Sean Harris is visual artist and animator, commissioned by the Curious Travellers 2 Project to make collaborative art based on Thomas Pennant’s works with the pupils of Ysgol y Llan in Whitford. Here he reflects on his long-running relationship with one of the most fascinating birds in Pennant’s Zoologies – the now-extinct Great Auk.

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How can we truthfully represent a being which lies beyond our lived experience? Or, for that matter, a creature which still inhabits our immediate sphere? This is a challenge that faced Thomas Pennant, traveller in external landscapes, and which I myself face today, as an artist engaged in more internalized forms of journeying. Pennant, it seems, had his struggles in the matter just as I do, and had readers very willing to point out his failures:

The British Zoology part the 2d. & another Copy for Mr. Tindale I have received. The figures are in general well done, but two very common Birds are so very ill executed that I fear it will bring a Discredit on the whole. These are the wood Pigeon or Ring Dove, & the Bull finch. They are not at all proportioned to the size of the natural Birds. The Wood Pigeon I thought a bird of Prey by its attitude, & could by no means guess what it was on account of its bulk. You will excuse my censuring freely what I think wrong in the work as I wish it well.

Daniel Lysons to Thomas Pennant, May 1764

Feedback, whilst valuable, can be vexing. Today, most people’s answer would be simply to pick up a camera or go online. And of course, we now have the very considerable advantage of being able to generate and source moving images. However, having dedicated the greater part of a career as a visual artist, animator, and filmmaker to the creation of works concerned with culturally resonant animals, I can categorically state that it’s not that straightforward. Try finding a photo – or clip – of the curlew, the horse, the salmon, the hyaena, the wild boar… that is to say, the image which all at once perfectly conveys the being’s form, its distinctive movement, its colour within an ever-shifting light field, its relationship with other beings; its meaning. What animals mean to us is a matter of cultural conditioning and always changing. Take the extinct Thylacine (or Tasmanian Tiger): once, to colonists, this was a snarling predator with a bounty on its head, but now in the post-colonial era it is a lonely being occupying still, silent spaces, evoking the twenty-first-century concept of the ‘Endling’.

I have an on-going preoccupation with another species of our rapidly growing necrofauna: the great auk. In my quest to ‘re-animate’ this icon of extinction, Thomas Pennant’s oeuvre has become an increasingly important way-marker. When in 1766 Pennant included the great auk (under the name ‘Penguin’) in the first, luxurious edition of British Zoology, it was still extant, albeit in significant decline: as a valuable resource which needed preserving, it had already been afforded legal protection. In this edition, the species is not awarded an illustration by Pennant, instead being solely represented by a somewhat brief verbal description.

In the same year Joseph Banks undertook the voyage to Newfoundland which was to make his name as a naturalist. Here, on the 7th/8th May he recorded ‘Penguins’ on the Grand Banks and apparently collected one in Chateau Bay, Labrador. Banks later lent Pennant many bird skins gathered in the course of the expedition – including the now-extinct ‘Eskimo curlew’: it may be that a great auk skin was among them. The nomenclatural revision evident in Pennant’s 1776 British Zoology – whereby the species is presented for the first time as the ‘GREAT AUK’ – might have been informed by a physical encounter with Banks’ specimen. If this was the case, it is not immediately apparent in the newly inserted illustration or the accompanying text, which still leans heavily on Martin Martin’s account of a 1697 journey to St. Kilda. The engraving, by Peter Paillou, is obviously derived from an earlier (1738) watercolour by Charles Collins which, in being rendered with such clarity, clearly references a very dead taxidermy specimen or skin. Presumably the engraving was commissioned so as to enable reproduction within the new more manageable (and marketable) British Zoology – though Paillou or his technician felt it unnecessary to reverse the image on the plate to remain faithful to Collins’ original (which is pragmatic but perhaps, speaking as a printmaker, a bit lazy). Both images share the rather strange quality of a bird that is somehow overlaid on its watery environment – rather than being immersed in it – in order to convey the anatomy of the specimen in its entirety.

This paddling bird stands apart from the overwhelming majority of great auk illustrations, which tend to show the species standing upright like a southern hemisphere penguin – as is the case in The Ornithology of Francis Willughby, with which Pennant was deeply familiar. There, it was represented by an engraving showing Ole Worm’s pet bird from the Faeroe Islands (1655). This vertically inclined depiction, perhaps rooted in the anthropomorphic appeal of both the penguin and great auk, does reflect the likely nature of more prolonged auk sightings on remote skerries. But it does not convey the reality of the great auk as a true ocean dweller, which spent the overwhelming majority of its annual cycle engaged in a bobbing migration on Atlantic currents.

At the time Pennant was assembling his Zoology the majority of encounters with the species beyond the slaughter grounds off Newfoundland would have been with birds in the water: the great auk only came onto land for a few weeks in the early summer to breed. Having undertaken his Scottish tours in the decade between the publication of the 1766 and 1776 editions of the Zoology, Pennant had certainly come closer to the coasts where it still lingered. It seems likely that anecdotal accounts concerning the bird and its behaviour might have brought it more immediately into his sphere of thought – and also influenced his choice of illustration. Though atypical amongst portrayals of the great auk, Pennant’s version – if one is seeking to distill the bird’s being into a single representative image – is probably closer to the truth than we are generally presented with.

