My thesis draws on more than three hundred and fifty accounts penned by migrants to nineteenth-century New Zealand to recover an important aspect of shipboard life which has hitherto been marginalised within the existing historiography. It seeks to recover the interactions of crew and passengers with albatross through the southern latitudes of the Southern Ocean. Of all the marine and avian creatures encountered on the voyage out, it was albatross that left the strongest impressions on almost all migrant writers.

The surviving evidence shows that shooting and ‘fishing’ for albatross were common forms of shipboard entertainment and integral to the individual and collective experience of voyaging to New Zealand by sailing ship. Yet historians of this maritime era have overlooked the opportunity to examine, in depth, what motivated crew and passengers aboard migrant vessels to mercilessly hunt these birds. In this thesis, I will show that shooting albatross as target practice or catching these birds with a baited hook and line were popular and widespread leisure activities on the voyage out. However, I argue that albatross were primarily hunted by crew and migrants for their body parts, which could be made into a variety of personal accessories or highly sought-after saleable goods either aboard ship or once ashore.