Ocean Notorious

by Matt Vance

  On a visit to Campbell Island I cruise the upper reaches of Perseverance Harbour with a boatload of birders keen for a glimpse of the legendary teal. We glide past likely hideouts – undercut streams and overhanging tussock. Nothing. Then out of the corner of my eye I notice a flutter as a brown-coloured bird disappears smartly into the undergrowth. The birders mutter their disappointment: a mere glimpse is not enough for them to put a check next to the bird on their lists. Lacking a camera or notebook I feel something different, a warm glow at the simple knowledge of the teal’s presence. Perhaps we can survive the next great extinction on faraway islands surrounded by extraordinary birds?

  Dent Island.

  Campbell Island teal.

  Elephant seals and king penguins, Macquarie Island.

  Macquarie Island scone

  54°29′S

  Sailing to Macquarie Island, 970 kilometres south-west of New Zealand across a stormy Southern Ocean, has become one of my yearly rituals. I used to go for the wildlife – the legions of penguins and elephant seals that give the island a Dr Seuss-like flavour. These days I go for the scones and tea that are served up in a weather-beaten mess room at the research base of the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions (ANARE). The scones come with cream and the kind of hospitality you find in lonely places.

  It’s hard to appreciate just how isolated this island is. Geographically speaking, Macquarie – affectionately known as Maca – is a piece of New Zealand. Politically, it is part of the Australian state of Tasmania because it is wildly difficult to bash your way to it from New Zealand through the westerly gales of the roaring forties. When sailing ships plied these waters, the downwind ride from Hobart meant Maca became Australia’s southernmost limit.

  Traditionally, the discovery of a subantarctic island is a dry affair. The latitude and longitude are recorded in the ship’s log and the island is given a name designed to flatter some investor or political backer of the voyage who will probably never set eyes on the place. No sooner is the island discovered than it dissolves back into the murk of history. That this did not happen to Macquarie is thanks to its wild creatures.

  In 1810 a brig named Perseverance arrived in Sydney Harbour with a small selection of high quality fur-seal skins on board. According to a report in the local paper, the ship was missing a boat and six of its crew, said to have been carried away in bad weather.

  The captain, Frederick Hasselburg, was in a hurry to procure more men and a large quantity of salt. The ship had recently discovered Macquarie Island and its potential bonanza of fur seals, and Hasselburg was desperate to keep this a secret in order to have a monopoly on the skins, which were fetching twenty shillings a piece on the London market. He had left six men on the island to start the wholesale process of harvesting the seals and made a quick dash back to Sydney to obtain the salt needed to preserve the skins. To put the locals off the scent, he had spun the newspaper a yarn.

  The astute citizens of Sydney were not so easily fooled. This had all the signs of being a gold rush and they were quickly on to the noisy crew, who were partaking of liquid refreshments ashore. To loosen tongues they plied the sailors with rum but to no avail: the men had no idea of the location of the island as only captains and officers practised the dark art of navigation. They did, however, glean that the island was dreadfully cold and that the fur seals were as numerous as flies in a butcher’s shop. Had the crew had a large supply of salt they would apparently have had enough skins to load the Perseverance well down on her marks.

  The night before the ship sailed south again, James Underwood, a cunning Sydney sealing merchant, invited Captain Hasselburg to supper. Another local merchant, Thomas James, later reported in his book Six Months in South Australia: ‘There was rum, sugar, lemons and cigars, hot water and cold.’ These were passed around freely until the party became quite raucous. After many toasts to good luck, Underwood noticed that Hasselburg ‘was more than half-seas over’ and might soon be incapable of talking. He quickly leapt to his feet and said, ‘So you thought, Captain, that you had made a new discovery. Why, your island has been known these three years to many a master of a ship in this company, and it is nonsense to claim it as yours.’

  There was uproar, with points made for and against, until Underwood put his hand in his pocket, produced a £20 note, and stated that if anyone present could name him the latitude and longitude of Macquarie Island they could have the money. ‘This had better be done in writing,’ said a voice from the back. A piece of chalk was acquired and the gamblers wrote their latitudes and longitudes under the table. As each entered his guess, Underwood would stoop under the table, rub out the marks with his hand and cry ‘wrong’ or ‘not even close’.

  Underwood offered Captain Hasselburg the chalk and said, ‘Now then, Captain, you may bid goodbye to your £20.’ Hasselburg crawled under the table and with an unsteady hand scribbled 54°29'S 159½°E, the island’s true position. Underwood stooped down, memorised the figures, rubbed them out and cried, ‘I have lost’ before handing over the £20 note to the swaying Hasselburg. He then dispatched a message to one of his sealing schooners, which was waiting in Sydney Harbour ready to depart immediately.

  Macquarie Island went from the honeymoon period of discovery to a torrent of exploitation and destruction. Sealing gangs were a nearly constant presence for the next ninety years. When the fur seals were exterminated, the elephant seals and penguins replaced them as bounty. The sealers’ only duty was to procure skins and oil for their investors back in Sydney. They were paid a ‘lay’, a share of the profits.

