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Paper short abstract

Albatross were important for twentieth-century seafarers, whose ideas about sailing tradition gave them a protected status and viewed killing or eating them as potentially disastrous. This divergence from archived practice marks a collective reimagining of the birds and the seas they inhabited.

Paper long abstract

Aboard Euro-American sailing ships in the first half of the twentieth century that made the long transits from North Atlantic or Pacific ports around Cape Horn to Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand and back, seafarers often saw themselves as taking part in an enduring tradition of seafaring that was in the process of dying out. The passage around Cape Horn and its surrounding latitudes formed an especially significant part of the journey for seafarers, one that was marked by both frequent high winds and high seas, as well as the persistent presence of the albatross. These large birds, which can circle above the waters with seeming endlessness, occupied a protected place: killing or eating them could prove disastrous to the ship and the crew who worked aboard.

In shipboard archival records from previous centuries—especially ship’s logs and journals kept by seafarers and passengers—ships sailing through these latitudes gave no special protection to albatross. They were caught and released, but also killed and sometimes eaten, especially when crews had no access to fresh stores of meat. Rather than see this as an error, a lack of knowledge about the recorded history of which twentieth-century seafarers saw themselves as a final part, this paper argues that this can be viewed as a communal reimagining of that history in a way that sacralizes the oceanic environment further, propelled by the power of the albatross itself and the particular regions of the ocean which it inhabits.