About Books: Chasing Phantoms

Mark Lynch

August 1, 2024 8 MIN READ Book and Video Reviews

The Great Auk was a unique alcid. The birds bred on small offshore islands in the north Atlantic and were totally flightless. They wandered south in winter to off the New England and European coasts, swimming all the way. I still fantasize about standing on Race Point and watching a small group of Great Auks paddling by. Their bones have been found in indigenous people’s middens, and there are Neolithic cave paintings of Great Auks. They were impressive, standing almost three feet tall and weighing eleven pounds. They dwarfed the somewhat similar looking razorbill. They were also the original bird to be called a “penguin.”

By the sixteenth century, the great auk was known as penguin, pengouin, or penguin, in Dutch, French, and English respectively—possibly a reference to fat (pingus) and without wings or flight feathers (in-penna), but maybe from the Welsh pen (“head”) and qwyn (“white”), a reference to the characteristic white spot between the bird’s eye and beak. When European travelers in the southern oceans came across large, flightless birds that resembled great auks, they called them “penguins,” and the name stuck. The great auk is, in other words, the original penguin. (p. 35)

The reason for the Great Auk’s rapid decline was simply that they were an available resource for boats sailing west from Europe. They were large, flightless, somewhat clumsy on land, and bred in large colonies on offshore islands of Iceland and other North Atlantic locations. Their flesh, feathers, and oil were all harvested.

As Europeans increasingly sailed to the New World, in the wake of colonial expansion and improvements in ship technology, the nesting colony of great auks on this island—once the largest colony in the world—became vulnerable. On the island, the big, defenseless birds were herded like sheep into pens, gang-planked into boats, and clubbed to death. The meat was used for human consumption, and also as fish-bait, and the fat was rendered down for its oil, while the silky feathers were useful for stuffing quilts and pillows. (p. 37)

Some of the birds were burned alive to loosen their valuable feathers. When the seafarers had filled their vessels with feathers and barrels of salted great auk meat, they sailed away. The meat was enough to feed the entire crew all the way across the Atlantic back to Europe, with some left over. The great auk fueled, in other words, European pillaging of the New World, feeding the very colonial system that would massively reduce the great auk population. (p. 38)

I have read many articles and a number of books about Great Auks over the decades, so I was not expecting much when I came across The Last of Its Kind by Gísli Pálsson. I was surprised to find that this book presented a history that I was unfamiliar with, all wrapped in the story of the doomed quest by John Wolley and Alfred Newton to find live Great Auks. Finally, this book is a history of how people came to understand that human-caused extinction could happen. By the mid-nineteenth century, thanks to fossil discoveries and the writings of scientists including Darwin, the scientific community was familiar with the concept of extinction. But it was thought that extinction was a natural process that happened over long periods of time. It was believed that animals alive today did not become extinct. Their numbers could be low, but if they could not be found, well, they were thought to have moved to other locations. This movement was thought to be true of Passenger Pigeons. When folks no longer saw the vast flocks that used to darken the skies, it was theorized that they had moved to remote areas farther west.

Prior to the killing of the last great auks, extinction was either seen as an impossibility or trivialized as a “natural thing”. The great taxonomist Carl von Linné, or Linnaeus (1707-78), imagined that a living species could never disappear; for evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin (1809-82), species would naturally come and go in the long history of life. The great auk brought home the fact that a species could perish quite quickly and, moreover, not naturally, but primarily as a result of human activities. No other extinction had been documented as carefully. (p. xix)

Gísli Pálsson is a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Iceland. Even as a child he had a passion for birds, though initially this passion manifested itself in egg collecting. He came across the story of the Iceland expedition of Wolley and Newton and the “gare-fowl books.”

John Wolley (1823–59) was a classic British Victorian gentleman. He was passionate about egg collecting and even led expeditions to Scandinavia and Russia to procure new eggs for his Wunderkammers, or cabinets of curiosities. This was a Victorian passion, to collect and exhibit vast collections of curiosities from nature. He was even called “Lord of the Eggs” by the locals in various Scandinavian countries. Wolley had passed his final exams in medicine at the University of Edinburgh but decided instead to spend his time accruing more exotic eggs. He was looking forward to a collecting trip to Iceland to procure more eggs from unusual species, including the gyrfalcon and, he hoped, the Great Auk.

Alfred Newton (1829-1907) was a zoologist at Cambridge University who knew from field reports that Great Auks were becoming rare. He hoped to travel to Iceland to document the remaining Great Auks and maybe bring some skins and eggs back to the university.

Like their contemporaries, Wolley and Newton busily collected birds’ eggs and specimens, classifying and recording them in the fashion of the Victorian age. When they set off for Iceland in 1858 they hoped to visit Eldey and study the rare great auk. They hoped to observe the bird’s behavior and habits, and, perhaps, bring home an egg or a skin or a stuffed bird or two for their own cabinets of curiosities—unaware of the fact that the species had already been hunted into extinction. When they left Victorian England for Iceland, they teased that this was a “genuinely awkward expedition.” And so it proved to be, in many ways. They never made it to Eldey. Like me, they never saw a great auk on Iceland, not even stuffed. (p. xix)

This quite odd story of two British gents desperately searching for a bird that in all likelihood was extinct forms the core of The Last of Its Kind. Their ship landed in Reykjavik. The capitol of Iceland was more of a boomtown at the time of their visit. Wolley and Newton planned a trip from Reykjavík to the remote southwest corner of the island, including to towns such as Reykjanes that were the closest mainland spots to Eldey Island. They then hoped to hire a fisherman to take them out to this last known location of breeding Great Auks. At least that was their plan. But Wolley and Newton had trouble even getting out of Reykjavík. The roads were poor and, according to locals, haunted by “mythical hidden people (huldufólk) admired and feared by many Icelanders.” (p. 41) To make matters worse, the friendly Icelanders kept plying them with drink.

Besides this we were almost in a chronic state of intoxification from the unnecessary amount of hospitality we had to endure, but as it was all meant as civilly as possible one had nothing to do but abide it. (p. 58 quoted from the Gare-Fowl Books)

When Wolley and Newton finally did arrive at their destination and inquired about a boat to go out to Eldey, the locals informed them that at this time of the year the waters were extremely rough there and it would be dangerous to sail the waters around Eldey. Wolley and Newton decided to wait for better conditions. So they waited and waited and waited some more like some nineteenth century Vladimir and Estragon waiting for Godot. It must have been frustrating in the extreme. To have come so far, but being denied their final goal. They could even see Eldey from the shore, far off in the distance. That was to be as close as they would ever get to Eldey. To pass the time they talked to a wide range of locals about all things gare-fowl.

John Wolley wrote all these conversations and events down, and these notebooks were collected in what are called today the Gare-Fowl Books. These papers are currently housed in the Cambridge University Library. The existence of these papers is not well known, and Gísli Pálsson only learned about their existence by happenstance, coming across a mention of the Gare-Fowl Papers in a paper by another Great Auk maven.

I was also struck by a 2018 article by Petra Tjitske Kalshoven, “Piecing Together the Extinct Great Auk,” which cited in some detail a group of intriguing manuscripts——known as the Gare-Fowl Books describing an expedition to Iceland by the nineteenth-century British naturalists John Wolley and Alfred Newton, “gare-fowl” being an old name for the great auk. (p. xviii-xix)

Gísli Pálsson finds that these obscure papers are a treasure trove of information about the life history of the Great Auk and of the locals who hunted them and saw them more often than anyone else. One of the reasons these papers are not better known is that Wolley’s handwriting is atrocious and difficult to read.

Wolley and Newton returned to Britain empty-handed except for Wolley’s extensive notes. Wolley became engaged, but he was never married because he succumbed to some unnamed neurological disorder and soon died. Women were never an issue for Newton because he thought they were second class citizens.

Newton never married, and his attitude toward women was complicated. While he was invariably polite, he dismissed out of hand any suggestion that women might be admitted to his inner sanctums to peruse his collections, such as the eggs he held so dear. He was outraged by the proposal that women might be admitted to the chapel at Magdalene College, where he lived and worked (women did not gain admission until after his time). (p. 170)

Newton could have written about what he and Wolley had learned about the habits of the Great Auk from the Icelanders he spent so much time with. He did not. What Newton initially wrote about was his partner’s famous egg collection. He spent years documenting Wolley’s collection.

In honor of Wolley, and as a token of his gratitude and a testimony to their profound friendship, Newton put aside his plans to write at length about the great auk and instead commenced work on his magnum opus, a description of Wolley’s egg collection. The work would ultimately comprise four volumes: Ootheca Wolleyana: An Illustrated Catalogue of the Collection of Birds’ Eggs Begun by John Wolley published between 1864 and 1907. (p. 173)

Happily, Newton eventually wrote about something more groundbreaking than a collection of eggs. The loss of the Great Auk was something out of the ordinary. He realized that some species of birds could be pushed into extinction by the behavior of humans. At the time it was thought that only God could cause a creature’s extinction.

Despite his support of evolutionary theory, it was in opposition to Darwin’s views that Newton developed his greatest achievement—the concept of extinction that paved the way for robust animal protection measures, and, more broadly, modern environmental concerns. Newton’s secret lay in establishing a clear distinction between unavoidable natural extinctions—exposed by Anning and Cuvier and theorized by Darwin and Wallace—and avertible extinction due to human agency, such as that faced by the great auk in the mid-nineteenth century. (p. 190-91)

This insight was an important breakthrough in science’s understanding about evolution, extinction, and dwindling populations of certain species. Humans could be the engine of species extinction, and extinction was something that could happen rather quickly. Newton even believed that as a species was discovered to be getting rare, human intervention could prevent a species from becoming extinct. Newton pushed for more restrictive hunting regulations, to allow species to recover numbers.

The Last of Its Kind is a scientific history that few people will be familiar with and is well worth your attention. Gísli Pálsson is a passionate writer and takes several interesting sidetracks from the main tale. These digressions keep the book lively. He looks at egg collecting as a Victorian mania. He visits many of the sites mentioned in his book and visits museums that have skins, eggs, and viscera of the Great Auk. He even visits extinction author Errol Fuller to see his vast collection of Great Auk material. The Last of Its Kind is illustrated with black-and-white and color photographs. Gísli Pálsson writes from an Icelandic perspective. The reader sometimes comes across phrases like “Að sjóast”­—to become the sea—(p. xxii-xxiii) similar to the English phrase “to find one’s sea legs.” Pálsson finally reconsiders the role that young Ketill Ketilsson played in the final extermination of the Great Auk. Most importantly, Gísli Pálsson’s The Last of Its Kind uncovers the life and writings of long forgotten Alfred Newton. Despite his failings, he was an important early voice on the role that human society can play in the extinction of species.

For Newton’s concern with both singularities and collectives, with mortality of individual great auks as well as of the species and its habitats, was a significant early step in our understanding that what is lost with extinctions is not just species and biodiversity but a way of life, natural habitat with an age-old story, a sort of language, even culture—and the countless opportunities of an uncertain collective future that perhaps will never be. (p. 236)