  The Sydney Gazette of 1822 described the conditions: ‘As to the island, it is the most wretched place of involuntary and slavish exilium that can possibly be conceived: nothing could warrant any civilised creature living on such a spot… As to the men employed in the gangs the most appalling account is given. They appear to be the very refuse of the human species, so abandoned and lost to every sense of moral duty.’

  One hundred and ninety years on, there is no doubt you have arrived at Macquarie: the name is spelt large on the diesel tanks that line the shore. Surrounding them is a profusion of stately king penguins, slumbering elephant seals, and giant petrels scrapping over entrails in various states of decomposition. I make a beeline for the mess hall.

  We have been at sea for some time. The base and its bristling technology offer a refreshing whiff of civilisation. The residents, far from the refuse of the human species, are intelligent, studious and serious about the business of conservation. While I absorb my scone I read a faxed copy of The Age from Melbourne. Apparently the world is going to end on Tuesday. It is Wednesday so I toss the paper aside and look out the window.

  If I stare long enough I can see the hill is moving with rabbits. These pests busy munching the island into the sea were introduced by the early sealers as a change of diet from ship biscuits and penguin casserole. They were accompanied by horses, donkeys, pigs, cattle, goats, dogs and sheep, all of which have thankfully died out. Cats, also on the passenger list, were hunted down. Only rabbits, rats and mice lasted the distance to wreak havoc on the island’s sensitive environment.

  The exploitation of Macquarie Island eventually ended, mainly because of one of its more rowdy characters. Joseph Hatch had been the mayor of New Zealand’s southern city of Invercargill and a member of the House of Representatives. Despite this aura of respectability, he had an eye for making money in sometimes unpleasant ways. He started a rabbit fur business, a pharmacy and a factory that manufactured rabbit poison. All either went bankrupt or burnt down, despite Hatch being a member of the Invercargill volunteer fire brigade.

  In 1887 Hatch sent a team of sealers to Macquarie to obtain the oil of bull elephant seals. However, they found seal numbers were on the wane. Hatch decided to experiment with the king penguins. He set up a Norwegian steam-pressure digester that could render oil from meat and bone. The process was gruesomely simple. The penguins were driven into pens and clubbed to death be
fore being packed by hand into the digester. The men started packing at the bottom and when the giant boiler was full they exited out a manhole at the top. The lid was closed and the penguins cooked at thirty pounds’ pressure for twelve hours. With the bodies reduced to a pulp, the oil was tapped from the top into barrels. A poor unfortunate then had to remove the remains of the penguins by pick and shovel and distribute them on the beach to feed the waiting flock of giant petrels.

  Joseph Hatch’s steam-pressure digesters, Macquarie Island.

  At the height of this activity there were oiling plants at Lusitania Bay, South East Bay, the Nuggets, Hasselborough Bay and Bauer Bay. The oil was used in tanning, soap-making and the manufacture of binder twine. Hatch managed the business by lurching from one crisis to the next, usually referring to them as ‘impediments to fair and Christian-like progress’.

  He may have persisted with his oiling operations were it not for Douglas Mawson and his Australasian Antarctic Expedition visiting Macquarie on their voyage to Antarctica in 1911. Mawson’s primary reason for stopping was to install radio equipment that would relay messages from his base in Antarctica to Australia and the rest of the world. Many on the expedition, including Mawson himself, were disgusted by what he described as the ‘wholesale destruction of animal life on Macquarie Island’. Their despatches were amplified by possibly false reports to the Australian government by crews of visiting ships that penguins were being force-marched into digesters and boiled alive.

  Resistance to Hatch’s industry had in fact been slowly building over the years. It now moved into top gear with well-known people such as the photographer Frank Hurley, the explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard and the writer H. G. Wells joining the call to halt the penguin slaughter. In 1920 the Tasmanian government revoked Hatch’s licence to operate on the island. Hatch, a fiery speaker, went on the road in Australia and New Zealand to persuade the public he was being unjustly treated. His rhetoric and lantern slides had audiences booing, clapping and cheering, making as much noise as a penguin rookery.

  At the end of each meeting Hatch would goad those present into backing a formal resolution for his oiling licence to be reinstated. The Tasmanian government responded with stony silence and in 1928 it declared Macquarie Island a wildlife sanctuary. In thirty years Hatch had killed over three million birds. Today, his penguin digesters can be hard to spot among the much-recovered king penguin population that swarms around them.

  Unable to put my hands on a rabbit digester, while drinking my tea and eating my scone I used to write letters to the Australian minister for the environment. Some had a trace of jam or a faint tea stain. I posted them from the island to ensure authenticity. I suspected most would go straight into the bin in some swish Canberra office but I kept at it.

  Perhaps some Australian politician finally read the sacks of letters like mine, or even visited the island, because in 2007 24.6 million dollars were allocated for the largest and most farflung pest eradication programme attempted anywhere in the world. Aerial baiting of the entire island was carried out despite grim weather. This was followed by three years in which rangers scoured the island on foot with tracker dogs to look for any pest that had avoided the bait. In April 2014, after nearly three years without any sign of rabbits, rats or mice, the project was declared a success.

