Early Encounters with Penguins

Nicholas Breyfogle: 
Hello, and welcome to Early Encounters with Penguins brought to you by the History Department and the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University and the magazine Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective. My name is Nick Breyfogle. I'm Professor of History and Director of the Goldberg Center for Excellence in Teaching, and I'll be your host and moderator today. Welcome to everyone and thank you for joining us. 

Now, let me ask you, who doesn't love penguins? Today we are joined by Ellen Arnold, who will unveil for us all the many different roles that penguins took on as Europeans first began to encounter them in the mid-1500s, from a quirky oddity to salvation for the starving. Over the course of the following century Europeans had many different interactions with penguins, and these shaped how they understood what the birds were. Sailors and scientists alike brought back accounts of the strange birds, which were only slowly understood to be unique to the South. 

Let's take a moment to get to know our speaker. Ellen Arnold is an environmental historian and senior lecturer in the Department of History at The Ohio State University. Before joining Ohio State, she was associate professor of History at the University of Stavanger, in Norway, where she was part of the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities. She was also professor of history at Ohio Wesleyan University, and a fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environmental Humanities. Ellen is a very prolific author in medieval environmental history and global water history. She's published books, including Negotiating the Landscape Environment and Monastic Identity in the Medieval Ardennes in 2013, Medieval Riverscapes: Environmental Meaning and Memory in Northwest Europe in 2024, and most recently, Water in World History, a small book about a big topic. She's now researching a new book, Strange Birds, a Human History of Penguins. And this talk is a sneak preview of what she's finding. 

With that introduction let me mention the plan. Professor Arnold will open with a presentation on our much beloved, if a bit stinky, penguins, and then she'll take your questions. If you're interested in asking a question, please write it in the Q& A function at the bottom of your screen with Zoom. We'll do our best to answer as many questions as we can. We received several questions in advance and as a reminder this event will be recorded and posted at a later date on YouTube and made available to everyone who has registered for the webinar. Also, we'd like to take a moment to acknowledge that the land The Ohio State University occupies is the ancestral and contemporary territory of the Shawnee, Potawatomi, Delaware, Miami, Peoria, Seneca, Wyandotte, Ojibwe and Cherokee peoples. Specifically the university resides on land ceded in the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, and the forced removal of tribes through the Indian Removal Act of 1830. We want to honor the resiliency of these tribal nations and recognize the historical context that have and continue to affect the indigenous peoples of this land. Now, without further ado, let me pass you over to Professor Arnold. Over to you, Ellen. 

Ellen Arnold: 
Thank you so much, Nick, for both the really kind introduction and also the invitation to join this group today. I am very excited to give you a little glimpse into some of the depth of the human relationship with penguins. And so I'd also like to acknowledge the amazing design work that the history department put together for this poster. It is incredibly cute. And that said, I want to start with giving everyone a chance to get the cuteness factor out, and everybody sort of say, oh, and let's recognize that we are now culturally embedded with a sort of sense of the cuteness and joy and delight and love of penguins. But this is not necessarily the whole history of our relationship with these strange birds. 

There are 18 species of penguins that populate the southern hemisphere, and the birds live not only in the Antarctic, but also in Southern Africa, Patagonia, the Galapagos, Australia, and New Zealand. Penguins today are recognized to all be part of the same family, Spheniscidae. The LOC World Bird List provides an international standard in which all 18 species of penguins are placed into 6 genre and ongoing. There is an ongoing argument over the number of penguin species that revolves around whether differences between different groups of crested penguins are significant enough to merit classification as separate species, or whether they're subgroups of a common species. I introduced this point because it's important for us to recognize that deciding where penguins fit and where species fit in the global web of animals is not a predetermined or uncontested thing. This modern debate is just the latest complication in a much longer attempt by scientists to understand the diversity and ecology of penguins and to figure out where they fit in that web of animal difference. And of course, we have not always known all about these birds though penguins were known to communities that lived alongside them. 

