"Albatross" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "The albatross—its docility was charming—soon occupied a splendid isolation on the tarpaulined covered hatchway platform.... I shall in future read Keats' 'Ancient Mariner' with an ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 1, 1916 • Various
... loaded, their cartouch boxes were fastened round their waists, and their patoo-patoos were fixed to their wrists. Their hair was tied up in a tight knot at the top of their heads, beautifully ornamented with feathers of the albatross. As the opposite party landed, ours all crouched on the ground, their eyes fixed on their visitors, and perfectly silent. When the debarkation was completed I observed the chief, Ta-ri-ah, put himself at their head, and march towards us with his party formed closely and ...
— A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827 • Augustus Earle
... the forbidden fruit and fell from their glorious estate. Oh, what a fall was there! It was the fall of innocence and purity; it was the fall of happiness into the abyss of woe; it was the fall of life into the arms of death. It was like the fall of the wounded albatross, from the regions of light, into the sea; it was like the fall of a star from heaven to hell. When the jasper gate forever closed behind the guilty pair, and the flaming sword of the Lord mounted guard over ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... put in here to-day with four men picked up from an open boat south of New Guinea, who reported that the Government survey vessel Albatross has run ashore in a storm on Ysabel Island, one of the Solomon group. The crew and passengers, including Dr. Thesiger Smith, the famous geologist, were saved, but the vessel is a complete wreck, and the unfortunate people were compelled to camp on the ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... upon which De Quincey bases his hinted charge against Coleridge in his Lake Poets. It was not Coleridge who had been reading Shelvocke's Voyages, but Wordsworth, and it is quite conceivable, therefore, that the source from which his friend had derived the idea of the killing of the albatross may (if indeed he was informed of it at the time) have escaped his memory twelve years afterwards, when the conversation with De Quincey took place. Hence, in "disowning his obligations to Shelvocke," he may not by any means have ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... see. There, in a space of, perhaps, a thousand yards long and five hundred yards wide, lay, in a perfect oval, a fleet of ships. By all appearances they had no right to be on land. There was no visible evidence that they could rise from the solid earth after once touching it, any more than the albatross can do from a ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... the man at the wheel and the guard at the quarter-railing, he was alone on the deck. A few birds flew round about the vessel, and seemed to pass under her stern windows only to appear again at her bows. A lazy albatross, with the white water flashing from his wings, rose with a dabbling sound to leeward, and in the place where he had been glided the hideous fin of a silently-swimming shark. The seams of the well-scrubbed deck were sticky ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... the evening she smelt the sea to southward and sheered thither like the strong-winged albatross, to circle enormously amid green flats fringed by ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... ornamental plumage to display. Goatsuckers, geese, carrion vultures, and many other birds of plain plumage have been observed to dance, spread their wings or tails, and perform strange love-antics. The courtship of the great albatross, a most unwieldy and dull coloured bird, has been thus described by Professor Moseley: "The male, standing by the female on the nest, raises his wings, spreads his tail and elevates it, throws up his head with the bill in the air, or stretches it straight ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... hung with the works of modern masters; then, through the room filled with specimens of stuffed animals. The lion and the tiger, the vulture of the Alps and the great albatross, looked like living creatures threatening me, in the supernatural light. I entered the third room, devoted to the exhibition of ancient armor, and the weapons of all nations. Here the light rose higher, and, leaving me in darkness ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... an Albatross That fluttered round the Lamp: He looked again, and found it was A Penny Postage-Stamp. "You'd best be getting home," he said: "The nights are ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... where the wide-winged albatross Floats white 'neath the Southern Cross, There came the swift cruisers, And Germans are losers; Australians want ...
— War Rhymes • Abner Cosens
... Russian and German squadrons in the Baltic, between the Island of Oeland and the Courland coast; after a brief engagement the German squadron, outnumbered and outmatched in strength, flees; the German mine layer Albatross is wrecked by Russian gunfire and is beached by her crew; the Russian squadron then sails northward, sighting another German squadron, which is also outmatched in strength; the German ships flee after a thirty-minute fight, a German torpedo boat being damaged; Dutch ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... animals are numerous, but only during the night. Between latitudes 56 and 57 degrees south of Cape Horn, the net was put astern several times; it never, however, brought up anything besides a few of two extremely minute species of Entomostraca. Yet whales and seals, petrels and albatross, are exceedingly abundant throughout this part of the ocean. It has always been a mystery to me on what the albatross, which lives far from the shore, can subsist; I presume that, like the condor, it is able to fast long; and that one good feast on the carcass of a putrid whale lasts for ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... north, the usual point at which gales in these regions begin. During the stormy weather which prevailed throughout the passage, we were unceasingly attended by those majestic birds and monarchs of the ocean—the White Albatross (Diomedia exulans) which with steadily expanded wings sailed gracefully over the surface of the restless main in solemn silence, like spectres of the deep; their calm and easy flight coursing each wave in its hurried career seemed to mock the unsteady ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... western pile to eastern rack; As on from peaks of Pyrenees To Graians; youngness ruled the track. When songful beams were shut in caves, And rainy drapery swept across; When the ranked clouds were downy waves, Breast of swan, eagle, albatross, In ordered lines to screen the blue, Youngest of light was nigh, we knew. The silver finger of it laughed Along the narrow rift: it shot, Slew the huge gloom with golden shaft, Then haled on high the volumed blot, To build ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... organs; that is, by extracting the oxygen from the atmosphere as well as from the water in which it is dissolved. They pass a great part of their life in the air; but if they escape from the sea to avoid the voracity of the Dorado, they meet in the air the Frigate-bird, the Albatross, and others, which seize them in their flight. Thus, on the banks of the Orinoco, herds of the Cabiai, which rush from the water to escape the crocodile, become the prey of the jaguar, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... of Port Hudson by Admiral Farragut, on the night of the 14th of March, 1863, out of a fleet of eight vessels which attempted to run the batteries, only the two foremost ones, the "Hartford" and the "Albatross," succeeded in doing so. The "Hartford" was a regular steam sloop-of-war, which the admiral had chosen for his flag-ship; while the "Albatross" was a rather small propeller which had been purchased by the navy department, officered, ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... an Albatross, Thorough the Fog it came; And an it were a Christian Soul, We hail'd it ...
