite mistaken 
in the opinion I had formed respecting the sterility of the 
1 Evident confusion with Fratercula. 
2 In none of these old accounts is any mention made of the strange nocturnal 
clamour of the Shearwaters. But can Waldron's story (' Description of the Isle of 
Man,' 1731, Manx Soc, vol. xi. p. 67) of the spirit which haunted the coasts have 
originated in this noise, described as infernal by modern writers ? 1 The dis- 
turbed spirit of a person shipwrecked on a rock adjacent to this coast wanders 
about it still, and sometimes makes so terrible a yelling that it is heard at an 
incredible distance. They tell you that houses even shake with it ; and that, not 
only mankind, but all the brute creation within hearing, tremble at the sound. 
But what serves very much to increase the shock is that, whenever it makes this 
extraordinary noise, it is a sure prediction of an approaching storm. ... At 
other times the spirit cries out only, " Hoa, hoa, hoa!" with a voice little, if 
anything, louder than a human one.' 