For most of history they were not objects of international exchange and the peoples who lived near them had also been relatively insulated from broad global networks. But today almost everyone around the world can imagine a penguin. So, the bigger question that I'm asking in my book is, “How did we get to the point that these birds which live in some of the most isolated parts of the world became a global phenomenon?” The earliest encounters between Europeans and penguins were unrecorded, brief and violent beginning in the late 1400s. As Portuguese sailors increased the range of their journeys around Africa, they began to encounter islands full of wildlife including some that were homes to year-round colonies of what we now call African penguins. Their habitat runs from modern-day Namibia all the way around the Cape. And so in 1503 when the sailors, piloting António de Saldanha's ship, anchored at what is now Robben Island they encountered a bounty of marine life including seals, which they called Robin, and that inspired the island's name. They also killed many birds, which are called sutilicarios and sea wolves and tortoises, of which there was great abundance. This word is a very rare one that appears practically only in this account. It's probably Portuguese in origin and in the earliest publications and translations of the account it is glossed by writers as being penguins. 

So possibly this account from 1503 is the earliest written evidence of penguins from anywhere in the world and it starts with people, as people tend to do, with strange things in nature. It starts with people eating them. Now around the same time, halfway around the world the Portuguese also encountered black and white, flightless, fatty birds while Magellan's crews worked their way through what are now called the Strait of Magellan. Antonio Pigafetta, a Venetian, who left the only descriptive account of Magellan's voyages, from which lasted from 1519 to 1522 described these birds, and this is the first full description that survives afterwards. 

“Following the same course towards the Antarctic pole. Going along the land, we found 2 islands full of geese and goslings and sea wolves of which geese the large number could not be reckoned for. We loaded all the 5 ships with them in an hour. These geese are black and have their feathers all over the body of the same size and shape and they do not fly and live upon fish, and they were so fat that we did not pluck them but skinned them. They have beaks like that of a crow.”

These 1st descriptions of penguins were quickly followed by more as European encounters with the Cape of Good Hope, Patagonia, and the Antarctic regions grew. Sir Francis Drake's crew encountered islands full of the birds within the Strait of Magellan. 

On August on 24, August, 1577, Francis Petty reported, “We arrived at an island in the Straits, where we found great store of fowl which could not fly of the bigness of geese, whereof we killed in less than one day 3,000, and victualled ourselves thoroughly therewith.” 

John Winter, one of the other captains on Drake's trip, was separated from the rest of the fleet and returned through the Straits to head back home. He and the crew of the Elizabeth had a second encounter with penguins, which was described by one of his mariners. “They have no wings, but only short pinions which served them in swimming. Being of a black color, mixed with white spots on their bellies, and round their necks they walk so upright that they seem afar like little children and when approached they conceal themselves in holes underground, not very deep of which the island is full to take them. We used sticks, having hooks fastened at one end, with which we pulled them out, while other men stood by with cudgels to knock them on the head for they bit so cruelly with their hooked bills that we could not handle them when alive.” 

The islands where such encounters happened were a group of nesting sites, quickly named by the sailors, the Penguin Islands. Today. They're the Magdalena Islands and are a site of natural conservancy. This account that I just read from also seems to be the first to introduce what would become a standard way for people to describe penguins because he compares them to both birds and fish. 

“This penguin is shaped like a bird having stumps only in place of wings, by which it swims underwater as swiftly as a fish in eating as in when people ate them. These penguins seem neither fish nor flesh.” 

He estimated that on a single visit to the island the men killed and dried 20,000 birds but were only able to load 14,000 of them onto the ship. Penguins are fatty birds, and if they are not consumed fresh, they can be either salted in barrels or speared on poles and left to wind dry in ways that are similar to traditional salt cod production or the drying racks for the North Sea stockfish. 

This image that you've been looking at is from a publication of the account of a Dutch voyage through the Straits. The trip was that of Sebald de Weert, whose ship endured a long and disastrous voyage. On their return home the hungry sailors arrived at Penguin Island, and they were able to kill and salt many penguins. They reported killing 900 in only 2 hours. But because of bad weather they were unable to return the next day to get the birds, and they were forced to leave them behind. Such written accounts were accompanied in print by drawings, but they were never made from life drawings. So the people writing down the trip voyage accounts did not simultaneously draw the birds or the landscapes and no living penguins made it back to Europe for several centuries. So instead, when these accounts were being published, the artists at home in Europe had to rely either just on the descriptions or on the descriptions plus preserved scientific specimens that had been brought back by the voyagers. 

