supposed to go with them refused to on the grounds that it was too
dangerous.) By this point the island’s total auk population, probably
never very numerous, appears to have consisted of a single pair of birds
and one egg. On catching sight of the humans, the birds tried to run, but
they were too slow. Within minutes, the Icelanders had captured the auks
and strangled them. The egg, they saw, had been cracked, presumably in
the course of the chase, so they left it behind. Two of the men were able to
jump back into the boat; the third had to be hauled through the waves
with a rope.
The details of the great auks’ last moments, including the names of the
men who killed the birds—Sigurður Iselfsson, Ketil Ketilsson, and Jón
Brandsson—are known because fourteen years later, in the summer of
1858, two British naturalists traveled to Iceland in search of auks. The
older of these, John Wolley, was a doctor and an avid egg collector; the
younger, Alfred Newton, was a fellow at Cambridge and soon to be the
university’s first professor of zoology. The pair spent several weeks on
the Reykjanes Peninsula, not far from the site of what is now Iceland’s
international airport, and during that time, they seem to have talked to
just about everyone who had ever seen an auk, or even just heard about
one, including several of the men who’d made the 1844 expedition. The
pair of birds that had been killed in that outing, they discovered, had been
sold to a dealer for the equivalent of about nine pounds. The birds’ innards
had been sent to the Royal Museum in Copenhagen; no one could say
what had happened to the skins. (Subsequent detective work has traced
the skin of the female to an auk now on display at the Natural History
Museum of Los Angeles.)
Wolley and Newton hoped to get out to Eldey themselves. Wretched
weather prevented them. “Boats and men were engaged, and stores laid
in, but not a single opportunity occurred when a landing would have been
practicable,” Newton would later write. “It was with heavy hearts that we
witnessed the season wearing away.”
Wolley died shortly after the pair returned to England. For Newton,
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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