Elsevier

Endeavour

Volume 42, Issue 1, March 2018, Pages 42-47
Endeavour

Lost and Found
Crozier’s penguin: An object history of maritime and museum science

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2018.01.002Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Explores descriptions of emperor penguins encountered and captured during the British Antarctic Expedition (1839–1843).

  • Examines the motivations and methods of naval and museum science in the 1840s.

  • Contrasts the diverse meanings given to emperor penguins on board naval vessels with atrophied accounts produced by museums.

Abstract

In November 1843 John Cassidy, curator in the Belfast Museum received, perhaps rather dolefully, a collection of bird skins. The Museum was barely managing to cope with the constant flow of donations from the ‘four quarters of the globe’. But the gift of bird skins could not be ignored. Sent by Captain Francis Crozier, recently returned from the British Antarctic Expedition, the bequest contained 150 species of Southern Ocean birds, including the remains of two immature ‘great penguins’. Taking the one surviving specimen as a focal point, this paper compares and contrasts the ways in which Aptenodytes forsteri, or the emperor penguin, was differently scripted on board ship and in the museum. The lively interpretations and close encounters with emperor penguins on the ice and on board the two naval bomb vessels are set alongside the more constrained meanings and fleeting attention given to them in a metropolitan and a provincial museum.

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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