This is a map of the southern point of South America, and the Strait of Magellan, that was published in 1601, so exactly one year after the publication of this engraving in the Dutch account. It accompanied a description of the voyage of another Dutchman, Olivier Van Noort, and, as you can see, the penguin is the only image on the land, and he's labeled Penguin. And he seems to draw direct inspiration from the image of the penguin hunt that I just showed you, this idea of the borrowing of an engraving of these birds. See here and here and then here. That same image was incorporated in 1605, into one of the earliest natural history books to include penguins. The book was called 10 Books of Exotics, and it surveyed the non-European plants and animals known to Europeans. The author, Clusius, included the Penguin, calling it an answer Magellanicus. This is an older, this is a Latinization of the name Magellanic Goose or Goose of Magellan and he based his description of penguins largely on these written Dutch accounts. But he blended the Portuguese and the Dutch encounters into one early history, explaining that Magellan's crew encountered a large number of marine birds which had come there to lay their eggs and to hatch them. He described many he borrowed from these descriptions and then recognized for his readers that he had limited knowledge, explaining, “I cannot see them.”

So he may not have seen a real bird, but he had seen these illustrations, and his book copied directly from them. He was able to put together a description of the birds as having black backs and white bellies, small little wings that are not good for flying, but for swimming, and black feet shaped like a goose. He offered an explanation for both. How the name came to be that because of how fat they were, they had called them penguins. I can discuss that more in the Q&A. And indeed, the island where they observed them in such number they have called Penguin Island. He also, though, tried to understand how penguins fit into the known order of nature. He said that they clearly belonged because of similarities in size and feet, structure, and beaks into the genus of gray geese. 

Almost a century after these earliest encounters that one image was still circulating as one of the lone authoritative drawings of these birds in 1660. In what would become a standard work of zoology, the Historia Naturalis, John Johnson used Clusias's earlier work. As his example, Johnson continued to call penguins Magellanic Geese. and noting that they are named after the place, the Strait of Magellan, but that the Dutch or Hollanders name it a penguardine, that is, fatness, possibly Penguin. 

By 1785, 200 years after Magellan's voyage, but just decades after Cook's voyages introduced people in the northern hemisphere to Australia and its own penguins, John Latham wrote a study of all the birds in the world. As you can see, the number of penguins had exploded as European trips. Number of types of penguins had exploded as European trips through the southern hemisphere became more frequent, and people began to recognize that there were, in fact, many kinds of penguins. Latham's account not only shows an expanded view of penguins, it also included a full discussion about how the penguins fit in with other birds in the world. And it introduces the final issue that I'm going to introduce you to briefly, and the one that dominated early scientific discussions of the birds, and that is the relationship between these birds and what may have been their northern counterparts. 

Latham writes, “This genus of birds seems to hold the same place in the southern parts of the world as the auk do in the northern and are by no means to be confounded the one with the other. However, authors may differ in opinion in respect to this matter. The penguin is seen only in the temperate and frigid zones on that side of the equator which it frequents. And the same is observed of the auk in the opposite latitudes and neither of the genera has yet been observed within the tropics. The auk has true wings and quills, though small, the penguin mere fins only, instead of wings.” 

Latham's assertive declaration that penguins and auks were unrelated, different species, strikes us today as common sense with what we know now of the distribution of these birds. But at the time this question of how the penguins of the world--and here I'll zoom back out to that full range of penguins that we now know exist--the separateness between these birds and auks was not as clear to the European sailors and scholars who began to encounter these birds because they were working, as everyone does within their own pre-existing frames of reference. In this case that was their long centuries of experience of sailing the North Seas, living along the north along the Atlantic coast board, and encountering generation after generation, the northern hemisphere's family of black and white seabirds Auks, or else today are a whole family of seabirds who inhabit the North Atlantic. And so, all of these seafarers would have been accustomed to not only encountering these birds on voyages, but to the fact that generations of people grew up eating these birds and eating their eggs. The most interesting point of this is not only their coloration, but the fact that although three of these common species look a lot like penguins who can fly, the razorbills, the little auks, and the Guillemots, all of which were hunted, eaten, and exploited for their eggs. But the fact that while these sailors were first encountering penguins, there was this historical moment when penguins coexisted alongside the great auk, known in Latin as the Penguinus Empenis or the not flying Penguin.

