SUCH is the fame of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, that it is almost impossible to say "Albatross" without mentioning Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the same breath and vice versa. The poem was published in 1798, and dates from a successful period of collaboration with William Wordsworth, when both men were in their late 20s. Indeed, it is said to have been Wordsworth who told Coleridge the story on which much of the poem is based - that of the privateer George Shelvocke, who shot an albatross while rounding Cape Horn, and who was subsequently dogged by stormy weather.
The albatross roams the vastness of the mighty southern oceans, and can stay aloft for hours, or even days, while scarcely moving its lengthy, slender wings. It needs wind, however, to support its way of life; its physical structure is ideally suited to "dynamic soaring" in the strong steady breezes of the middle latitudes of the southern hemisphere the so called "roaring forties".
Close to the surface of the water, the roughness of the sea causes dramatic variations in the wind speed; the albatross takes advantage of these variations by gliding down towards the waves at a shallow angle, and then shearing up again, using the turbulent flow to gain airspeed in much the same way as a seagull exploits the updraughts caused by a wind encountering a cliff.
Given this relaxing yet perpetually mobile way of life, people have wondered from time to time how albatrosses sleep. Oliver Goldsmith, for example, answered the question thus: "At night, when they are pressed for slumber, they rise into the clouds as high as they can putting their head under one wing they beat the air with the other, and seem to take their ease." How Goldsmith came to this conclusion, I have no idea, but more reliable observers have noted that the albatross chooses to rest on the ocean during calms, and that in any event, the bird is so aerodynamically efficient that it can afford to nod off while on the wing without catastrophe.
Generations of seafarers in the southern hemisphere have noticed that wherever the albatross may be, the wind is too, so its presence in olden times was taken as an indication of favourable conditions that would speed the sailor on his way. No wonder, then that, when the mariner shot the albatross, his colleagues were annoyed:
And I had done a hellish thing, and it would work `em woe,
For all averr'd, I had kill'd the bird, that made the breeze to blow.