SEA-BIRD NUMBERS AND MAN 75 



miles from Kirkjuvogur to Eldey; the sea was rough, and only three 

 men could get ashore, SigurSur Islefsson, Jon Brandsson and Ketil 

 Ketilsson. They found two garefowls and an egg. Ketilsson smashed 

 the Ggg, 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 Reyk- 

 javik, Moller. 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, Gunnbjorn 

 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 Snaefell Peninsula of Iceland, and now thought (G. Holm, 19 18) 

 to be Leif's and Erik den R0de's Islands north-east of Angmagssalik. 

 It was from Snaefellsnes that Erik the Red set sail in 982 to found the 

 first European colony in the New World — and he navigated west to 

 Gunnbjorn'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 Gunnbjorn and Erik sailed to, or by, 

 Gunnbjorn'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 Latra Clemens from 

 Adalsvik 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 



* Grieve quotes a date 1652, but this refers to a voyage of David Danells on this 

 coast, on which he did not visit Gunnbjorn's skerries, and could not have done so 

 because of the ice. 