My own animated work about the bird (which similarly draws on a diverse array of sources) seeks to convey the duality of the great auk: as both ‘auk-ward’ landlubber and vivacious and graceful torpedo capable of outpacing a boat rowed by many men. My birds also incubate in the horizontal position, reflecting ornithologist Tim Birkhead’s investigation of ‘brood patches’ – bald spots in the breast feathers for nestling the egg – in taxidermy specimens.

But what of the meaning of the bird?

Pennant’s overarching view of interspecies and Indigenous/colonial relations seems clearly articulated in his reflection (in Arctic Zoology) on the American bison and its relationship with Native American tribes. The latter group, he observes, ‘whilst at war with the animal creation…never thought of conquering those of the brute creation, and rendering them subservient to their will’. The (still undomesticated) American bison and the Plains tribes very narrowly escaped extinction – but the great auk and the Beothuks of Newfoundland did not. Their extirpation was precipitated, in the case of the auk, by the perception of them as little more than a floating pillow factory and drive-in fast food facility for North Atlantic sailors and whalers – and in the case of the Beothuk as a human obstacle to the ‘superior’ culture’s extractive objectives. In commenting thus on the relationship between ‘the savage’ and the bison, Pennant appears to express the enlightened agriculturalist’s paradigm of nature subjugated in order to maximise yield and thereby generate a surplus.

Nevertheless, Pennant’s great auk reflects an important marker in a paradigm shift precipitated by the realisation that a species could vanish; and therefore that a ‘resource’ could in fact become exhausted and disappear altogether. By the time John James Audubon – whose great auk pair, depicted in his Birds of America, provide the principal reference for my own ‘re-animated’ colony – set sail in search of a specimen in 1833, the species had long gone from Newfoundland and he had no option but to resort to taxidermy for reference.

Several decades later, in 1860, the Cambridge University zoologist Alfred Newton (who dismissed Audubon’s efforts as ‘a daub’) and John Wolley arrived in Iceland hoping to acquire a great auk specimen. But they were to leave with only an archive of memories, along with a record of the last human encounter with a breeding pair – a remarkable and (to us) brutally direct account of the moment when the anima of a species was snuffed out. The Garefowl Books – a collection of handwritten notes taken during interviews with the men who took the last auk pair – constitute an absorbing and thought-provoking memorial that has deeply informed my own work. This scrutiny of an archival source perhaps echoes Pennant’s reference throughout his work not just to matters of animal anatomy and behaviour, but to their contemporary cultural relevance and history. In this way, for me he stands not just as a naturalist, but as precursor to the best of modern nature writing.

For an animator the ‘truth’ of an animal’s being lies not so much in its form but in the nuances of its passage through time and space. Thus, the being is more adjective or verb than noun – perhaps in common with some Indigenous perspectives, where both nomenclature and taxonomy reflect the fleeting encounter in the landscape more than the minutiae of anatomy as observed in the skeleton or skin on the dissecting slab. A preoccupation with movement is intriguingly apparent in the Garefowl Books where many of the Icelanders’ descriptions of the great auk’s movement and behaviour are given via embodied mimesis – and the use of handy dead seabirds as puppets.

In a journey through the death and afterlife of the great auk, with Pennant as the point of embarkation, Wolley and Newton’s expedition marks the establishment of extinction as a recognised mechanism, and the emergence of conservation as a societal concept. Newton’s experiences in Iceland in pursuit of the remembered great auk surely influenced his lobbying for seabirds, which eventually led to the Sea Birds Preservation Act, 1869. Interestingly though, the law itself was apparently still more concerned with preserving seabirds as a warning system for sailors lost in the fog (a function Pennant refers to in his great auk entry) than for the good of the birds themselves. But nevertheless, the (to us) familiar concept of conservation was emerging with the inception of the Society for the Protection of Birds in 1889. And on the other side of the Atlantic, ‘The Auk’ was the name given to the journal of the American Ornithological Society, founded as the Ornithological Union in 1883.

To return, then, to the original question – how do we form a truthful depiction of a species which lies beyond lived experience? The answer apparently lies in journeying: through the literature, the mind and the physical world, gathering and then processing a diverse array of data. This is gathered not just from ‘science’, but from a variety of sources which we would now categorise as ‘history’, ‘anthropology’, ‘archaeology’ and ‘art’. Still somewhat blurred in Pennant’s time, the dividing lines between these disciplines hardened over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We are slowly and uncertainly emerging from these silos, having realised that none of them in isolation can present the reliable and holistic universal truth that is needed to effect change.

It strikes me that Pennant and I, spurred on by curiosity and imagination, have (very simply) drawn on an array of memories, pictures and specimens, and curated them using the technologies available to us. Perhaps through this shared process a thread now connects us. His great auk has occupied the centre of my mind’s eye for some time now. Maybe in bringing it to life I will, at the same time, re-animate both the bird and a part of his mind.

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With thanks to Professor William Montevecchi, Memorial University (Newfoundland) and Professor Gísli Pálsson (Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, University of Iceland) for the gifts of their books Newfoundland Birds: Exploitation, Study, Conservation and The Last Of Its Kind: The Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction respectively.