down along the Irish coast, and then steamed rapidly away from
Queenstown, the little house on the left of the town gleaming white on
the hillside for many miles astern. In our wake soared and screamed
hundreds of gulls, which had quarrelled and fought over the remnants
of lunch pouring out of the waste pipes as we lay-to in the harbour
entrance; and now they followed us in the expectation of further
spoil. I watched them for a long time and was astonished at the ease
with which they soared and kept up with the ship with hardly a motion
of their wings: picking out a particular gull, I would keep him under
observation for minutes at a time and see no motion of his wings
downwards or upwards to aid his flight. He would tilt all of a piece
to one side or another as the gusts of wind caught him: rigidly
unbendable, as an aeroplane tilts sideways in a puff of wind. And yet
with graceful ease he kept pace with the Titanic forging through the
water at twenty knots: as the wind met him he would rise upwards and
obliquely forwards, and come down slantingly again, his wings curved
in a beautiful arch and his tail feathers outspread as a fan. It was
plain that he was possessed of a secret we are only just beginning to
learn--that of utilizing air-currents as escalators up and down which
he can glide at will with the expenditure of the minimum amount of
energy, or of using them as a ship does when it sails within one or
two points of a head wind. Aviators, of course, are imitating the
gull, and soon perhaps we may see an aeroplane or a glider dipping
gracefully up and down in the face of an opposing wind and all the
time forging ahead across the Atlantic Ocean. The gulls were still
behind us when night fell, and still they screamed and dipped down
into the broad wake of foam which we left behind; but in the morning
they were gone: perhaps they had seen in the night a steamer bound for
their Queenstown home and had escorted her back.