never to rest, to hatch its eggs under its wings, and to be incessantly
flying to and fro on the face of the waters on messages of warning to
mariners. Even to this day sailors believe that the albatross, the
aristocratic relative of the petrel, sleeps on the wing; and the power
of the albatross, for good and evil, readers of the Ancient Mariner will
remember. We say for good and evil, because opinion fluctuated. Thus:

'At length did cross an albatross,
Through the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God's name.'

When the mariner with his crossbow did shoot the albatross, the crew
said:

'I had done a hellish thing,
And it would work them woe;
For all averred I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
"Ah, wretch!" said they, "the bird to slay,
That made the breeze to blow!"'

And once more, when the weather cleared, they changed:

'Then all averred I had killed the bird
That brought the fog and mist;
"'Twas right," said they, "such birds to slay,
That bring the fog and mist!"'

Coleridge got his idea from Wordsworth, who got it from a passage in
Shelvocke's voyages, where a long spell of bad weather was attributed to
an albatross following the ship.

The poet who sang,

'Oh, stormy, stormy peterel!
Thou art a bird of woe,
Yet would I thou could'st tell me half
Of the misery thou dost know!'

has, however, misunderstood the feeling with which that little harbinger
is regarded. So have many other persons. The petrel is not a bird of
woe, but a bird of warning.

The Virgin Mary--Mater Cara--was the special protectress of the early
Christian seamen, just as Amphitrite had been the tutelary genius of
his Greek, and Venus of his Roman, progenitors, and just as Isis, the
moon goddess, had been the patroness of the Egyptian navigators. The
Catholic mariner still believes that the Virgin has especial power over
the winds and the sea.

At Marseilles is the shrine of the Notre Dame de la Garde, greatly
venerated by all the Provencal sailors; at Caen is the shrine of Notre
Dame de Deliverance; at Havre, that of Notre Dame des Neiges. Brand
tells, in his book of Antiquities, that on Good Friday Catholic mariners
'cock-bill' their yards in mourning and hang and scourge an effigy of
Judas Iscariot. The practice still continues, and as recently as 1881 a
London newspaper contained an account of the ceremony performed on board
sev