— Lyrical Ballads 1798 • Wordsworth and Coleridge
... he had visited; but whether his travels had been those of a mercantile sea-captain or of a wandering gentleman of leisure would have been hard to determine. There was a neat walnut bookcase with well-filled shelves, on the top of which stood a large glass case containing a huge stuffed albatross, and just opposite was a small but exquisitely-carved Venetian cabinet adorned with grotesque heads of men and animals, and surmounted by a small square case in which was a beautifully-mounted specimen of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... The second boche was still much farther off than his mate. By this time I had gotten to 2,200, the boche was almost up to me and taking a diagonal course right in front. He started to circle and his gunner—it was a biplane, probably an Albatross, although the mist was too thick and dark for me to see much but the bare outline of his dirty, dark green body, with white and black crosses—opened fire before I did and his first volley did some damage. One bullet cut the ...
— Flying for France • James R. McConnell
... plains, covered with hard stringy mosses, and I shall take away curious mineralogical and geological specimens with me. I have gone sealing, and taken sea-calves with your people. I have visited the rookeries where the penguin and the albatross live together in good fellowship, and that was well worth my while. You have given me now and again a dish of petrel, seasoned by your own hand, and very acceptable when one has a fine healthy appetite. I have found ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... and tells how the ship sailed forth gayly, and how it met after a time with storms, and cold, and fog, until at last it was all beset with ice. Then when to the sailors all hope seemed lost, an albatross came sailing through the fog. With joy they hailed it, the only living thing in that wilderness of ice. They fed it ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... searched with glasses for signs of habitations. So desolate, however, appeared the country, and so few the signs of life, that, as a diversion, the men cheered whenever an occasional school of porpoises or a solitary albatross came more closely under view. Cape Guardafui was passed soon after lunch, and the following evening the ship stopped her engines for half an hour in order to exchange messages with Aden, which was dimly visible through the thick bluish ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... In command is Prof. Leslie A. Lee, of the Biological Department of Bowdoin. With a life-long experience in all branches of natural history, the experience which a year in charge of the scientific staff of the U.S. Fish Commission Steamer "Albatross" in a voyage from Washington around Cape Horn to Alaska, and an intimate connection with the Commission of many year's standing, and the training that scholarly habits, platform lecturing and collegic instruction ...
— Bowdoin Boys in Labrador • Jonathan Prince (Jr.) Cilley
... condition of the adjacent land, it could hardly be a matter of surprise that all the sea-birds, the albatross, the gull, the sea-mew, sought continual refuge on the schooner; day and night they perched fearlessly upon the yards, the report of a gun failing to dislodge them, and when food of any sort was thrown upon the deck, they ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... for Mary that southern constellations, snowy, white-winged albatross, leaping flying-fish, and white-capped mountain-coast, had been joined in her mind with something higher, deeper, and less personal, or their recurrence would have brought her nothing but pain unmitigated in the contrast with ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the epochs in its growth are finely treated by Coleridge in "The Ancient Mariner" and by Tennyson in "In Memoriam." The Ancient Mariner felt only selfish affection. He had no love for "being as being." He killed the albatross with as little heed as he disregarded his fellow-men; but the ministries of his misery were multiplied until, at length, he was able to see something beautiful even in the writhing green sea-serpents that followed the ship ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... PICKING ONE "OFF THE TAIL" The German Albatross airplane going down in flames was in pursuit of the light British "Quick" machine seen on the left, when suddenly a British Nieuport (at the right) dived through the clouds. The Albatross nose-dived, the British following with his guns working, ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... enough, for half the magic of our Flying Corps was its freedom from advertisement. But the British Army knew all about him, and the men in the trenches used to discuss him as if he were a crack football-player. There was a very big German airman called Lensch, one of the Albatross heroes, who about the end of August claimed to have destroyed thirty-two Allied machines. Peter had then only seventeen planes to his credit, but he was rapidly increasing his score. Lensch was a mighty man of valour and a good sportsman after his fashion. He was ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... better winds. What a dreary outlook it was! Nothing but sky and water with waves which were mountains high. The only bit of life outside of our ship's company was a number of birds of a different nature from any I had ever seen and they followed the ship day after day. Cape pigeons and albatross were in large numbers. We caught many of the latter and measured them. I remember one weighing thirty pounds and measuring fifteen feet from tip to tip of the wings. Cape hens about as large as good sized turkeys, ice birds, and many other small birds. I enjoyed ...
— Cape Cod and All the Pilgrim Land, June 1922, Volume 6, Number 4 • Various
... the moonbeam, The albatross lone on the spray, Alone know the tears wept in vain for the ...
— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous
... own country hasn't enough combat planes to send out a patrol. They are developing some mystery motor, I hear, but I'm not very keen about trying out any mystery motors. Our Camels are mystery enough to suit me. When I'm up against the ceiling with a fast flying Albatross or tri-plane Fokker on my tail, I don't want any mysteries to handle. No, Red, for the time being I guess I'm satisfied. Besides, they might chuck me in the infantry, and I have a horror of having things drop on me from overhead. Let's to bed, old topper, so we can hop off early in the morning. ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... the unhealthy region, we climbed to a less dangerous height. Again we became the target for a few dozen H.E. shells. We broke away and swooped downward. Some little distance ahead, and not far below, was a group of five Albatross two-seaters. V. pointed our machine at them, in the ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... him. Your ship broke in half in the storm. The Doctor had tied you down when he found you stunned. And the part you were on got separated and floated away. Golly, it was a storm! One has to be a gull or an albatross to stand that sort of weather. I had been watching for the Doctor for three weeks, from a cliff-top; but last night I had to take refuge in a cave to keep my tail-feathers from blowing out. As soon as I found the Doctor, ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... plot between the churchyard and the house. It was a lovely still summer evening, and I stayed out, climbing among the chairs and sofas. Falling on a large bone or skull, I asked what it was. Part of an albatross, auntie told me. 'What is an albatross?' I asked, and then she described to me this great bird nearly as big as a house, that you saw out miles away from any land, sleeping above the vast and desolate ocean. She told me that the Ancient Mariner was all about one; and quoted with ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... propitious to the formation either of close friendships or of deadly enmities as an Indiaman. There are very few people who do not find a voyage which lasts several months insupportably dull. Anything is welcome which may break that long monotony, a sail, a shark, an albatross, a man overboard. Most passengers find some resource in eating twice as many meals as on land. But the great devices for killing the time are quarrelling and flirting. The facilities for both these exciting pursuits ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... why so named Waterhouse Isle Discover Port Dalrymple Account of the country within it Natural productions Animals Sagacity and numbers of the black swan Inhabitants; inferior to those of the continent Range of the thermometer Pass Table Cape Circular head Three Hummock Island Albatross Island Hunter's Isles Proceed to the ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... nor did I wholly without dread approach near enough to ascertain that the man-eater had already met his own death from some fisherman in the bay. In the same ramble I encountered a bird—a large gray bird—but whether a loon or a wild goose or the identical albatross of the Ancient Mariner was beyond my ornithology to decide. It reposed so naturally on a bed of dry seaweed, with its head beside its wing, that I almost fancied it alive, and trod softly lest it should suddenly ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in the face of science; for Wordsworth's knowledge is a mystic insight wholly estranged from erudition; his celandine, his White Doe, belong to no fauna or flora. When Leconte de Lisle, on the other hand, paints the albatross of the southern sea or the condor of the Andes, the eye of a passionate explorer and observer has gone to the making of their exotic sublimity. The strange regions of humanity, too, newly disclosed by comparative religion and ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... MARINER, A., traveler, albatross raiser. Gathered fame by making a voyage with some dead ones. His feat has frequently been duplicated on liners out of ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous
... in 1942 was one of the turning points of World War II. The islands continued to serve as a naval station until closed in 1993. Today the islands are a National Wildlife Refuge and are the site of the world's largest Laysan albatross colony. Palmyra Atoll: The Kingdom of Hawaii claimed the atoll in 1862, and the US included it among the Hawaiian Islands when it annexed the archipelago in 1898. The Hawaii Statehood Act of 1959 did not include Palmyra Atoll, which ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... very much to the west. We have had all sorts of weather—some beautiful, some very rough, but always contrary winds—and got within 200 miles of the coast of South America. We now have a milder breeze from the SOFT N.E., after a BITTER S.W., with Cape pigeons and mollymawks (a small albatross), not to compare with our gulls. We had private theatricals last night—ill acted, but beautifully got up as far as the sailors were concerned. I did not act, as I did not feel well enough, but I put ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... figure, we have the vultures that soar above, performing the part of predatory sea-gulls; the eagle representing the rarer frigate-bird, or albatross. ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... little to say about his mysterious companion in the air. He thought it was a "French laddie." Nor had he any story to tell about the driving down of the baron's machine. He could only say that he "kent" the baron and had met his Albatross before. He called him the "Croon Prince" because the black crosses painted on his wings were of a more ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... to his head and he was seeing red. He raised himself upon his elbows and stared at the owl which stared back from red rimmed eyes, cold, emotionless, implacable. He had been terribly shaken, and now a superstitious fright overcame him. The raven and the albatross were in his mind and he murmured under his breath passages from their ominous poems. The scholar had his raven, the mariner had his albatross and now he alone in the forest had his owl, to his mind the most ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... in the stormy gale. The lordly and graceful Albatross, whose motion is a very melody, swept screaming by upon the blast. The smaller Cape pigeons followed us fast, passing and repassing across the vessel's track. At last one of them spies a fragment on ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... baited hook which we floated