The Sea Inside

progress. Perhaps it never ended.
    Every so often rockets fizz into the air. Troupes of children and adults are dancing and singing, each followed by their own brass band. Teenage boys who elsewhere would be embarrassed to take part in such a procession are dressed in satin bows. They and their partners pirouette along the route, dancing down to the square, where, the following day, in the shadow of the basalt-outlined church, tables will be loaded with round loaves of sweet bread, stuck over with flowers and offered up to São Pedro, patron saint of fishermen. For all these joyous celebrations, however, a current of reservation runs through these streets, defined as they are by the sea.
    A few months before that last visit my mother had died. My grief seemed implicit in this place. I felt open to its remoteness and obscurity, its clinker-dark shores which looked as though the whole place had burnt to the ground.
    The mid-Atlantic night is pitch-black and impenetrable. The moonless sky sinks into the sea, allowing the Cory’s shearwaters to sail inland to their nests, feathery ghosts in the darkness. All day they’ve worked the waters, seizing fish and squid from below the waves. But as evening falls, they burst into eerie squeaks –
qwwwaaark—qwakqwak—qwwwaaark
– strangulated, semi-human, half-comical cries constantly reiterated as they soar inshore, each sounding more demonic than the last; little wonder that their calls were once thought to be those of the devil.
    They owe their common name to Charles B. Cory, the nineteenth-century ornithologist and golfer who first described them in 1881, and whose house in Boston was stuffed with nineteen thousand avian specimens; their Latin title is rather more prolix,
Calonectris diomedea borealis
. Shearwaters – which do precisely that – hail from the family of procellarids, after
procella
or storm, the kind of weather they are supposed to favour. It was one reason why sailors were wary of their appearance; another being that they were believed to bear the souls of their drowned comrades.
    Their order includes some of the most romantic birds of the sea: the albatrosses, fulmars, puffins and storm petrels. Like whales, they have evolved mechanisms to cope with an oceanic life: olfactory bulbs in their brains that allow them to smell their food from far away; tubes in their beaks that discharge salt water; and a diet of fish, squid and krill which produces a noisome stomach oil potent enough to dissolve the plumage of any interloper who is on the receiving end of a projectile vomit, although its greatest benefit is as a highly calorific fuel. Procellarids require such energy, since they are the greatest riders of oceanic winds, which echo the currents below. From wandering albatrosses with twelve-foot wingspans to tiny storm petrels barely bigger than a sparrow, they undertake journeys so ambitious that they occasionally get lost and end up in strange locations, such as the back of a whale. Or perhaps not so strange, since their kind have long been called ‘whale birds’ after the way they appear to herald leviathans. Storm petrels will fly downwind of hunting orcas, savouring the fishy grease in their blows. Off Cape Cod, I’ve watched clouds of greater shearwaters over feeding humpbacks, even dipping into the whales’ mouths to pluck out sand eels.
    In the waters off the Azores, whales and dolphins drive to the surface the deep-water prey that the birds cannot ordinarily reach; as the cetaceans round up their bait, the shearwaters dive down to feed on the same source. Sadly, these seabirds suffer from our own hunting habits. Tens of thousands of procellarids die each year snared on longlines, strung out along them like a gamekeeper’s line; some escape only to return to their nests, beaks loaded and pierced with hooks.
    Cory’s shearwaters mate for life, returning to the same site each year to lay a single egg. They regurgitate their day’s catch, supplemented with rich stomach oil, into the mouths of their begging chicks, all under the cover of a dark moon to avoid predatory gulls. With their legs at the back of their bodies, setting their centre of gravity awry like wonky clockwork toys, they are at their most vulnerable on the ground. Yet these islands must suit such precarious lives, since they are home to seventy thousand breeding pairs of shearwaters that gather here from all over the North Atlantic, very noisily. They echo in my ears as I lose