Again, I can come back to this issue of the Northern penguin, and the name of the Penguin in discussion if interested. But this bird was a large, flightless black and white seabird that was an expert swimmer, stood erect on land, and laid small nests of very few eggs that could be eaten and commercially exploited. This not only made them look a lot like penguin. This not only made people think a lot that they looked like penguins but also this history of eating the birds and their eggs eventually led them to become extinct in 1858, severing us today from the living memory of these other northern flightless birds. 

So what today for us seems like a real disconnect between species throughout the 16 and 1700s, scientists and sailors alike who are trying to figure out what penguins are, have this other living Northern example to compare the penguin to. As a result, this association between penguins and auks became deeply embodied, and we can even see this in the taxidermy of one of the very first King penguin specimens ever brought to Europe. This bird was brought to Europe in 1843, right before the extinction of the great auk. It's called the Tring Penguin. It's named for the Natural history collection that is in England. And it stands not in a way that we recognize as a penguin stance, but in the stance of a character of the characteristic posture of the Great Auk. This example of weird taxidermy was prepared, of course, by a taxidermist who had never seen a live penguin, or even a photograph of a King penguin, since photography was in its infancy in the 1840s, and the 1st Antarctic photographs don't come until 1913. And so, the penguin is stuffed, what looks like to us, awkwardly stretched as tall as the skin allowed with the legs fully extended, and this gives the bird an exaggerated elongation that bears little resemblance to common penguin postures. This bird, this string penguin really can stand in for some of this blurring of penguins with other birds and is a real reminder of the way that, as Europeans met penguins figured out how to use them and worked to understand where they fit in the larger scheme of the world. They had other animals and other species in mind as well. 

The way that these birds then fit into the European imagination is part of this longer story of the relationship between people and penguins, and how the ways that we understood the birds changed over time. and how these changes reflect broader changes in the way that we understand nature and our place in it. And so, I will stop with that. 

Nicholas Breyfogle:
Thank you so much, Ellen. That was, I mean, it's fascinating to hear about the origins of our kind of thoughts about penguins. Particularly given how different it is in terms of how we think about them today. So, thank you so much for that. We will open things up for questions from folks who are here. If you're interested in asking a question, please just type it into the to the Q&A at the Q&A button at the bottom. And let me. We've had one come in and I've got just a couple of questions I want to ask that came in from beforehand. One has to do with the questions that were submitted on registration. But one has to do with kind of the movies about penguins. 

So one of our, one of the folks here talked about how they have recently watched the movie, My Penguin Friend, and apparently it was a very interesting and engaging movie and focuses on the relationship between a penguin and a fisherman. There's another film coming out next year, Penguin Lessons or something like that. Anyways, there seems to be a new genre of penguin friendship and penguin human films, and I guess my question is, to what degree do penguins, have we seen a history of penguins as sort of as friends, as pets, as companions? Is this something brand new in our early 21st century that we're starting to tell these kinds of stories about humans and penguins? Or is there a longer tradition for that? 

Ellen Arnold:
There is a much longer tradition of that. The nature of it has obviously changed. And that's something that I'm going to be looking at is in part how we started to see some penguins as individual penguins, instead of one of 20,000 that are killed and butchered and eaten. Right. Part of this is about which animals people are capable of seeing, not capable, which animals people choose to see as individual animals with unique personalities, life stories, and biographies, or which animals are seen as interchangeable for a long time. Penguins fit this latter category for a long time, for most of the people who 1st encounter them.

Penguins are 20,000 of the same thing. The individuals are merely calories, individual birds to be eaten, to be navigated, to be negotiated, to be stolen from, but very soon, like by the 1600s already there are people who are trying to capture penguins and bring them, keep them on board ships because they are curiosities, and this is part of the great imperial story of the colonization of the New World, of course. But there's early attempts right off the bat of people to take one or two of these birds, put them on the ship, watch them walk around like silly little comic animals and try to keep them alive and feed them. They all very quickly die. But right off the bat we're seeing people choose some of these individuals to have a special relationship with. It does take a while for people to figure out how to keep penguins alive in captivity. So these success, these stories are often very short lived, and they're always stories of the relationship between people and captive birds. 

