Without Any Market-Value A Century
Ago, The Great Auk Now, As A Stuffed Skin,
Represents A Value Of Fifteen Hundred Dollars In
Gold.
There are but seventy-two specimens of
this bird in the museums of Europe and
America, besides a few skeletons, and sixty-five of its
eggs.
It was called in ancient days Gare-fowl,
and was the Goiful of the Icelander.
Captain Whitbourne, who wrote in the reign
of James the First, quaintly said: "These
Pengwins 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 island that
men drive them from thence upon a board into
their boats by hundreds at a time, as if God had
made the innocency of so poor a creature to
become such an admerable instrument for the
sustenation of man."
In a copy of the English Pilot, "fourth book,"
published in 1761, which I presented to the
library of the United States Coast Survey, is
found this early description of this now extinct
American bird: "They never go beyond the
bank [Newfoundland] as others do, for they are
always on it, or in it, several of them together,
sometimes more but never less than two
together. They are large fowls, about the size
a goose, a coal-black head and back, with a
white belly and a milk-white spot under one of
their eyes, which nature has ordered to be under
their right eye."
Thus has the greed of the sailor and
pothunter swept from the face of the earth an old
pilot - a trusty aid to navigation.
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