astern upon a shingle. Their long, flapping wings, long legs, and large, staring eyes, give them a very peculiar appearance. They look well on the wing; but one of the finest sights that I have ever seen was an albatross asleep upon the water, during a calm, off Cape Horn, when a heavy sea was running. There being no breeze, the surface of the water was unbroken, but a long, heavy swell was rolling, and we saw the fellow, all white, directly ahead of us, asleep upon the waves, ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... kilometres within German-held territory. The cable ran to the outskirts of a village situated on a railroad and a small stream. The location of enemy aviation fields was also shown pictorially, each one represented by a minute sketch, very carefully made, of an Albatross biplane. We noticed that there were several aerodromes not far distant from ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... who gazes with royal disdain down over the spray, who wonders why the breakers have been there for thousands of years pounding against gates that never open, who soars at this moment with outspread wings over Cape Horn—who but the albatross, the largest of all storm birds, the boldest and most unwearied of all the winged inhabitants ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... themselves, with our River their home, which gave Poplar's name, wherever they went, a ring on the counter like a sound guinea, at the most they are now but planks bearded with sea grass, lost in ocean currents, sighted only by the albatross. ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... but nobody imagined it was merely a sort of backwater from the Gulf Stream that formed a great circular mill-race around the cone of a subterranean volcano, and rejoined the Gulf Stream off Cape Albatross. But it is! That is why papa bought a yacht three years ago and sailed about for two years so mysteriously. Oh, I did want to ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... winding to the Green Sea beach. Around its base the bare rocks stood Like naked giants, in the flood As if to guard the Gulf across; While on its peak that braved the sky A ruined Temple towered so high That oft the sleeping albatross[225] Struck the wild ruins with her wing, And from her cloud-rockt slumbering Started—to find man's dwelling there In her own silent fields of air! Beneath, terrific caverns gave Dark welcome to each stormy wave That dasht like midnight revellers ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... to the ship on the following morning, a large albatross alighted on the water close to the boat. As we passed it, it made several futile attempts to rise again on the wing. It is well known that this bird cannot fly while under the influence of fear, and so it appeared in this instance, for, while we ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... for escape from this palace of his desires, when one morning, just as one venerable mandarin was saying to another, in their usual edifying style of conversation, "Pelican of the Morning, before the magic charm of thy lofty countenance I am spell-bound, like an albatross bewildered amid the flapping sails of a mighty—" down burst the door with a crash, and a lion rushed roaring in among them. What a scrambling there was of the long-flowered dresses! What a tumbling, a flying, ...
— The Magician's Show Box and Other Stories • Lydia Maria Child
... for the rest of his days. Be assured that he understood very well the cash value of his old uniform. If he had a peg-leg or an empty sleeve, so much the more impudently could he pass around his property cap. For forty years, he and his mendicant band have been a cursed albatross hung around the necks of their honest fellows. Able-bodied men, they have lolled back and eaten up millions of dollars, belonging to a State which they pretend to love and which, as they well know, has needed ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... Coleridge. For the crime of having shot an albatross (a bird of good omen to seamen) terrible sufferings are visited upon him, which are finally remitted through his repentance; but he is doomed to wander over the earth and repeat his story to others as a ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... his vague glances, luminous as that of an albatross, hovered for a long time over the sea, interrogating space, seeking to pierce ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... an albatross perched on his shoulder, and who might be introduced to the congregation as the immediate organ ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... of all birds dares to enter a white torrent. And though strictly terrestrial in structure, no other is so inseparably related to water, not even the duck, or the bold ocean albatross, or the stormy-petrel. For ducks go ashore as soon as they finish feeding in undisturbed places, and very often make long flights over land from lake to lake or field to field. The same is true of most other aquatic birds. But the Ouzel, born on the brink of a stream, or on a snag or boulder ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... everything else, and thought always of my welfare first and seemed content to wait so long as I thought best. My business expanded. I was sought after and consulted and drawn into the higher life of New York, and more and more felt that the woman was an albatross on my neck. I put her off with one excuse after another. Finally she began to suspect me and demanded that I should recognize her as my wife. I attempted to point out the difficulties. She met them all by saying that we should both go to Spain, there I could marry her and we could ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... deputation of Falmouth Whigs, headed by their Mayor, came on board to wish Macaulay his health in India and a happy return to England, nothing occurred that broke the monotony of an easy and rapid voyage. "The catching of a shark; the shooting of an albatross; a sailor tumbling down the hatchway and breaking his head; a cadet getting drunk and swearing at the captain," are incidents to which not even the highest literary power can impart the charm of novelty in the eyes of the readers of a seafaring nation. The company on the ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... Of all birds the albatross is the most skillful in the art of sailing in the air. It is a large sea-bird, about the size of a swan, and has very long and powerful wings. It lives far out upon the open ocean, hundreds of miles from land, and spends ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... been shed over the graves of many exemplary Christians than those that