against the iron-work perilously near him. And still they caught
birds--not, however, without danger to themselves, and not without
numerous losses of birds due to my rifle.

Their procedure was to toss their hooks and bait over the rail from
shelter and slowly to pay the lines out as the slight windage of the
_Elsinore's_ hull, spars, and rigging drifted her through the water. When
a bird was hooked they hauled in the line, still from shelter, till it
was alongside. This was the ticklish moment. The hook, merely a hollow
and acute-angled triangle of sheet-copper floating on a piece of board at
the end of the line, held the bird by pinching its curved beak into the
acute angle. The moment the line slacked the bird was released. So,
when alongside, this was the problem: to lift the bird out of the water,
straight up the side of the ship, without once jamming and easing and
slacking. When they tried to do this from shelter invariably they lost
the bird.

They worked out a method. When the bird was alongside the several men
with revolvers turned loose on me, while one man, overhauling and keeping
the line taut, leaped to the rail and quickly hove the bird up and over
and inboard. I know this long-distance revolver fire seriously bothered
me. One cannot help jumping when death, in the form of a piece of flying
lead, hits the rail beside him, or the mast over his head, or whines away
in a ricochet from the steel shrouds. Nevertheless, I managed with my
rifle to bother the exposed men on the rail to the extent that they lost
one hooked bird out of two. And twenty-six men require a quantity of
albatrosses and mollyhawks every twenty-four hours, while they can fish
only in the daylight.

As the day wore along I improved on my obstructive tactics. When the
_Elsinore_ was up in the eye of the wind, and making sternway, I found
that by putting the wheel sharply over, one way or the other, I could
swing her bow off. Then, when she had paid off till the wind was abeam,
by reversing the wheel hard across to the opposite hard-over I could take
advantage of her momentum away from the wind and work her off squarely
before it. This made all the wood-floated triangles of bird-snares tow
aft along her sides.

The first time I was ready for them. With hooks and sinkers on our own
lines aft, we tossed out, grappled, captured, and broke off nine of their
lines. But the next time, so slow is the movement of so large a shi