THE GREAT AUK. 115 



on the coast of Waterford. The bird was first seen close to the 

 yawl of a fisherman, and apparently in a starved condition ; for 

 on his holding out some sprats to it, it came close to the boat 

 for them. This may, however, have been only that the bird 

 was so little accquainted with man, and quite corresponds with 

 the ancient accounts of its stupid character. Another bird of 

 the species, probably the mate of this, was shortly afterwards 

 procured in the same locality, but was not preserved. 



In Northern and North-Eastern Europe, the Great Auk is 

 equally rare. According to Benicke, a specimen of the Great 

 Auk was shot in 1794, in the harbour of Kiel in Holstein; and 

 in 1838, another bird of the species was killed in the neighbour- 

 hood of Freidrikstadt. It seems almost certain, too, that in 

 1848 a Great Auk was shot on the island of Wardoe, within 

 the Arctic Circle, by one of the peasants there. It is possible 

 that this bird formerly even bred in Denmark, for portions of its 

 skeleton have been found and recognized in the so-called 

 ^'Kjokken Moddinger," the remnants of the repasts of the 

 aborigines of that country. The bird seems, therefore, in former 

 times to have been widely distributed on the Atlantic coasts ; 

 but its principal habitat was undoubtedly on the eastern coasts 

 of Newfoundland and Labrador. Possibly, in earlier times, it 

 was much more numerous on the eastern shores of the great 

 Atlantic Ocean; but, on the other hand, the few scattered indi- 

 viduals that have appeared on our shores, and in the Faroe and 

 Orkney Isles, may have been originally driven by stress of 

 weather from the American coast, and have settled down on 

 the rocks that they had taken refuge on. On the Newfound- 

 land fishing-banks, the Great Auk was two centuries ago 

 to be found in great abundance. Its appearance was always 

 hailed by the mariner ai^proaching that desolate coast as the 

 first indication of his having reached soundings on the fishing - 

 banks. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these 

 waters, as well as the Iceland and Faroe coasts, were annually 

 visited by hundreds of ships from England, France, Spain, 

 Holland, and Portugal; and these ships actually were ac- 

 customed to provision themselves with the bodies and Qp;<rs of 



