NATIONAL MARITIME HISTORICAL SOCIETY

By Richard J. King

Vito Dumas on the cover of the July 1943 issue of El Gráfico, an Argentine sports magazine. Courtesy of El Grafico, via Wikimedia Commons.

“A seaman has to suffer,” wrote Vito Dumas in his book Alone Through the Roaring Forties (1944). He knew what he was talking about. Few people at sea have ever endured what he did—at least on purpose.

In 1943, before GPS, radar, modern outdoor clothing, and automatic steering of any kind, Dumas became the first person on record to sail alone around the entire Southern Ocean, the windiest, roughest waters on Earth. Along the way, he stopped at only three ports. He was also the first to sail alone around Cape Horn and survive. He did all this in a little wooden boat without an engine or electricity.

With no weather reports or radio—in part because he was sailing during World War II and wanted to avoid being detected by German U-boats—Dumas became intimately acquainted with his surroundings, especially the sea state, the clouds overhead, and the marine life all around him. Seabirds were his most frequent companions. After he departed his home in Argentina, he explained, “My solitude in the Atlantic was complete except for the albatrosses and some smaller birds with pretty check patterns under their wings. These were pintado petrels or Cape pigeons. I often saw them during my long hours at the helm.”

Sailor’s-eye view of a flock of Cape pigeons, near Clarence Island in the Southern Ocean, January 2011. Photo courtesy of Liam Quinn, CC BY ISA via Wikimedia Commons.

You’ve probably heard of an albatross, but a Cape pigeon?

These were not pigeons like the kind you see in a modern city. It was the sailors who saw these birds when navigating around Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope who gave them this name. They do look similar at a distance.

Cape pigeons, also known as the “pintado,” are a type of petrel, true seabirds that spend most of their lives out at sea. They only land on desolate islands in the Southern Ocean or along the coast of Antarctica to raise their chicks. All petrels, like albatrosses, have special glands and tubenoses (straw-like structures on top of their beaks) to excrete salt from their system, enabling them to hydrate with seawater.

Pintado translates to “painted” in Spanish and refers to their dramatic black-and-white speckled feathers, a pattern almost entirely unique among seabirds. In 1699, the pirate-naturalist William Dampier observed thousands of these “pintado-birds” at sea, which in flight he described were “about the bigness of a tame pigeon.”

Cape pigeons have long been known to deep-sea sailors of the Southern Ocean because they occasionally follow a boat looking for food. Frederick Pease Harlow, a merchant sailor in the 1870s, wrote of how the “very beautiful” Cape pigeons liked to fly around a ship’s wake, especially in rough weather. “Suddenly it drops into the water,” Harlow wrote, “diving beneath for scraps and bits of food.”

Cape pigeons were especially fond of following whaleships. Aboard a whaleship in 1841, Francis Allyn Olmsted wrote how the number of birds increased as they sailed closer to Cape Horn. One day a single Cape pigeon began “coming close up to the ship as she ‘lay to,’ and alighting upon the waves, or skimming along over the boisterous sea with his little web feet.” When shore-based whaling stations were active in sub-Antarctic waters in the 1900s, Cape pigeons appeared by the thousands to feed on bits of whale blubber.

When Vito Dumas sailed the Southern Ocean during World War II, very little whaling was going on, nor was there a lot of merchant shipping or commercial fishing. He was even more alone than a sailor usually would be in a small boat in these vast, stormy seas. His closest companion was a single Cape pigeon that paid a daily visit to his boat as he transited the Indian Ocean. “He used to arrive and fly around the boat every day and then disappear,” Dumas wrote. “Quite one of the family; he would fly ahead of the boat and alight, as though expecting scraps of biscuit as I passed. When the albatrosses came, they would drive him off, and I would not see him until the next day, when he came regularly to be fed.” Dumas added that his Cape pigeon was “a great friend” and “I awaited him anxiously, and he must have felt as I did.”

You’re not alone if you’re wondering if Dumas was actually seeing the same bird, but Cape pigeon markings are pretty distinct, and, as another example, a British officer in the Royal Navy once reported that a Cape pigeon with a piece of red ribbon around its neck followed his ship for 1,500 miles.

Dumas continued across the Indian Ocean, encountering seas and winds in which he wondered how any living thing could survive. For weeks, he no longer saw his feathered friend. Then when he was stuck in a flat calm below South Australia, the petrel flew twice around his boat but left, only to return to continue its daily visits as Dumas approached Tasmania. A couple of weeks later, nearing Aotearoa New Zealand, Dumas began suffering symptoms from scurvy. To make things worse, a storm was brewing, and by that stage of his voyage his rain gear was disintegrating. As he tried to figure out the direction of the weather, “Something delightful materialized out of this inferno; something that I had missed for several days: my Cape pigeon! The faithful bird had not abandoned me.”

Vito Dumas ducked below and got his bird some crumbled biscuit. This would be the last time he would see his Cape pigeon friend. He sailed into Wellington after a passage of 104 solitary days on the tempestuous Southern Ocean: wind and seas fit only for the birds.

Read more Animals in “Sea History” or the book Ocean Bestiary: Meeting Marine Life from Abalone to Orca to Zooplankton, which is a revised collection of more than 18 years of this column!