What bird did sailors call Mother Carey’s Chicken?
Mother Carey "Mother Carey", she calls old sailors to return to the sea. The character appears as a fairy in Charles Kingsley's "The Water Babies". She lives near the North Pole and helps Tom find the Other-end-of-Nowhere. She is shown in one of Jessie Willcox Smith's illustrations for this book. Storm petrels, thought by sailors to be the souls of dead seamen, are called Mother Carey's Chickens. Giant petrels are known as Mother Carey's Geese. In "The Seaman's Manual" (1790), by Lt. Robert Wilson (RN), the term Mother Carey's children is defined as "a name given by English sailors to birds which
Mother Carey Mother Carey Mother Carey is a supernatural figure personifying the cruel and threatening sea in the imagination of 18th- and 19th-century English-speaking sailors. She was a similar character to Davy Jones (who may be her husband). The name seems to be derived from the Latin expression "Mater cara" ("Precious Mother"), which sometimes refers to the Virgin Mary. John Masefield described her in the poem "Mother Carey (as told me by the bo'sun)" in his collection "Salt Water Ballads" (1902). Here she and Davy Jones are a fearsome couple responsible for storms and ship-wrecks. In a Cicely Fox Smith poem entitled