I think one of the things that some of our newer stories are doing is trying to show penguins as choosing to have a relationship with us rather than us choosing to take a penguin out of their context and befriend them. These stories of pet penguins kind of increase with the increase of Antarctic exploration, because for a lot of the story people encounter penguins. While the people are in motion and moving, they encounter them briefly and move on. By the time we get to the Heroic Age of Polar Exploration people are stuck on ice floes. People are stuck at winter camp, people are spending months, if not years, next to penguins, and therefore they start to actually have longer-term relationships with the birds as food, as fuel, but also as diversion and entertainment. And they do start to adopt individual penguins. Sometimes those adopted penguins are actually then killed. So it's the penguin friend is a complicated story, but one that we see really early on.

Nicholas Breyfogle:
No, it's really interesting. Let me follow up with that. We have. I'm going to put together a couple of questions that are big ones and my apologies. You'll have a lot to say, I think, about both. But they really, both these questions, have to do with in our sort of how our understandings of penguins have changed over time. But so could you talk a little bit more about the cultural fascination with penguins and how it's changed up through time, kind of through to the present? When was it that penguins came to be seen as cute little people birds? At what point did they, you know, did that happen? And sorry? And I'm going to lump all these together for you. But then also how, excuse me, so what has been the kind of history of the relationship between kind of our obsession with penguins, particularly thinking about the penguins should be in zoos or penguins should be in videos or penguins, or things to go as tourists to go see? How does that all develop so many different kinds of topics? But I think there's curiosity to see. Where do we go from this moment that you've been talking about as we've been shifting up into more recent times? 

Ellen Arnold:
Yes, I was just looking to see if I could really quick find a particular image. But speed is oh, there it is! Speed is loading. So I'm going to show you one of the earliest sort of people bird images that I've found so far. Let me, while I'm figuring out how to answer the question, I'm going to distract you with a not very cute penguin. So this one here is part of a map of the Strait of Magellan with the Indigenous communities, local plants, and then a penguin person, viewed at the same size as people, and in a decidedly human gait. But the one of the accounts that I read from where they're describing these birds for the first time points out as early as the 1500s that when you look at them from afar they look like little kids. They look like human children. This does not stop people from killing them for a long time. But right off the bat, the upright posture of the birds, and their unique silhouette from a distance, which is actually how most people first encounter them, people come up on their islands, on their rookeries, on their breeding sites from on board a ship. And it's not until they go out to those islands and then are on ground and interacting with the birds, one on one that we get the more intimate histories. But people see them from afar, and there's a bunch of stories in Antarctic exploration of people seeing penguins from afar and kind of in an oasis effect, thinking that they're people. And so this link between penguins and little people is made pretty much right off the bat. 

It takes a long time for that to become cute little people, and it's the shift from little people who we’re then gonna kill and eat because we're hungry, too. Oh, look at these cute little people, animals! Wouldn't it be neat to let people see them? And that link really comes with the birth of the modern Zoo. It is even the people who try to bring penguins back are trying to do it initially for scientists they're under. Many of these voyages have naturalists like Charles Darwin, who encounters penguins in his travels, who travel with the boats, and are in charge of cataloging and killing as many animals as they can, to bring back as skins and skeletons to naturalists who are writing the kinds of books that I was showing you. And so, even while they're saying, Oh, how interesting they look like little people! they talk to us even as people start to encounter penguins. They walk up to us and they stand next to us, and they're curious about us, and they seem to want to talk to us, and then they kill them and eat them, or stuff them or send them back. So even the earliest penguins are coming back alive because scientists want to see them alive. It takes a while for that to transition to scientists want to see them alive. They get live penguins, and then the live penguins are kept by scientific bodies, because these earliest zoos often start out as collections of scientific organizations. And as that shift happens, more people see penguins more people have the reaction we all have of. “Oh, my goodness, what strange little birds! Look! How cute they are! Look how much they look like us! Look! Look at they’re, they're curious, they're engaged. They want to be our friends.” And so, this kind of leads more and more zoos then to want penguins, because people respond so well to them. And this creates a whole demand cycle, right? That makes more and more. People want to try to bring penguins back alive into the northern hemisphere, which really doesn't happen until the late 1800s. But then zoos and then photography, zoos first, then photography, then motion pictures all start to create a wider audience than just the scientific scholars that are writing these early books. And that steamrolls into popularity of penguins and eventually penguin protection schemes is, is part of the kind of love that we have for penguins. Does it come out of the fact that they have behaviors that seem, I'm going to say, this sort of very self-focused, but seem sort of almost human. 

