The Last Great Auk? II

Carmichael’s is one of a handful of reports concerning the last British great auk, and like the rest of them was recorded long after the event. Even though it appears to be the only account we have written down by a Gaelic speaker, it is rather suspect, especially when compared to the much more circumstantial synthesis of accounts given by Alfred Newton (1829–1907), Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at Cambridge, to his fellow ornithologist – and correspondent of Carmichael – John Alexander Harvie-Brown (1844–1916). Professor Newton drew upon information he had received from the naturalist, sportsman, and St Kilda afficionado Henry Evans (1831–1904) with whom he had visited the island in 1887; Evans himself had recorded the story from Lachlan Mackinnon (Lachlann Eòghainn) (1808–95), a native St Kildan who was one of the party who had caught the bird – on Stac an Àrmainn rather than Stac Lì as Carmichael stated – and indeed claimed to be the very man who advised three days later, after a terrible storm had arisen, that it should be killed for fear it was a witch.

Carmichael’s account, focusing upon the St Kildans as a community rather than upon the individuals who caught and later killed the bird, demonstrates how the story of the great auk was already being transformed into a folktale by the time he recorded it in the late 1880s. It may nonetheless have preserved some authentic details. Perhaps most interesting for us is the point of the story for contemporaries: the St Kildans were woefully ignorant of the extraordinary value of the bird they had killed. In terms of average earnings, the price Carmichael put in the late 1880s on a single wing of the great auk, £100, would equal more than £50,000 today. With a bounty worth a fortune on each of their heads from museums around the world, it’s hardly surprising that great auks were doomed. Their very rarity was what killed them.

But when exactly did the event take place? Carmichael seems to be quite precise about the date, crossing out 1847 and putting 1848 in its place. This might tally with John Love’s remark in his fascinating new book A Natural History of St Kilda that it is rather curious that there is no mention of the killing in accounts by the several naturalists who visited the island between 1840 and 1847. If it was indeed in 1848 – and there were severe gales on the west coast towards the end of July – then Lachlan Mackinnon and his four companions may have killed the last surviving great auk on the planet.

References:
CW 131B, fos. 356–8
Jeremy Gaskell, Who Killed the Great Auk? (Oxford: OUP, 2000).
Bill Lawson, Croft History: Isle of St Kilda (Northton, Isle of Harris: Bill Lawson Publications, 1999), p. 16.
John A. Love, A Natural History of St Kilda (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2009), pp. 121–36.
Scotsman, 26 July 1848, p. 3.

The Last Great Auk? I

Even before it became extinct, the great auk or gairfowl (Pinguinus impennis) was renowned as one of the most extraordinary seabirds to be found around the Hebrides: a sort of North Atlantic penguin, very rare, large (nearly three feet all), and quite unable to fly. There is some controversy over when the last great auks were killed: we know that a breeding couple (the birds mated for life) was slaughtered on the rocky island of Eldey off the south-west tip of Iceland in early June 1844. Some time in the 1840s, however, in the month of July, a great auk was captured by a party of St Kildans on Stac an Àrmainn, taken back to the village, then killed a few days later. Alexander Carmichael left an account of the event among the many slips of paper he filled with information concerning birds, animals, fish, and plants of the Hebrides.

About 40 years ago or so say about 1848 a party of S[t] K[ilda] people found a Gearrabhal on Stac-a-lì, a stack near Borrery. They brought it home but did not know what bird it was, what to do with it nor what to make of the bird. They knew not what to make of it and they came to no decision that night. They tied a strong cord or rope to its leg and fastened a stake to the other end of the rope and fixed this in the ground. Thus they left the bird all night tethered behind the house like one of their cows. ‘Nuair thig la thig comhairle’ ‘When day comes council comes.’ But the bird had his revenge in the noise he made and the sleeplessness he caused. He cried all night long and made night hideous with his noise. He screamed and roared like a creature possessed and the people got no sleep no rest. In the morning the people met as usual in the daily parliament (Comhairle) and among other matters what they were to do with this demoniacal bird-like creature they caught. The parliament which is composed of all the heads of families in the place and which met daily [decided] that this strange bird or bird-like creature must be possessed of a demon and that it was only a demon that could make [the] noise it made all night long. They therefore decreed that the bird must be put to death and so the bird was put to death accordingly. Every man in the community set upon the poor bird with sticks and stones and staves and attacked him till he was dead. And as the bird took a deal of killing the people were the more confirmed that he was possessed of a demon and they belaboured him accordingly. The body of the bird was then thrown to the dogs of the village and torn asunder by dogs and children. Next year when they came to discover their mistake they were searching about for bits of the broken bones of the bird!

[margin: The children of the village tore off its wings and used the wings upon one anothers ears and after they they were used by the women of the village to sweep the muddy floors of their crubas, their old wall bedded houses. Were there ever such costly brooms used in sweeping the floor of a king’s palace. Each of those wings on the bird would probably today realize £100!]

References:
CW 131B, fos. 356–8.
Illustration:
‘Great Auk’ from John James Audobon’s The Birds of America (1840–44).