82 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2020
curiosity that captivated explorers,
so much that some men admitted to
missing the company when they
found themselves adrift in empty
stretches of sea ice for weeks on end.
But McCann notes that most inter-
species meet-cutes, however mirth-
ful, ended with the birds’ slaughter,
“either to supplement the men’s diet
with fresh meat or to be preserved
as specimens.” “It seems a terrible
desecration to come to this quiet
spot only to murder its innocent in-
habitants and stain the white snow
with blood,” observed the Royal Navy
officer Robert Falcon Scott, “but ne-
cessities are often hideous.”
Necessity often led to desecration
in the extreme environments of the
Antarctic, though most instances
were justified by profit rather than
survival. After Cook reported that
Kerguelen Island was crowded with,
as his biographer John Cawte Beagle-
hole writes, “seals whose lack of so-
phistication made it easy to club them
for their oil,” sealing gangs set out to
locate other tiny subantarctic isles
and skin every fur seal they could
find, bringing pelts to luxury markets
in New York, London, and Canton.
William Smith, who discovered the
South Shetland Islands and claimed
them for Britain in 1819, said that he
had taken sixty thousand pelts.
When Henry Forster visited the is-
lands on the Chanticleer a decade
later, they were lifeless. As southern
fur seal populations declined from be-
tween one and two million to fewer
than a thousand animals, elephant
seals attracted attention with their
prodigious blubber, which could be
melted down for lighting oil.
Penguins, too, were taken for their
oil. McCann recounts a particularly
rapacious industry on Macquarie Is-
land, which today is marked by a layer
of soil bristling
with avian bones.
Joseph Hatch, a
British pharma-
cist whose previ-
ous ventures were
in bone milling
and rabbit skins,
leased the entire
island from the
Ta s m a n i a n g ov-
ernment and
boiled three mil-
lion king and
royal penguins in
large cylindrical
digesters between
1890 a nd 1920.
Hatch, who had
been a member of
the New Zealand
parliament, faced
growing public
pressure to shut
down his penguin-
oiling operations.
Only after his
death was the is-
land declared a
bird and seal sanc-tuary, in 1933, one of the first conserva-
tion victories in the Antarctic.I
n the nineteenth cen tury, the
Southern Ocean became the stage
for the revival of the whaling in-
dustry, which over four thousand years
had depleted whale populations in the
Northern Hemisphere. It first estab-
lished itself in force on the coasts of
Tasmania and mainland Australia,
where southern right whales went to
breed. In 1847, Ross wrote sanguinely
of the cetaceans he sighted off the
Antarctic coast:Hitherto, beyond the reach of their
persecutors, they have here enjoyed a
life of tranquillity and security; but
will now, no doubt, be made to con-
tribute to the wealth of our country,
in exact proportion to the energy and
perseverance of our merchants.The first explorer to make landfall on
Antarctica was Norwegian Carl An-
ton Larsen, in 1902. His mission was
to ascertain the advantage of estab-
lishing a commercial whaling base be-
low the Antarctic Circle. He built
Grytviken, a factory and settlement,Top: Photograph of fishermen casting for macroplankton with a dip net, by Frank Hurley. Courtesy the State
Library of New South Wales. Bottom: Océan, by Adolphe Philippe Millot, from Nouveau Larousse illustré, 1898