sprinkled the turf under the birch-trees where Gelert was sleeping. It could not free the Ancient Mariner from the remorse that clung to him like a poisoned garment till it made him a "world's wonder," because, when he shot the albatross, he thought he was benefiting his fellows. Not less accusingly did the voices of the sea wail in the ears of the desolate Viking, because, when the bitter arrow went aside, he was fighting hard to save Oriana. Nothing could be more ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... much amused by the manoeuvres and appearance of these strange birds. They seemed to be of different species, for some had crests on their heads while others had none, and while some were about the size of a goose, others appeared nearly as large as a swan. We also saw a huge albatross soaring above the heads of the penguins. It was followed and surrounded by numerous flocks of sea-gulls. Having approached to within a few yards of the island, which was a low rock, with no other vegetation on it than a few bushes, we lay on our oars and gazed at the birds with surprise and ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... way! Part of the left hand plane had broken loose. Drunkenly, whirling head over like an albatross shot ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... Like the albatross and the tropic-bird, forever on the wing, For them nor night nor breaking morn may peace nor shelter bring. All drooping from the weary cruise or shattered from the fight, No dear home-haven opes to them ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... servant, had the fire replenished, opened his desk and began to write letters. First he resigned the presidency of the Hasheesh Club. Next he begged that Mrs. Rear-Admiral Albatross would excuse him from her Christmas dinner. Unforeseen circumstances, and the death of an intimate friend, were his apologies. Then he sent his regrets, and declined all the invitations to holiday parties. He canceled ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... thicket of masts on the river. But in the prints to be There will be lake boats, With port holes, funnels, rows of decks, Huddled like swans by the docks, Under the shadows of cliffs of brick. And who will know from the prints to be, When the Albatross and the Golden Eagle, The flying craft which shall carry the vision Of impatient lovers wounded by Spring To the shaded rivers of Michigan, That it was the Missouri, the Iowa, And the City of Benton Harbor Which lay huddled ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... were annexed to Great Britain in 1867 and added to Cape Colony in 1874. Seal Island and Penguin Island are in the bay; Ichaboe, Mercury, and Hollam's Bird islands are to the north; Halifax, Long, Possession, Albatross, Pomona, Plumpudding, and Roastbeef islands are to the south. On these islands are guano deposits; the most valuable is ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... stranger among the fellow-beings he had come to meet. He found himself still a Selkirk of the world of trade and traffic and transfer of thought and well-wishing and strong-doing and of all social life. He was like a strange bird, like an albatross blown into unaccustomed seas, alighting upon an island where albatrosses ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... the albatross sails proudly on his broad wings, and cares nothing for high winds or storms. He rests and sleeps on the billows at night with his little companions, the stormy petrels. He is the largest and strongest of ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... was hove down in a blow off the Horn an albatross came aboard. You know what they be—the one bird in all the seven seas that don't us'ally need a dry spot for the sole of his foot. If Noah had sent out one from the ark he'd never have come back with any sprig of promise for the land-hungry ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... to live far from dry land. Even Seals, though some of them make remarkable migrations, remain habitually near the shore. Whales alone are specially modified so as to make the wide ocean their home. Of birds the greatest wanderer is the Albatross, which has such powers of flight that it is said even to sleep ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... chaperon, Charlotte, because in my hour of need I simply fastened myself to you like a limpet, or an albatross, or a barnacle, or any other form of nautical vampire that you prefer. Still, I might as well confess that I cabled to Duke, or wirelessed, or did something awfully expensive of that sort at St. Thomas while you were having ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... borrow, and so gracefully I'll wear Two feathers soft and snowy, for my long, black, lustrous hair. Of the albatross's down they'll be — O, how charming they'll look there — All to chase away this feeling — O, this ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... whirlpools, in a land of moors where no stranger came, unless it should be a sportsman to shoot grouse or an antiquary to decipher runes, the presence of these small pedestrians struck the mind as though a bird-of-paradise had risen from the heather or an albatross come fishing in the bay of Wick. They were as strange to their surroundings as my lordly evangelist or the old Spanish grandee ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... did cross an Albatross, Thorough the fog it came; As if it had been a Christian soul, We hailed it ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... private garden. I saw a crab in one of them; five-fingers too. From the edge of the rocks, you may look off into deep, deep water, even at low tide. Among the rocks, I found a great bird, whether a wild-goose, a loon, or an albatross, I scarcely know. It was in such a position that I almost fancied it might be asleep, and therefore drew near softly, lest it should take flight; but it was dead, and stirred not when I touched it. ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to sunset the gloom quickly deepened. The sun sank early into banks of leaden clouds, and the Karluk slid on through the seething seas in a scene of strange loneliness, save for the suspended albatross that never varied its position by an inch or by a flirt of ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... little Sol didn't know. Then little Jacob said "Huh!" So they went to ask Mr. Steele or Captain Solomon. Captain Solomon was standing right behind them, and he was smiling because he had heard what the boys said. And he said that the bird was an albatross, and that little Jacob was pretty nearly right about the length of its wings. Little Sol was taken down a peg ...
