1887-88.] Recent Notes on tJie Great Auk. 105 



The following is what appears, and probably refers to the Great 

 Auk: "The wobble is an ill -shaped fowl, having no long 

 feathers in their pinions, which is the reason they cannot fly, — 

 not much unlike the Penguin. They are in the spring very 

 fat, or rather oyly ; but pulled and garbidged, and laid to the 

 fire to roast, they yield not one drop." Josselyn appears to 

 have lived eight years in Scarborough, a hundred leagues east 

 of Boston. This was probably in the neighbourhood of Casco 

 Bay, in which locality the Great Auk was at one time used by 

 the ancient inhabitants for food, its remains having been found 

 in shell-heaps. Professor F. W. Putnam of the Peabody 

 Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard 

 University, Cambridge, Mass., in a footnote in connection with 

 a paper by Professor James Orton which appeared in the 

 ' American Naturalist,' vol. iii. p. 540, says : — 



That the Great Auk was once very abundant on our New England 

 shores is proved beyond a doubt by the large number of its bones that 

 have been found in the ancient " shell-heaps " scattered along the coast 

 from British America to Massachusetts. The " old hunter " who told 

 Audubon of its having been found at Nahunt was vmdoubtedly correct in 

 his statement, as we have bones of the species taken from the shell-heaps 

 of Marblehead, Eaglehead in Ipswich, and Plumb Island ; and Mr Elliot 

 Cabot has informed me that an old fisherman living in Ipswich described 

 a bird to him that was captured by his father in Ipswich many years ago, 

 which, from the description, Mr Cabot was convinced was a specimen of 

 the Great Auk. 



I am indebted to Mr Frederic A. Lucas of the United States 

 National Museum, Washington, D.C., for the following extract 

 from the ' Gloucester Telegraph,' August 7, 1839, taken from 

 the ' Salem Eegister,' no date given : — 



All the mackerel-men who arrive report the scarcity of this fish, and at 

 the same time I notice an improvement in taking them with nets at Cape 

 Cod and other places. If this speculation is to go on without being 

 checked or regulated by the Government, will not these fish be as scarce 

 as Penguins are, which were so plenty before the Revolutionary war that 

 our fishermen could take them with their gaff's 1 But during the war some 

 mercenary and cruel individuals used to visit the islands on the eastern 

 shore, where were the haunts of these birds for breeding, and take them 

 for the sake of the fat, which they procured, and then let the birds go. 

 This proceeding finally destroyed the whole race. It is many years since I 

 have heard or seen one except on the coast of Cape Horn. — A Fisherman. 



It seems, however, exceedingly probable that the Great Auk 