You know, we tend to like other species that kind of do things that we do. So just thinking about the kind of penguin pebbles and the ways of expressing, seemingly of expressing love or partnership, or something that seems that you don't see in every species are those things that have, that is, that part of the attraction for people. That absolutely becomes part of the attraction. The penguin behaviors, the ways that penguins stand out as individuals in a crowd is also part of the compellingness of them for us. It takes us a long time to recognize that, and it takes generations of people encountering these birds to start to spend enough time with the colonies to understand the cycles of bird breeding, to understand the ways that penguins have in the absence of us. And it's not it. It's interestingly, it's around the same time that the, it's again the Heroic Age of Polar Exploration, is putting polar explorers on the cultural map and those polar explorers are spending months next to incredibly loud, incredibly stinky, penguin colonies and the scientists on those expeditions start taking notes and start watching bird behavior. 

One of the earliest publications of photos of the Antarctic, it's called The Great White South and it was by one of the people who was on the failed Terra Nova voyage, where Scott died trying to make it to the North Pole, the South Pole, oops. That's also another story is penguins imagined as being in the North Pole. But I digress. So, Scott dies on the way to try to get to the North Pole on that same expedition. There's the famous worst journey in the world, where three men are able to go for the very first time to an Emperor penguin breeding colony while there are eggs. But at the same time there's another scientist and photographer there who's tracking penguin life in a land-based colony for a whole year. He takes lots of photos. He comes back. He publishes all these photos, including a whole series of photos of penguin nesting and penguin pebbling, that thieving of pebbles to give to a mate. That's not all penguin species, but the ones that he observed did it. And these photos got published and printed widely and accessible in slideshows, and he also took moving picture tapes of this, and he started to publicize this story of penguin breeding and penguin partnering and penguin families in a way that captured the late Victorian imagination which was already looking to nature for models of human behavior. He's also the one who kept records of things that Victorians would have seen as deviant penguin sexuality. But those didn't get published and those were recently discovered. Actually, his notes were discovered in 2021 in an archive, but this account started out the fascination of the media for these behaviors that penguins have, that we look to and see our own interest in partnership and child rearing, and the story of the ways that Penguins court, that penguins partner mistakenly believed to be monogamous for life. Not true, but miss, but understood that way and the ways in which penguins cared for the young became a big part of the conversation of penguins. That lasts all the way up until today with March of the Penguins and the Penguin documentaries, and even the controversies in recent zoo history over what happens when male penguins partner up and hatch eggs. So that that human behaviors, whether or not penguins have behaviors that resemble humans, we have looked at them for lessons about how we should act for quite a long time now. 

Nicholas Breyfogle:
That's amazing. Let me add two more specific questions here. So one of our viewers would really love to know, when did humans stop eating penguins? And then also, could you talk a little bit about what knowledge of penguins was like outside of Europe? Do we see? Yeah, what did they know before? Do we see a parallel kind of experience outside of Europe, as well? 

Ellen Arnold:
So first part is shockingly recently. Penguin eggs get eaten a little longer than penguins. But penguins were a staple source of food for Southern seafaring people. Whether that is Arctic Antarctic explorers or whaling ships. Penguins were actually a giant byproduct of the whaling expeditions that dominated the history of the Southern seas well into the 1800s. Robben Island, where we started with the, maybe the very 1st European encounters, was not only a place where Indigenous communities ate the penguins and their eggs, but eventually it becomes a whaling station, and it becomes a place where penguins are slaughtered, not just as food for the people who are the whaling crews who are based in those islands while they render down the whales. 

So penguins are eaten by those people, but then the penguins are also, the blubber is converted into oil and mixed into the whale oil. That goes on well into the 1800s, and it's the big mass slaughter of penguins that starts to attract international outrage by the late mid- to late-1800s. As whaling is coming under scrutiny as well, the mass slaughter of penguins gets wrapped up in that. Yet at the same time polar explorers continue to eat penguins left and right. It's the only fresh food available other than seals, and so at the same time that the people on Scott's Terra Nova expedition are watching penguins, they're also killing them and eating them. And there's cookbooks from Antarctic explorations, European and Japanese, because Japan's also involved in polar exploration, of the best ways to cook penguin. Penguin eggs get eaten by local communities well up until 1913. Well, no? Well, well into the world wars. People are eating penguin eggs. There's actually a market for penguin eggs in South Africa. That's a steady demand market of African penguin eggs as part of the daily cuisine of Southern Africa. Well into the world wars also up until the world wars, South Africa's Government tries to create a market for penguin eggs in England and America. And in fact, penguin eggs, there was a giant controversy at one of the Chicago Democratic Presidential conventions about whether or not penguin eggs should be eaten by the delegates as part of a fancy hotel brunch, so eaten a lot longer than we expect them to be. 

