On a previous British expedition, an officer had spotted an albatross by Staten Island and, fearing that it was a bad omen, shot it, and the ship later wrecked on an island. The incident inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In the poem, the killing of the albatross brings a curse upon the seaman, causing his companions to die of thirst: Instead of the cross, the Albatross About my neck was hung. Anson’s men hunted these birds nonetheless. “I remember one caught with a hook and line…baited with a piece of salt pork,” Millechamp wrote. Though the albatross weighed
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