Lost and FoundCrozier’s penguin: An object history of maritime and museum science
Section snippets
Penguins, naval culture and expeditionary science
In 30 September 1839, two naval ‘bomb’ vessels, adapted for polar exploration, set sail from Margate bound for the Antarctic. The official purpose of the voyage was scientific, primarily geomagnetic. The discovery of the south magnetic pole was a major aim, along with setting up several observatories on various oceanic and sub-Antarctic islands. Natural historical objectives were also important. Joseph Hooker, assistant surgeon on HMS Erebus was charged with describing and collecting botanical
Taxonomic objects and civic gifts: penguins in the museum
When the two ships returned to London on 4 September 1843 the task of transporting the collections to the relevant repositories began. The movement of the emperor penguins from ship to shore was, to a degree, a move from unstable meanings connected with naval practices, problems and personalities to apparently tidier accounts made possible by the ostensibly controlled space of the museum. Before getting there, however, certain barriers remained to be overcome.
The British Museum, which appears
Conclusion
On board the Erebus and Terror, knowledge of the ‘great penguin’ (down to how it tasted in a soup) abounded. That knowledge was not well disciplined, but it was manifold. That hardly made it ‘global’ in any sense of the abstraction, despite the ostensibly ‘global’ character and ambitions of the expedition and its aims. In a metropolitan and in a provincial museum, the knowledge and material remains of the emperor penguin were presented in a highly reduced form. In one sense, the resulting
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Dr Nuala Johnson and Professor Patience Schell for kind invitations to present earlier versions of this paper to audiences in Belfast and Aberdeen respectively. I would also like to thank Angela Ross (National Museums Northern Ireland) for information about, and providing the image of, ‘Crozier’s penguin’. And perhaps the penguin, shot on the Antarctic ice 175 years ago, deserves our special gratitude.
This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the
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Animals, Joseph Dalton Hooker and the Ross Expedition to Antarctica, 1839–1843
2020, Journal for Maritime Research