were obtained, many more escaping to sea. Faber, on bis
visit in 1821, did not see any, although some were killed on
the mainland about that period. In the spring of 1830 this
skerry disappeared during a submarine eruption, and shortly
after it was discovered that there was a colony on a rock
known as Eldey, or the Meal-sack, between the sunken
skerry and the mainland, where the birds had not previously
been known to breed. During the next fourteen years
systematic expeditions were made to this spot : about sixty
birds and a number of eggs being procured, the majority of
which were sent either to Copenhagen or Hamburg. The
last two birds were taken alive there early in June, 1844,
and were sent to the Royal Museum at Copenhagen, where
preparations of their bodies may be seen preserved in spirits.
Since that date no examples are known to have been obtained,
and the faint hope may now be abandoned that a remnant
might have taken refuge on the Gfeirfugladrângr, a lonely
islet hitherto protected from the invasion of man by the dangerous
surf which encircles it.
On the east coast of Greenland, which in recent times has
been rendered almost inaccessible by a change in the drift
of the polar ice, it would appear from the researches of
Preyer, that about the year 1574 an Icelander loaded his
boat with Gare-fowls at some islands, since identified with
Danell’s or Graah’s Islands in 65° 20' N. lat. To the west
coast it can only have been a straggler, and Fabricius, who
was at Fredrikshaab in only 62° N. lat., speaks of it as
excessively rare, and not known to breed there ; adding “ seel
pullum vidi, mense Augusto captum, lanuginem griseam
tantum habentem ” (Faun. Groenl. p. 82 ; 1780) : a description
which hardly proves the accuracy of his identification.
It is doubtful if the specimen in the University Museum at
Copenhagen, said to have been obtained at Disco Island in
1821, was not really taken some years earlier at Fiskernæs, a
considerable distance to the south of the Arctic circle. Inasmuch
as the Great Auk has been erroneously associated in
the popular mind with high northern latitudes, and as these
misconceptions die hard, it may be repeated that, with the
above questionable exception of Disco Island, and similar
assertions respecting Grimsey, off the north coast of Iceland,
there are no authentic records of the occurrence of the Great
Auk to the north of, or even very close to, the Arctic circle.
Nowhere was the Great Auk found in such abundance
as in the neighbourhood of Newfoundland, where it received
from the early voyagers the name of Penguin or Pin-wing,
probably from the shortness of its wings, and not, as supposed
by Clusius and others, from pinguis, fat. From
Hakluyt’s ‘Voyages’ it appears that numbers were found
on ‘ the Island of Penguin ’ in 1536; and about forty
years later the same collection of narratives furnishes more
exact descriptions, adding that the French fishermen victualled
themselves with, and salted down, these birds. In
‘ A Discourse and Discovery of Newfoundland, written by
Captaine Richard Whitbourne of Exmoutli, in the county of
Devon,’ published in 1620, it is stated (p. 9) that among the
Water-fowl, which are very plentiful, are ‘ Penguins,’ which
“ are as bigge as Geese, and flye not, for they have but a
little short wing, and they multiply so infinitely, upon a
certain flat Hand, that men drive them from thence upon a
boord, into their boates by hundreds at a time, as if God
had made the innocency of so poore a creature, to become
such an admirable instrument for the sustentation of man.”
How long this slaughter continued it is impossible to say,
but Anspach, writing in 1819, speaks of ‘ the Penguin
as exterminated in that quarter. In 1841, when Stuvitz
visited Funk Island, about thirty miles from Newfoundland,
he found quantities of the bones of this bird, and the remains
of rude stone enclosures or ‘ pounds ’ into which the victims
had been driven; in 1863 several natural mummies wm'e
procured and sent to Europe; and in July, 1874, Prof.
Milne obtained remains belonging to at least fifty individuals
in less than half an hour. It also existed on the coast of
Labrador; and Catesby, in his ‘ History of Carolina, &c.
(1743), includes ‘the Penguin’ amongst the winter visitors
to the waters of that State.
Such is briefly the history, apart from vague statements,