It's, in fact, not until 19, I'm going to punt on this, the 1970s, that the Cites Treaty, the Treaty on the protection of internationally endangered species and birds, the Antarctic treaty in the forties, protected Antarctic penguins, but penguins exist in nonpolar settings. Those penguins aren't formally legally protected until the 70s. So now no one can eat penguins or penguin eggs. 

But it's brand new and bringing Japan into the conversation gets at that second question. We do not have any written evidence of penguins before European encounters. This is a product of the fact that many of the Indigenous, all the communities that lived near natural penguin colonies are in categories that we would today categorize as Indigenous communities, and they're prehistoric communities. They are communities with rich oral histories and oral traditions, but no written tracks for us to see their views. And so, from the very first time that we see penguins in the historic record, we're seeing it through the eyes of the European colonizers. And as part of this project, I have not yet done this work, but part of what I am going to be doing is digging more deeply into networks of Indigenous knowledge, to try to understand what stories are handed down, especially in New Zealand and Australia. I think that's the clearest way that we're going to have a link. I've also got a connection to someone who is Indigenous, who grew up in Patagonia, and so going to try to figure out some of the traditional ecological knowledge that has endured across the centuries of these birds. But there's not a lot. Most of our story does have to perforce be one of post-colonial expansion, the other colonizing powers, including those in Asia also do get interested in penguins. And America is very quickly incorporated, First as parts of England, but then Americans, all on their own in their own fascination with the birds. And so really, what I'm really fascinated with is the flip from all of these birds naturally existing in the southern hemisphere to all of these great northern hemisphere, colonial powers becoming so invested in penguins that they now are truly global birds. 

Nicholas Breyfogle:
So, in that sense do we see today the same kind of cultural fascination with stuffed penguins or penguins at zoos or tourism to penguin locations on the part of people all over the world, I mean, has this sort of Northern infatuation now become a much more global phenomenon? 

Ellen Arnold:
Yes, the penguins are literally all over the world. And not, with industrialization, that's the story that I didn't talk about at all, part of the story is the story of industrialization, whaling and sealing and penguining to the extent it was possible that it happened, was only possible post-industrialization with the mass factory ships and the factory slaughter. And the production of the need for hunting whales and penguins and seals to provide oil to fuel industrialization that also led to ships that could travel faster and get penguins back alive also led to refrigeration that could keep habitats cold enough for penguins to survive. And the ability to keep penguins alive in captivity is closely tied to modernization and industrialization, and the all the things that come along with that in terms of creating artificial habitats. And so by the post-war years, with the post-war electrification of the world, really, that made penguins able to be kept really widely. And now there's penguins in Pigeon Forge. There's penguins at Niagara Falls. There's penguins in Dubai at artificial ski slopes. There's penguins in any aquarium worth the price of admission now anywhere in the world has to have at least one kind of penguin. And the post war electrification, and then the post 1980s just zoom, like mega investment ,all around the world in zoos has meant that really these birds are all over the place. There was also a giant commercial market in live penguins between the 1880s and the 1930s. And so yeah, Ripley's Believe It or Not has penguins. Seaworld had penguins And so they're really, they're all around the world now. 

Nicholas Breyfogle:
Amazing. Let me give you a kind of lightning round of three more precise questions. So one question is to ask you to talk a little bit about the chronology of the mis association of the penguins and the auks. Were the North Atlantic encounters with the auks contemporary, proceeding after? How does this timing shape the confused scientific association of the two species? And then is there any? So now we're shifting to tuxedos? Is there any relationship of these penguins to the origin of the tuxedo and 3rd question, is there any relationship of these kinds of penguins, or your story here to the success of the Beatrix Potters children's books about rabbits, and other kinds of, you know, animal hero stories? So totally, 3 totally different ones, but more focused in their questioning.

