The albatross is an actual family of sea birds. They have the largest wingspan of any living bird, reaching up to 12 feet in width, which allows them to fly for 10,000 miles over open ocean without landing. The albatross is a symbol of the Cape Horner's Association (people who have sailed around Cape Horn).
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| Association of Cape Horner's Flag |
They appear largely in the mythology of Pacific peoples, but this episode is in conversation with stories from western traditions, most specifically the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
In the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, there's a guy on his way to a wedding, which is about to start. The bride has arrived and the band is playing and he's anxious to get inside and watch this wedding. But he's stopped by an old mariner who sets him down on a rock and tells him a story and the story is so captivating and the ancient mariner's eyes are so wild that the wedding guest can't leave. In the story, the mariner set out on a ship headed south, when all of a sudden there was a storm that blew them to Antarctica, where they were surrounded and trapped by ice. An albatross appeared, flew over the ice, and guided them back to the open sea through a fog while a south wind picked up. The sailors where cheering and crying, when all of a sudden, the mariner shoots the albatross. At first, he's wracked with guilt and all his friends are like, "How dare you kill the bird that lead us out of the ice and brought this wind that's bringing us home!" But when the fog clears and the wind keeps up, they say, "Maybe the bird actually brought that fog, and it's a good thing you shot it." But, as soon as they decide this, the wind dies and the ship is stuck for days and days in the middle of the ocean, where they see slimy monsters rise up out of the water and the water burns green and they think spirits are following them. This is where the line "Water, water, every where, /Nor any drop to drink" comes from. Everyone agrees it's the spirit of the albatross that did this to them, and they hang the albatross' corpse around the mariner's neck as punishment. The mariner sees a ship approaching and assumes they're saved. (There's a wild bit here where the mariner's lips are so parched that he can't speak to draw attention to the ship, so he bites his own arm, and drinks his own blood so he can shout out.) But as the ship approaches, it's a ghost ship, and aboard it is Death and Night-mare Life-In-Death, and they play dice and Night-mare Life-In-Death wins, and everyone aboard the mariner's ship except the mariner fall down dead, their souls making the same noise as the mariner's crossbow when they leave. The mariner is stuck alone on the ship for a week, unable to die. Finally, he notices the slimy things in the water are alive, he blesses them and feels love in his heart, and the albatross falls off his neck. It rains and then a wind picks up, and when the moon rises that night, all the undead sailors stand up and sail the boat. They all lie down again when the sun comes up, and the wind disappears, but the ship keeps moving because a spirit under the ship is moving it. Eventually, he comes within sight of land, and a luminous seraph (an angel) appears over each corpse and waves at the lighthouse until a boat comes out. When it gets close to the ship, the ship sinks straight into the ocean, and the mariner ends up in the little boat. When he gets the the shore, he feels the need to tell his story to the man who rescued him, and now he wanders around, compelled to tell his story to people.
Honestly, the thing I like best about this story is the framing device. A guy with wild eyes just runs up and won't let you leave until he's told you a ghost story. This happens to me at least once a month.
A second, less familiar story with which this episode is interacting is the story of the last Great Auk in the British Isles. Great Auks were real birds that have been hunted to extinction because their feathers made really good down for pillows, their meat was delicious, and sailors made oil from their fat. They also had no fear of humans, and the preferred method of hunting them was to walk up to a bird and strangle it with your bare hands while a hundred other Great Auks watched. They were a bit like large penguins, except they lived in the North Atlantic. The last Great Auk was found on an island off Scotland in 1840. By then, it was already a rare bird and the three guys who spotted it were like, "Whoa! Look at that weird penguin!" Instead of killing it (like pretty much anyone else from the time period would have done), they decided to grab it, tie its legs together, and take it with them. The bird started to wail, the rain started to fall, and they holed up together in a tiny hut to wait out the storm. They kept it alive for three days, but the bird would not stop wailing and the storm would not stop storming, and they grew stir-crazy and convinced that the Great Auk was causing the storm because it was a witch. To put a stop to the storm, they decided to stone the bird to death, which does not seem like the quickest or easiest way to kill a slow, flightless bird, but what do I know?
What we learn from these stories is that you just shouldn't bother large birds, because they're magic.
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