The habits of the albatross during the breeding season are still partially veiled in mystery, as the desolate mossy headlands of Tristan d'Acunha, Inaccessible Island, and other lands lying far to the southward, where the albatross makes its nest, are visited only at rare intervals. The island of Tristan is circular, and almost entirely volcanic, and on the summit of its cliffs, which rise a thousand feet above the sea, on broad dreary plains of dark gray lava, the albatrosses gather some time during November, and prepare themselves nests. Selecting some space free from tussock-grass, the bird scrapes together a circle of dried grass and clay, in which it lays one egg about the size of a swan's, white, with a band of small brick-red spots round one end. But few naturalists have been able to visit these great breeding warrens, and none have determined how the albatross lives and feeds its young during its absence from the ocean. It is certain that the great bird rarely leaves its nest, for there is a wicked little robber gull ever on the watch to break and eat the egg, should the mother-bird desert it for a moment.
The young, when hatched, are snow-white, and covered with a soft woolly down. A traveller once climbed up the dangerous precipice of Tristan d'Acunha, and saw these young helpless things lying in the nests, while several hundred pair of parent birds were stalking awkwardly about. They all snapped their beaks with a great noise, and ejected from them an offensive oil--their only means of defense. The same traveller visited the place five months later, when he found all the young albatrosses sitting in their nests as before, but the old birds had all disappeared. It is supposed that an albatross must be a year old before it can fly; and as the parents depart some time in April for their ocean hunting grounds, and are never seen to return until the breeding season again comes round, it is astonishing what feeds and supports the young until they are able to hunt for themselves. Naturalists wonder over this point, and advance many different theories, but as yet no facts have been discovered in regard to the diet of the young and helpless bird.
The albatross was formerly regarded with superstitious reverence by sailors, who considered this majestic companion which came around the ship in desolate icy seas as a bird of good omen; and to kill one was considered a crime that would surely be punished by disaster and shipwreck. Coleridge, the English poet, has written a wonderful poem on this superstition, called the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," to which Gustave Doré, a French artist, has drawn a series of illustrations picturing the lonely frozen ocean, and the majestic, lordly albatross which the unhappy sailor shot with his cross-bow, thereby bringing misfortune and death on the goodly ship and its crew.