The Sea Inside

arc in and out of the waves. Their name,
Arctocephalus pusillus
, ‘bear-headed little one’, perpetuates an error, having been first described from an illustration of a pup. In truth they’re the largest of all fur seals, and seem to revel in their status, with their upturned noses and haughty profiles – for all that they are forever picking fights with one another, flashing their eyes and baring their teeth. Were I foolish enough to approach one, I’d soon discover that a fur seal can move fast, even out of the water. Faced with such a situation – so the pages of my field guide tell me – I should maintain eye contact and slowly back off, since bull seals see an upright human as a threat.
    Perhaps they have good memories. In Tasman’s and Cook’s wake came the sealers, supplying the Western world with fur. The elegant ladies and gentlemen who preened themselves on Piccadilly or the Unter den Linden had no idea of the desperation that lay in the sleek pelages which protected their necks on a chilly winter’s afternoon. Nor could they know the nature of the men who peeled the pelts from their still-living owners: lawless men, many of them escaped convicts who kidnapped Aborigine women, keeping them captive as sex slaves on places such as Kangaroo Island.
    Sealing began in Australia in 1798. Such was its ferocity that within thirty years, three species – the New Zealand fur seal, the Australian sea lion and the Southern elephant seal – were all but extinct. Three-quarters of a million animals died, many skinned alive. Only the Australian fur seal remains in Tasmania. As we sail around the cliffs, ledge after ledge is filled with these restive animals, lying belly to belly, disputing the perfect spot. Tim steers the rib into the fractured, barnacled shore. Peering down into the clear water, in the opening and closing gap between rock and boat, I can see huge stems of swaying brown kelp, twenty metres tall, a playground for the seals that anchor themselves to the stems with their surprisingly dexterous hind limbs. We drift dreamily over the thick fronds as though over a gelatinous forest.
    A Shy albatross soars out of the sky – the first I’ve ever seen. No other bird could be so shaped to the sea, ‘a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked, Roman bill sublime’, as Melville wrote when he saw his own first albatross, flying on ‘vast archangel wings as if to embrace some holy ark’. Like any other reader after
The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
, Melville was alerted to the bird’s romance by Coleridge’s poem. But the poet (who called himself a ‘library-cormorant’) drew his story from George Shelvocke’s
A Voyage Round the World by Way of the Great South Sea
, published in 1726.
    Most sailors regarded the sight of an albatross as auspicious. As it ages, the wandering albatross becomes almost entirely white, not unlike the Risso’s dolphin or the beluga whale: a ghostly soul-bird, invested with the spirits of departed sailors or the whiteness that appalled Ishmael. Shelvocke’s second captain, Simon Hatley, saw the black albatross as an evil sign, ‘observing, in one of his melancholy fits, that this bird was always hovering near us, imagin’d, from his colour, that it might be some ill omen’. As Hatley took aim –

    ‘God save thee, ancient Mariner!
    From the fiends, that plague thee thus! –
    Why look’st thou so?’ – With my cross-bow
    I shot the ALBATROSS .

    – his commander looked on in a kind of wonder, as if himself stupefied. ‘That which, I suppose, induced him the more to encourage his superstition, was the continued series of contrary tempestuous winds, which had oppressed us ever since we had got into this sea … [he] shot
the Albitross
, not doubting (perhaps) that we should have a fair wind after it.’
    There’s a fearful symmetry in the fact that albatrosses are now among the most endangered of all seabirds. They may spend a decade in the air never touching land, sleeping on the wing; like whales, they are able to nap with one hemisphere of their brain still active, in what is known, fittingly, as slow-wave sleep. And like the other procellarids, they also have an intense sense of smell. The ocean may seem a featureless expanse to us, but to an albatross it is a vast, multilayered web of odours. They can smell phytoplankton from miles away; and since the plankton’s presence indicates invisible upwellings and seamounts, it not only