was “said to breed on a rock on that island,” a curious contradiction since
no breeding bird can be said to be “accidental.”
ONCE the Funk Island birds had been salted, plucked, and deep-fried
into oblivion, there was only one sizable colony of great auks left in the
world, on an island called the Geirfuglasker, or great auk skerry, which lay
about thirty miles off southwestern Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula. Much
to the auk’s misfortune, a volcanic eruption destroyed the Geirfuglasker
in 1830. This left the birds one solitary refuge, a speck of an island known
as Eldey. By this point, the great auk was facing a new threat: its own
rarity. Skins and eggs were avidly sought by gentlemen, like Count Raben,
who wanted to fill out their collections. It was in the service of such
enthusiasts that the very last known pair of auks was killed on Eldey in
1844.
Before setting out for Iceland, I’d decided that I wanted to see the site
of the auk’s last stand. Eldey is only about ten miles off the Reykjanes
Peninsula, which is just south of Reykjavik. But getting out to the island
proved to be way more difficult to arrange than I’d imagined. Everyone I
contacted in Iceland told me that no one ever went there. Eventually, a
friend of mine who’s from Iceland got in touch with his father, who’s a
minister in Reykjavik, who contacted a friend of his, who runs a nature
center in a tiny town on the peninsula called Sandgerði. The head of the
nature center, Reynir Sveinsson, in turn, found a fisherman, Halldór
Ármannsson, who said he’d be willing to take me, but only if the weather
was fair; if it was rainy or windy, the trip would be too dangerous and
nausea-inducing, and he wouldn’t want to risk it.
Fortunately, the weather on the day we’d fixed turned out to be
splendid. I met Sveinsson at the nature center, which features an exhibit
on a French explorer, Jean-Baptiste Charcot, who died when his ship, the
infelicitously named Pourquoi-Pas, sunk off Sandgerði in 1936. We walked
over to the harbor and found Ármannsson loading a chest onto his boat,
the Stella. He explained that inside the chest was an extra life raft.