and killed many birds and their young. There may have been another raid from the Faeroes in 1809 (H. C. Müller, 1862); there was certainly a big one in 1813, when, during the war between Britain and Denmark, the armed schooner Faeroe landed a party which killed all garefowls that came within their reach, and arrived later in Reykjavik with twenty-four on board, besides numbers that had been salted down; fifty or sixty were taken back to the Faeroes. On 1 July 1821 Friedrich Faber and H. C. Raben visited Geirfuglasker, and Raben actually climbed Geirfugladrangur. They saw no garefowls at all: it is possible that the auks might have already gone to sea (especially if their eggs had already been taken that season). In 1828 at least one adult was taken, for a skin for the Copenhagen Museum. This is the last visit to Geirfuglasker that we hear of; in early March 1830 a series of earthquakes took place in which the skerry sank beneath the sea. The great auks moved at once to Eldey, ten miles nearer the coast, and attempted to breed there in the same season.
Eldey is a remarkable block of volcanic tuff with sheer sides and a flattish top that is distinguished by being the site of the second largest gannetry in the world (see here). It is about 250 feet high, at its highest point. On the east side of its north end, below the cliff, is a broadish ledge which slopes and slants into the sea (Pl. IIa), and, as one of us (Fisher) who visited it in 1949 saw for himself, was a suitable landing place and, under the sheer cliff, also a suitable nesting-place for the garefowls. Eldey is made of a particularly resistant type of volcanic tuff; normally such a formation weathers and erodes easily, but Eldey has not significantly changed in a century,* and the Icelanders, who are sensitive to tradition and history, and whose fowlers work with their fathers and sons, are positive that the garefowl ledge is still as it was. It was certainly easy, in 1949, to imagine the great razorbills bobbing buoyantly in the fuss of spray and breakers round the landing-places, clawing a foothold and waddling and struggling clumsily ashore. But they only did this at Eldey for fifteen years. In the first year, the year of the earthquake 1830, two boats took twenty or twenty-one skins for dealers; in 1831 twenty-four were taken; in 1834 at least nine skins and several eggs; in 1840 at least one egg; in 1841 three skins and one egg (the egg was probably laid by a female which laid an egg taken in 1840, judging by their remarkable similarity). On a day between the second and fifth (most probably the fourth) day of June 1844 a boat of fourteen men, under the leadership of Vilhjálmur Hákonarsson, sailed the fourteen miles from Kirkjuvogur to Eldey; the sea was rough, and only three men could get ashore, Sigurður Íslefsson, Jón Brandsson and Ketil Ketilsson. They found two garefowls and an egg. Ketilsson smashed the egg, because it was already cracked, and the others each caught and killed an auk. On their way home the men sold the skins to a certain Christian Hansen, who sold them to the bird-stuffer at Reykjavik, Möller. Since that day no great auk has been certainly seen alive by anybody, anywhere.
There is only one other place at which the great auk has been suspected to have bred; it is certainly the most remote and romantic of the lot—romantic because it is the first place in the New World to have been seen by an European. In 877 a Norwegian, Gunnbjörn Ulfsson, on his way to Iceland to settle, was driven west past Iceland by storms, to some skerries, beyond which was land. The land was the the east coast of Greenland, and the skerries, once thought to be what are known as Graah’s Islands, at about the same latitude as the Snæfell Peninsula of Iceland, and now thought (G. Holm, 1918) to be Leif’s and Erik den Røde’s Islands north-east of Angmagssalik. It was from Snæfellsnes that Erik the Red set sail in 982 to found the first European colony in the New World—and he navigated west to Gunnbjörn’s skerries on his way. In the old sailing directions they are regarded as “midway between ‘Greenland’ (the Norse colonies in S.W. Greenland) and Iceland”; which is correct. Many fishermen and voyagers to Greenland after Gunnbjörn and Erik sailed to, or by, Gunnbjörn’s skerries, and in the twelfth or thirteenth century at least one such voyager, according to the M.S. sagas of Iceland (Anon., 1838, W. Preyer, 1862), discovered a great multitude of great auks on them. Between 1586 and 1596 the fisherman Látra Clemens from Adalsvík in Iceland is said to have taken a ‘boatload’ of garefowls here. There is no later record of great auks at this place,* and it may have become too ice-bound with the deterioration of climate at about that time.
Such is the grim history of the great auk. As Salomonsen (1945) points out, the downfall of the great garefowl probably began when the Indians of the east coast of North America exterminated it on the mainland and neighbouring islands; by the time the hungry sixteenth-century transatlantic sailors found it in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Newfoundland it was probably already driven to skerries out of reach of the Indians’ canoes. Maybe in prehistoric times the great auk also had a wider breeding-distribution in north-west Europe, or at least a very much denser distribution in Iceland-Faeroe-Britain. At the last, in its final miserable nineteenth-century years of slaughter, it was demanded for collectors (though while it was alive they did not pay much for it, contemporary accounts show). For years its passing was not known, and it was still sought high and low, by Steenstrup, Wolley, Newton, Grieve, Lucas; the devoted interest of these ornithologists only served to show that ornithology came not quite in time to save the auk, and that ignorance and greed are sometimes more powerful than knowledge and truth.
The end of the great auk was the only extinction in historical times of a primary North Atlantic seabird; but a secondary sea-bird, the Labrador duck, followed it in 1875 or 1878. Man the ignorant killer was again the agent of its death, armed this time with a shotgun. The evidence against him, in this particular case, is circumstantial; for nobody knows much about the population of Camptorhynchus labradorius
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