Hidden treasure

This is clearly not an iceberg or an albatross. Its a painting by Sarah Stone and is called Sir Ashton Lever's Museum. It was painted in March 1785 and is a wonderful example of the natural historian collector's dream.

The Museum is full of natural history specimens from around the world and it takes ages to search through it.

Look at the scarlet ibis in the third gallery. Go down to the bottom and one case in to the left. Its a penguin.

In 1785 the penguins of the far south were a real oddity. This may explain the strange look and crooked wings. Unless its not a penguin but an auk, a northern hemisphere bird first called penguins by sailors. When Europeans discovered southern penguins the two species were so alike that the southern birds became penguins and the name gradually stuck south. Great Auks were extinct by the mid nineteenth century and that solved the confusion.

So where did the penguin come from ? We know that Cook had come back with penguins in 1775. And that sealers started going south pretty quickly after Cook. Not many returned with penguin specimens. It doesn't look like a South American or South African or Australasian penguin ?

So ?

Steve

Were off 2

There are so many journey metaphors around that I'm not going to begin by packing the bags but by unpacking.

I'm a passionate writer with too many passions, among them being Antarctica and historical treasures. I regularly go south as a history lecturer and tour guide and I help organise exhibitions about all sort sof things. I guess its pointless to note that some of the exhibitions concern Antarctica.

Do you know that feeling of privilege and excitement when you see a wonderful thing/place for the first time ? When you stand (on the deck of a ship) before a block of ice the size of a small country or look from the stern of a southward bound vessel and gaze at the delicacy and grace of albatross hanging in the wind ? And then you come home and open up a volume of watercolours painted by someone in the mid 177os - a painter with Cook's remarkable expedition - and see that albatross pictured and stored in a magnificent collection of work that records the story of people travelling to and settling in the southern continent

Thats what I want to talk about. That beautiful and uncertain connection between the immediate and the recollected and how this is maintained and represented.


Steve