Victorians, Volcanoes and Vanishing Species: The Great Auk’s Tragic Story

In the spring of 1848, two British naturalists, John Wolley and Alfred Newton, sailed to Iceland, propelled by equal measures of ambition and desperation. Their quarry was not just any creature but the great auk—a bird as ungainly as its name, rendered almost mythical by its absence. The great auk, or gare-fowl, as it was then quaintly known, had long since vanished from the bustling colonies of Greenland and Newfoundland, leaving only whispers of its existence in the desolate landscape of Eldey, a volcanic outcrop off the Icelandic coast. Wolley and Newton, with their Victorian predilection for collecting curiosities, hoped to glimpse—perhaps even claim—a living specimen. What they found instead was a sobering lesson in the fragility of life.

In The Last of Its Kind, Icelandic anthropologist Gísli Pálsson explores the poignant story of the great auk’s extinction through the lens of these two redoubtable Victorian naturalists, Wolley and Newton.

The Victorian Age was a time of plucky expeditions and insatiable curiosity, when naturalists scoured the farthest reaches of the globe in pursuit of specimens for their burgeoning Wunderkammern. These ‘cabinets of curiosities’ brimmed with relics of a world simultaneously discovered and dismantled: skeletons, feathers, and eggs, all lovingly catalogued for science (or vanity). What these collectors did not understand—or refused to consider—was the toll their endeavours exacted on the very species they sought to preserve. Extinction, they believed, was the work of nature, a preordained inevitability. If a creature could no longer be found, the thinking went, it must simply have moved elsewhere, to some uncharted corner of the map. Iceland, for Wolley and Newton, was that elusive elsewhere.

Yet mid-19th century Iceland was itself a study in precarity. The island’s rugged terrain offered little in the way of sustenance, and its people lived on the brink—farming poor soil, braving the Arctic chill, and casting their fates upon treacherous seas. Fishermen often rowed out to Eldey or Great Auk Skerry, not for sport but survival. There, they hunted the great auk, whose feathers and meat fetched a price in foreign markets. Wolley and Newton, through careful inquiry and conversation, uncovered a grim truth: a volcanic eruption in 1830 had decimated Great Auk Skerry’s nesting grounds, and the last breeding pair on Eldey had been slaughtered in 1844. The great auk was not merely rare; it was gone.

The Last of Its Kind weaves a meticulous narrative of loss, curiosity, and the dawning realization of humanity’s role in extinction. With a deft anthropologist’s touch, Pálsson recounts how John Wolley and Alfred Newton, Victorian naturalists driven by the era’s insatiable hunger for discovery, embedded themselves within the rhythms of Icelandic life. They sketched, interviewed, and chronicled the stories of fishermen and villagers who had witnessed the great auk’s tragic decline. This immersive approach feels strikingly modern, a precursor to contemporary ethnographic methods.

Wolley would die the following year, his grand adventure cut short by illness. Newton, undeterred, devoted his life to avian protection, becoming an early advocate for conservation. His realization—that humanity bore responsibility for the auk’s extinction—was revolutionary in its time, though tragically prescient.

But, perhaps the last word, should be saved for Ketill Ketilson, who had rowed to Eldey in 1844 with other local men and who has since, with no real evidence, come to be known as the man who had killed the last great auk. But family lore says different, that “his head failed him” at that moment, that he could not bring himself to kill that last bird. Let’s hope all our heads fail us in the future!

Shortlisted for the Royal Society of London Science Book Prize, The Last of Its Kind is a sobering elegy to a vanished species and a call to reevaluate humanity’s role in the natural world. I cannot recommend it too highly. Though academic in scope, the book is eminently readable, its prose sharp and accessible even as it occasionally loops back to hammer home its central theme: in the Anthropocene, species like the great auk will continue to vanish unless humanity recalibrates its relationship with the natural world. It is a sobering refrain, delivered with the kind of urgency that lingers long after the final page.

(The author is a novelist with an abiding passion for Chinese history.)