Ellen Arnold: 
Timing the auks are coincident with this entire early history of penguins, auks, great auks had been hunted, the flightless ones had been hunted and used in all over the North Atlantic since the Middle Ages. There's evidence of medieval Icelandic auk hunting. So the great Auks human experience goes all the way up until the 1840s, when they go extinct. And so all of the people writing about penguins and auks can very easily meet someone who has seen a living auk and a living great auk, and in fact, one of the early naturalists has one as a pet.

 So that is coincident and part of the push for penguin protection comes when not just, we figure out that the dodo went extinct, but when the great auk does go extinct. The extinction of that species drives some real fear amongst naturalists that flightless birds in particular are strikingly vulnerable. And there's several other flightless birds that go extinct over the course of the early 1800s. So that is a coincidental story. Interestingly, the word auk does not exist until penguins are discovered and brought into the conversation. The English word auk is first in the 1700s, because these birds are actually just called, the auks are called penguins. And it's then the people who meet the penguins say, Oh, wow! Hey! These are penguins. Like saying, Oh, hey! These are songbirds, or Hey! These are geese, it's like, oh, oh, hey! These are penguins, and they start to be called southern penguins, and then the auks are started to be called northern penguins, and eventually they become known as they become called auks, probably related to another local name, but that whole distinction doesn't even exist until penguins get thrown in the mix. It's really interesting to unravel, because you realize how many different competing ideas of what a bird is are coexisting for these people. The so coincidental auks see? Those. Okay. Penguin suits penguin suits. I do not know the history of the tuxedo, however well before we see penguins described as birds in formal wear which is probably going to start around the 1920s we see penguins described as being in military uniform. And that's actually the earlier link of penguins and human dress, and that goes into another whole phenomenon of the way that people experience penguins, which is the Penguin parade. And so penguins are seen as marching in parade, in formation, in lines all looking uniform. This becomes seen as penguins being in military garb, and that military marching orders. That's the thing that's linked first, and then we see penguins in formal wear, penguins in suits, penguins as waiters, as tuxedos become less common, and only waiters start to wear them. Then penguins are waiters, and that makes its way into advertisement which makes its way into this whole popularization of the Penguin, the cool cigarette penguin. That's a penguin holding a tray full of cigarettes. Moving around is based on this idea of the penguin as servant or waiter, which is where the tuxedo eventually shifts. So yeah. 

And then the 3rd was? 

Nicholas Breyfogle:
Beatrix Potter stories and other animals. Any thoughts, just maybe in the last minute on that? 

Ellen Arnold:
Penguins slot neatly into a Victorian and Edwardian attempt to see in nature reflections of our own morals. One of the things that I'm working on right now is tracking the appearance of penguins in children's books. And Beatrix Potter is a domestic version of a trend that's going on right across Victorian and Edwardian writing of using nature as a mirror for human behavior and particularly using nature as a mirror for good children, for good childhoods and how to raise children. There’re all sorts of children's books about how babies, how different animals raise their babies. There's all sorts of attempts right around the same time that Beatrix Potter is writing to look at all sorts of wild animals as each providing moral lessons which brings us full circle to why a medievalist can even try to tell this story is that that's actually a thing that is rooted in a medieval European attempt to classify the whole world into being part of a book of nature that God created for people to learn to read, to understand the lessons of Christianity and of morality. And these get wrapped up neatly in the 1200s, in books called bestiaries, where all the known and imagined animals in the whole world are described, along with the Bible verses and scriptural lessons that these animals are believed to reflect. Sadly, the penguin never gets added into the medieval bestiary. but the penguin in many ways becomes one of the hallmarks of this kind of modern bestiary, where we're trying to use penguins to understand how we need to act in our world. 

Nicholas Breyfogle:
Marvelous. We have much to learn from the penguins, and we have learned a great deal from you today, Ellen, thank you so much for sharing your expertise and the fascinating stories that you have about Europeans’ early encounters with penguins and about penguins in general. I hope everybody here will join me in giving Dr. Arnold a big virtual round of applause. Thank you. Thank you also for all of you who have joined us today, and for your excellent questions, and we'd also like to thank the College of Arts and Sciences, especially Alex Stacklane, the Department of History, the Clio Society, the Goldberg Center, and Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective for their support of this and other events in this series. Stay safe and healthy, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. Goodbye, and we'll see you next time.