  On my recent visits I have witnessed an island being reborn. Blue petrels have begun nesting, the vegetation is regaining its former lushness and spiders spin webs among it. I will be an old man by the time the transformation is complete but eventually the island will reach something approaching its original state. Meanwhile, the exploitation of penguins has moved to films and advertising, where the birds are rendered down into potato-chip-eating, tap-dancing caricatures.

  On my last trip to Maca I spent most of my time in the mess hut, where I no longer have to write letters to Australian parliamentarians. I merely admire the view and quietly enjoy my scone. Once, en route to get a second cup of tea, I noticed a stump of chalk used for racking up scores on the dartboard. I wandered over and picked it up. An English birder named Brian had moved to the window, studying through his expensive binoculars some giant petrels fighting over a penguin carcass. With Brian engrossed I saw my chance. I dived under the table and quickly scribbled something. Out of the corner of his eye Brian caught me surfacing. He swivelled his head and stared at me suspiciously while managing to leave his binoculars pressed against the window.

  Outside the hut there was a long belch from an elephant seal. Brian returned to his binoculars but kept checking on me discreetly. When I finished my tea and scone I ambled to the door, donned my jacket and headed out into the drizzle. As the door closed behind me I heard the scraping of chairs against the floor as Brian scrambled under the table. All he would have found were some crumbs of scone – and the chalked coordinates 54°29'S 159½°E.

  King penguins, Macquarie Island.

  Island of kings

  54°37′S

  Macquarie Island where Joseph Hatch ran his evil empire is one of the few places in the Southern Ocean where king penguins breed. ‘They are tough little buggers when it comes down to it,’ Ted says. ‘They have predators in the sea and in the air, yet they find a partner and raise a chick or two every three years if they can.’ His hands play out the swoop of the skua and the bite of the leopard seal.

  Ted is based on Macquarie for an eighteen-month stint. He enthusiastically shows me around the king penguin colony at Sandy Bay on the east side of the island. Afterwards we sit down in shotgun gravel and talk while curious kings shimmer and swirl around us as though they believe they are in an Impressionist painting.

  Ted has spent his life in the pursuit of his penguin infatuation. He smiles a lot, talks slowly and shares a dark penguin humour. He has the appearance of someone totally absorbed in what he’s doing. His clothes are well worn, his hair looks as though he cuts it himself, and he walks with a short rapid lope. He and the birds are comfortable with each other in a way usually found only between old spaniels and small children. He too is a tough little bugger.

  King penguins are relatively easy for a scientist to study. Unlike most birds they handle the intrusion of humans well. ‘They don’t fly away when you approach them and they continue their normal behaviour despite your presence,’ Ted says, flapping his arms in an attempt to fly. ‘The only downside is that we don’t get to see them in the water, which is where they spend most of their time.’ There’s a brief pause as Ted changes his arm movements into those of a blinking satellite moving across the sky. ‘Of course that is getting easier now with cheap tracking technology.’

  Having spent time wading around other penguin colonies, I find it refreshing to be among the kings. They have a dignity. They appear to pause and think a lot. Their communication with each other appears calmer and more measured than is the case with other species of penguin. The royal penguins that scramble among the kings are half their size and full of pettiness and anger. Life for a royal appears to be one long argument.

  Because of its size and colour it is easy to mistake a king penguin for the more famous emperor penguin. However, kings live in the Subantarctic while emperors congregate in Antarctica. Apart from looks, the only thing the two birds have in common is that they are both ancient species. The modern penguin’s direct ancestor is the waimanu, a flightless water bird. It’s believed waimanu evolved around sixty million years ago, after the extinction of the dinosaurs and a good fifty million years before our ancestors came down from the trees. They now exist only as fossils in the South Island of New Zealand.

  The mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs also killed marine reptiles such as mosasaurs and plesiosaurs, and some fearsome species of shark. The early penguin ancestors saw their chance and were the first to take the plunge into the oceans – well before seals and whales.

  ‘They have been around a while and seen a few changes in that time,’ Ted says. He flutters his hands. ‘The species we see today have been the be
st at adapting to change. And among that lot, according to DNA records, the kings were one of the earliest species to branch off the main line.’

  During the Palaeocene Epoch when all this evolution into the sea was happening, the world was much warmer than today and the seas were rising. The penguins would have evolved as warm-water creatures: the progression to cold-climate birds came much later when the Earth cooled. ‘It’s just that the tough little buggers are so good at adapting,’ Ted says. He has the air of a proud parent.

  Ted and I have become friends within the limits of what a two-day acquaintance will allow: I am accompanying a group of birders voyaging south and our stay is limited. He accompanies me to the mess room for my ritual scone and cup of tea. He takes extra helpings of cream with his scone and drinks his strong tea slowly. He checks the underside of the tables to find the one with the chalked coordinates I left the year before. When he finds the correct table a big snorting laugh shoots out of him like a sneeze.

  A group of birders joins us for some respite from the weather. They quiz Ted. The answer to ‘Is that the northern or the southern giant petrel?’ is easy but the answer to ‘Is that a male or a female king?’ is not. ‘It’s hard to say until you upend them and have a good look.’ Ted swivels his hands around and dips his head as though inspecting a penguin crotch.