— The Sandman: His Sea Stories • William J. Hopkins
... with a stout heart and a steady arm, when—don't be afraid—a Catamaran caught me! If you haven't fainted (bless those pretty eyes of your's, my Emmy!) read on; and you will find that this alarming sort of animal is neither an albatross nor an alligator, but simply—a life-boat with a Triton in the stern. Yes, God's messenger of life to me and happiness to you, my girl, came in the shape of a kindly, chattering, blue-skinned, human creature, who dragged me ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... squally, moist weather. Our course was then directed for Cape Leeuwin, with the wind usually a-beam; the sea being too high for the ship to make good way any nearer. In this passage we were accompanied by several petrels, and amongst them by the albatross, the first of which had been seen in the latitude ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... There is a path on the sea's azure floor,— No keel has ever ploughed that path before; The halcyons{1} brood around the foamless isles; The treacherous ocean has forsworn its wiles; The merry mariners are bold and free: Say, my heart's sister, wilt thou sail with me? Our bark is as an albatross whose nest Is a far Eden of the purple east; And we between her wings will sit, while Night And Day and Storm and Calm pursue their flight, Our ministers, along the boundless sea, Treading each other's heels, unheededly. It is an isle under ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... essence. He himself is, or has been, all that he truly and touchingly, i.e., poetically, describes. Wordsworth, indeed, never carried a pedlar's pack, nor did Byron ever command a pirate ship, or Coleridge shoot an albatross; but there were times and moods in which their thoughts intently realised, and identified themselves with the reflective wanderer, the impetuous Corsair, and the ancient mariner. They felt their feelings, thought their thoughts, burned with their passions, dreamed ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... yet subdued and musical laughter, which told that Alma had flown straight at some luckless quarry. She held in one hand a cluster of crimson anemones, and purple stars of periwinkle, and walking between two English gentlemen, whose yacht, the "Albatross", lay anchored close to the "Cleopatra" in the harbor below, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... localities for that precious fluid older than Adam yet younger than the morning dew. Sometimes, indeed, the inhabitants can swallow a shower when they are provided with any means of catching it; but generally they are like the albatross-haunted sailors in Coleridge's famous poem "The ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... when the coming race was announced. The racecourse was so constructed that the larger birds stood upon one side, and the smaller birds and animals upon the other. This was so arranged, chiefly at the request of a deputy of frogs, because, at a mass meeting once, an albatross had eaten twenty-seven of these animals in a fit of absent-mindedness, as he said. Still the frogs desired to prevent the recurrence of ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... a few books on Antarctic exploration, a copy of Browning and one of "The Ancient Mariner." On reading the latter, we sympathized with him and wondered what he had done with the albatross; it would have made a very welcome addition ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... of aerial flotation as if it were of the nature of a miracle—something not to be explained. Explanations which have been advanced have, it is true, been in many cases altogether untenable. For instance, some have asserted that the albatross, the condor, and other birds which float for a long time without moving their wings—and that, too, in some cases, at great heights above the sea-level, where the air is very thin—are supported by some gas within the hollow parts of their bones, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... like a rifle bullet in at one porthole and out at another as the fishes ran; how to dance on the top of the waves when the lightning was racing all over the sky, and wave his flipper politely to the stumpy-tailed Albatross and the Man-of-war Hawk as they went down the wind; how to jump three or four feet clear of the water like a dolphin, flippers close to the side and tail curved; to leave the flying fish alone because they are all bony; to take the shoulder-piece out of a cod at full speed ten fathoms deep, ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... ate his allowance on the following day with as good an appetite as usual. I measured a very large male condor, and the width from the tip of one wing to the tip of the other was fourteen English feet and two inches—an enormous expanse of wing, not equalled by any other bird except the white albatross. (Diomedea exulans, Linn.). The snipes (Scolopax frenata, Ill.) found on the little plain between the bay and the light-house are in color precisely like those of Europe, from which, however, they differ in ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... bald, swelling sea and empearled sky, darkening in lagoons of azure down to the soft mountainous masses of white vapour lying like the coast of a continent on the larboard horizon. But one living thing there was besides myself: a grey-breasted albatross, of a princely width of pinion. I had not observed it till the hull went down, and then, lifting my eyes with involuntary sympathy in the direction pointed to by the upraised arms of the sailor, I observed the great royal bird hanging like a shape of marble directly over the frothing ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... laid them under any sort of obligation, individually or collectively, and no reception could have seemed more special and dangerously cordial, yet no anxieties oppressed, no fears distracted him. The weight of excessive eligibility suddenly slipped off him, like the albatross from the neck of the Ancient Mariner, leaving him a thankful and a happy man, and in a week he had established himself firmly at the Bascombes', declined to accompany his uncle to Virginia, and definitely settled ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... we were in lat. 26 deg. 44' S., long. 103 deg. 50' E. I managed to go to the deck-house to-day for lunch, and remained on deck a little afterwards. Just before sunset we saw several sea-birds, and a splendid albatross with a magnificent spread of wing. It was wonderful to watch its quick turns and graceful skimming flight, so swift, and yet with hardly any ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... of sorrow are cries that seem cruel too: the screams of seabirds, gannets, gulls, and the wide-winged albatross, that have been long hovering above the Calypso, as if knowing her to be doomed, and hoping to find a feast among the floating remnants of ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... lying-to in heavy weather, save the motor and strain on the forebody. Will not send to leeward. "Albatross" wind-hovers, rigid-ribbed; ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... Mr. Murray, the treacherous owner of the ill-fated "Albatross," for Captain Deering, it should be borne in mind, was ignorant of the wretched man's ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... the side of the sidewalk, and the man guiding it motioned to Hopkins to jump into it. He did so without slackening his speed, and fell into the turkey-red upholstered seat beside the chauffeur. The big machine, with a diminuendo cough, flew away like an albatross down the avenue into which ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... know it, and wheeling albatross, Where the lone wave fills with fire beneath the Southern Cross. What is the Flag of England? Ye have but my reefs to dare, Ye have but my seas to furrow. Go forth, for ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... fishing was allowed—a fact of which he was evidently aware. These fellows are proverbially stupid, and will go at a bait again and again, even though they must know it to be a lure. Only once, too, did we catch an albatross, the bird of the Southern Ocean. That was by a line baited with a small piece of pork. This was fastened to a round ring of iron, in which the hooked beak of the bird caught, and so it was dragged on board. The captain knocked it on the head, and it was then cut up. ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton
... bind the spirit down; It is a thing as free As the albatross-bird that wings Its wild course o'er the sea. Go, bind the lightning, guide the sun, Chain comets, if you can; But seek not with thy puny strength To bind the soul of man. Though all the powers of earth combine, And all their strength ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... Ligeia! My beautiful one! Whose harshest idea Will to melody run, O! is it thy will On the breezes to toss? Or, capriciously still, Like the lone Albatross, Incumbent on night (As she on the air) To keep watch with delight On ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... ancient Mariner! From the fiends, that plague thee thus! Why look'st thou so?"—"With my cross-bow I shot the Albatross!" ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... swayed up to their cranes—the two parts of the wrecked boat having been previously secured by her—and then hoisting everything to her side, and stacking her canvas high up, and sideways outstretching it with stun-sails, like the double-jointed wings of an albatross; the Pequod bore down in the leeward wake of Moby Dick. At the well known, methodic intervals, the whale's glittering spout was regularly announced from the manned mast-heads; and when he would be reported as just gone down, ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... were Prince Henry's gentlemen, And though our flagship lie Where white the great-winged albatross Came wheeling down the sky, Or black abysses yawned for us, We could ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... winds so cherished by the hearts of mariners. We sailed many leagues south of the Cape of Good Hope and much too far away even to catch a glimpse of it, but we realized its proximity by the presence of the Cape pigeons which hovered around our vessel. The albatross was also our daily visitor and one or two of them were caught by the sailors, regardless of the superstition of possible calamity attending such an act. Our only stop during the long voyage was at the Moluccas or Spice Islands, in the Malay Peninsula, and was made at the request of the passengers ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... his wife was hatching an egg, and he kept comparatively near the island where her nest was situated. There was only one egg, but parental affection is not influenced by numbers. There is always love enough for the largest family, and everything that could be desired in an only child, and Mother Albatross was as proud as if she had been a hen sitting on ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... they knocked down another bird, and in the evening they got two more. The day after that they captured an albatross, which furnished them at last with an ample supply of ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... the Ancient Mariner sell his albatross and take a nice little trip around the world on the proceeds? Mother would die of a broken heart if I mentioned it to her. The Marsh family have been the slaves of that vineyard since the first mistaken ancestor went into the grape business. We've fertilised ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... a bird in the air Despot man doth dare! His humbling cumbersome body at length Light as the lark upsprings, Buoyed by tamed explosive strength And steel-ribbed albatross wings!" ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the glassy surface of the water; but there was still light enough reflected from the sky to have enabled us to see any object within sight almost as distinctly as in broad day, but not an object of any description could we see, not even a solitary albatross. ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... who lent a regrettably Pagan element to the assembly. But Lady ASTOR as CORNELIA, mother of the GRACCHI, was an austere and dignified figure in her panniered Botticelli stola, with pearl-embroidered red wings, and a flabellum (or fan) of albatross feathers with gold bells attached. The grandeur that was Rome, again, was revived in Mr. JOHN, who assumed the role of his namesake, AUGUSTUS, and in Mr. BOTTOMLEY, who as HORATIUS FLACCUS imparted a Sabine simplicity ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 5, 1920 • Various
... the Fuegians, the abundance of whales, which had never before been disturbed, the immense flocks of albatross and petrels, did not change his resolve. Cape Horn was rounded more easily than could have been expected. Upon the 9th of February the expedition was in the Straits of Magellan, and upon the 24th anchor was cast in Concepcion ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... albatross was seen in 31 1/4 degrees South and was flying about the brig at the same time with a tropic bird, which is a remarkable occurrence, for I never saw the latter bird before so far without the tropic; but here was ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... of all sorts of sailor-superstitions. He hates to take a ship out of port on a Friday, and wouldn't kill an albatross for anything." ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... little tossing among the huge waves that came rolling from the south-west, threatening to engulf the ship, but only dived beneath it, raising it upon a rolling bill, and then gliding onward to give room to the next. Nic saw the albatross till he was tired of watching its gliding flight. He fished and had very bad fortune, but better when he joined in with the sailors, who good-humouredly made room for him to help haul after they had hooked a shark, drawn the fierce fellow alongside, sent ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... and I lie under the awning by the engine-room door, lazily reading "Faust." There is a speck on the sky-line—the mail boat, bringing a letter from my friend. I look round at the translucent opal of the bay, the glittering white of the surf on the reef, the downward swoop on an albatross, and I listen to the dull roar of the breakers, to the solemn tang-tang of the bell-buoy on the bar, and the complaisant "ah-ha-a-a" of some argumentative penguin. Even the drab-coloured African hills in the ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... sailed in the year 1820 in a three-masted ship, the Albatross, for the South Sea, in pursuit of the spermaceti whale. When nearly under the Line, west of Washington's Island, they perceived a whale of an extraordinary size. The boats were all immediately lowered, and, ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... experimenters already noted, by some years, was Le Bris, a French sea captain, who appears to have required only a thorough scientific training to have rendered him of equal moment in the history of gliding flight with Lilienthal himself. Le Bris, it appears, watched the albatross and deduced, from the manner in which it supported itself in the air, that plane surfaces could be constructed and arranged to support a man in like manner. Octave Chanute, himself a leading exponent of gliding, gives the best description of Le Bris's experiments ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... suspense they saw the fragile creation of cloth and bamboo and metal, which had seemed as secure as an albatross riding on the lap of a steady wind, dip far over, careen back in the other direction, and then the whirring noise that had grown with its flight ceased. It was no longer a thing of winged life, defying the law of gravity, but ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... lateen spread both her great wings like an albatross, and leaped and plunged, and ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... am but an indifferent draughtsman, and I suspect that when the precise thought that I have in mind can best be expressed by a portrait of a humming-bird, or a flamingo, my readers because of my inexpert handling of my tools would hardly be able to distinguish the creature I should limn from an albatross, a red-head duck, or a June-Bug, which would lead to a great deal of obscurity, and in some cases might cause me to say things that I should not care to be held responsible for. There is left me then only a choice between English and Esperanto, and I incline ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... upstairs into a storeroom, and was there for half an hour in the cold. The book was left open when she went away, and Tom looked at it. It was a collection of poems by all kinds of people, and the one over which she had been poring was about a man who had shot an albatross. Tom studied it, but could make nothing of it, and yet this was what had so much interested her! "O God!" he said to himself passionately, "if I could, if I did but know! She cares not a pin for me; this is what she ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... possible that Coleridge may have seen this apologue when he wrote his "Ancient Mariner," and introduced a similar incident of the albatross?] ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... the creases of the canvas, are a handspike, a pair of boat oars, and an axe. Nothing more is perceptible of the raft, even to the keen eye of the albatross. ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... have borne my thirteen stone weight. Perchance the giant wings of the Albatross would have been more practicable, if less poetical, and with these appendages I might have been tempted to have a peep at my friends in England, despite the supremely ridiculous figure I should have cut in the ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... many fail; The low dwarfed by the shadows of the great, The stronger basking in the genial sun. Observe the myriad fishes of the seas— The mammoths and the minnows of the deep. Behold the eagle and the little wren, The condor on his cliff, the pigeon-hawk, The teal, the coot, the broad-winged albatross. Turn to the beasts in forest and in field— The lion, the lynx, the mammoth and the mouse, The sheep, the goat, the bullock and the horse, The fierce gorillas and the chattering apes— Progenitors and prototypes of man. Not only differences in genera find, But ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... he could endure anything, and certainly did not expose others more than he did himself. We saw numerous sea birds—albatrosses, Cape pigeons, stormy-petrels (or Mother Carey's chickens, as they are called), and many more. The albatross appeared to me a truly noble bird when on the wing; no matter how rough the weather or how heavy the sea, he sat on the water perfectly at ease, seeming to defy ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... never lost its charm to him, notwithstanding the rude hardships. He wished to make all kind of inquiries into natural history, and when the weather fell calm he would go off in a boat and shoot sea birds. Not the airy albatross, perhaps, for in it he realised the melody of motion, and it was not rare to naturalists. To shoot, from ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... of the water the birds were flying in large flocks, like thick clouds big with a storm. Aquatic birds of all sorts were there, from the albatross which is common to the south, to the penguin of the arctic seas, but of enormous size. Their cries were deafening. In considering them the doctor found his knowledge of natural history too scanty; many of ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... strangely restless as they neared their goal. He had come thousands of miles and had seen nothing fresh with the exception of a few flying-fish, an albatross, and a whale blowing in the distance. Pacing the deck late one night with Captain Brisket he expressed mild yearnings ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... the shores of the different islands, had an appearance of volcanic origin, though the rocks themselves told a somewhat different story. The last was principally of trap formation. Cape pigeons, gulls, petrels, and albatross were wheeling about in the air, while the rollers that still came in on this noble sea-wall were really terrific. Distant thunder wants the hollow, bellowing sound that these waves made when brought in contact with the shores. Roswell ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... lead to the killing of the albatross; those that lead from the killing of the albatross to the blessing of the water snakes; and those that lead from this ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... lightened, they did not require to be worked at all; but the greatest dread we laboured under was from the dangerous condition of the main and fore masts, that tottered to and fro, threatening to go by the board every minute. Before the hour of sunset, a large bird, called the albatross, with wings the length of four to five feet each, skimmed along the surface of the waves, close to and around us; this inspired the crew with hopes, as they supposed it to be a good omen. It remained hovering near our unfortunate wreck for some minutes, until ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 275, September 29, 1827 • Various
... they do the business for which scavengers are employed. Vultures are very greedy and ravenous; they will often eat so much that they are not able to move or fly, but sit quite stupidly and insensible. One of them will often, at a single meal, devour the entire body of an albatross (bones and all), which is a bird nearly as large as the vulture itself. They will smell a dead carcass at a very great distance, and will soon surround and ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... fulcrum, by means of which they present their bodies and outstretched wings and tails at various angles to the wind, and literally sail. How often, when becalmed on southern seas, when not a breath of air was stirring and the sails idly flapped against the mast, have I seen the albatross, the petrel, and the Cape-pigeon resting on the water, or rising with difficulty, and only by the constant motion of their long wings able to fly at all. But when a breeze sprang up they were all life and motion, wheeling in graceful circles, ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... ALBATROSS, the largest and strongest of sea-birds, that ranges over the southern seas, often seen far from land; it is a superstition among sailors that it is ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Marsden, in his notes to his translation of Marco Polo's Voyages, supposes the roc to be a description of the albatross or condor, under ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Anonymous
... Great albatross now began to wheel round the vessel and the sailors caught some of the monster white and gray birds with long strings to which they had attached bits of bread and other bait. These were flung out into the air and the greedy creatures, making ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton |
