through the air. And these birds are so fat it is marvellous. In less than half an hour we filled
two boats full of them, as if they had been stones, so that besides them which we did not eat
fresh, every ship did powder and salt five or six barrels full of them.
A British expedition that landed on the island a few years later found it
“full of great foules.” The men drove a “great number of the foules” into
their ships and pronounced the results to be quite tasty—“very good and
nourishing meat.” A 1622 account by a captain named Richard
Whitbourne describes great auks being driven onto boats “by hundreds at
a time as if God had made the innocency of so poor a creature to become
such an admirable instrument for the sustenation of Man.”
Over the next several decades, other uses for the great auk were found
besides “sustenation.” (As one chronicler observed, “the great auks of
Funk Island were exploited in every way that human ingenuity could
devise.”) Auks were used as fish bait, as a source of feathers for stuffing
mattresses, and as fuel. Stone pens were erected on Funk Island—vestiges
of these are still visible today—and the birds were herded into the
enclosures until someone could find time to butcher them. Or not.
According to an English seaman named Aaron Thomas, who sailed to
Newfoundland on the HMS Boston:
If you come for their Feathers you do not give yourself the trouble of killing them, but
lay hold of one and pluck the best of the Feathers. You then turn the poor Penguin adrift,
with his skin half naked and torn off, to perish at his leisure.
There are no trees on Funk Island, and hence nothing to burn. This led
to another practice chronicled by Thomas.
You take a kettle with you into which you put a Penguin or two, you kindle a fire under
it, and this fire is absolutely made of the unfortunate Penguins themselves. Their bodys
being oily soon produce a Flame.
It’s been estimated that when Europeans first landed at Funk Island,
they found as many as a hundred thousand pairs of great auks tending to
a hundred thousand eggs. (Probably great auks produced only one egg a
year; these were about five inches long and speckled, Jackson Pollock–like,
in brown and black.) Certainly the island’s breeding colony must have
tuis.
(Tuis.)
#1