- Creation
-
Creator: Henry A. McGhie
- Current Holder(s)
-
Full title:
McGhie, H.A. 'Images, Ideas, and Ideals: Thinking with and about Ross's Gull', in Thorsen, L.E., Rader, K.A. and Dodd, A. (eds.), Animals on Display: the Creaturely in Museums, Zoos, and Natural History (Pennsylvania University Press, 2013). pp. 101-127.
Description:
McGhie takes the example of 'Ross's Gull' as an instance of the way scientific and cultural and material factors combine in the creation of species. Offering a 'caricature' of scientific discovery in which animals or plants are gradually assimilated into scientic categories through a process of collection, analysis, description and dissemination, McGhie notes that this 'is a gross oversimplification of the complexity of human-animal relationships; how many of the episodes are far more complex and contingent; and how these contingencies influence the development of ideas about animals.' (103)
McGhie charts the various ways in which explorers and scientists came to value the gull as a scientific object. He highlights how the bird's association with nineteenth-century voyages of exploration and empire, the difficulty of reaching and working in arctic locations, and the rarity of the bird itself all contributed to its emergence as a species that was particularly valued by collectors. Travel narratives, depictions of the arctic and of the bird itself, as well as actual specimens combined in the definition of the species. McGhie thereby suggests that 'The example of Ross's gull shows how the apparent "fixity" of the idea of the species, its reputation (as opposed to its material reality), is not really derived from the type specimens.' (120) Rather, he claims, 'a mixture of social, textual, and visual practices that are heavily coloured by cultural phenomena... have influenced how Ross's Gull is understood, just as the (standardized, idealized) bird has influenced human cultural activities.' (122)
- No links match your filters. Clear Filters
-
-
CitesCaspar David Friedrich, Das Eismeer (1823-1824).
Description:'In 1823/24, the German artist Caspar David Friedrich painted Arctic Shipwreck [sic], popularly known as The Wreck of Hope. Architectural iceforms lurch forward and upward in a stomach-churning scene; the wrecked hull of a ship is carried along with the great ice slabs. This picture typifies imagery relating to the Arctic at that time, of a landscape of monumental forces and allegories. For thise viewers suitably primed through texts, paintings such as Friedrich's Arctic Shipwreck could induce a powerful effect on viewers. It is within these imagined landscapes that characters such as James Clark Ross were placed in the imaginations of readers and viewers, at the time when Ross participated in some of the most adventurous and well-reported attempts on the Northwest Passage.' (111-112)
-
Cited byA. Dodd et. al., 'Introduction', in L.E. Thorsen, et. al. (eds), Animals on Display: the Creaturely in Museums, Zoos, and Natural History. 2013. pp. 1-11.
Description:'Few material practices have changed both natural history and animal-human "lifeworlds" more than exploration, so accordingly, Henry McGhie turns to a case study of one particular animal - Ross's Gull - to demonstrate these important historical shifts. McGhie considers the problem of what counted as knowledge of this rare bird - was it enough to see a well-preserved specimen in a museum drawer, or was it necessary to travel to the Arctic and encounter the animal in its natural environment? McGhie shows how the debate around the scientific naming of animals reflected new modes of engagement: that this bird was later referred to by association with its discoverer, the quintissential Polar explorer James Ross, rather than by its physical characteristics (such as its trademark rosy breast), pointed to different fields of acivity in which particular animals retained (or, in some cases, lost) their global "reputation." Ross's Gull, McGhie concludes, provides a powerful example of how scientific and cultural practices collaborate to transform animals from complex, multiple creatures into standardized, singular idealizations.' (8)
-
QuotesFridtjof Nansen, Farthest North (London, 1897)
Description:'The most insightful commentary on encounters with Ross's Gull comes from Fridtjof Nansen, who wrote in his diary for August 3, 1894, "Today my longing has at last been satisfied. I have shot Ross's Gull." Whether Nansen had articulated this longing beforehand, or whether the statement originated with the benefit of hindsight, is unknown. Nevertheless, the bird clearly excited a sensation of longing, yearning and ambition, that was satisfied, at least momentarily, through killing the bird. Despite his remote situation, Nansen wrote at length about his encounter in his diary: "This elusive, strange and rarely seen inhabitant of the mysterious north, a world to which the imagination alone aspires and of which no one knows its coming or going, is that thing, from the first moment I saw these tracts and my eyes surveyed the lonely plains of ice, I had always hoped to discover. And now it came when I was least expecting it, indeed I was only out briefly on a very prosaic errand. As I sat near a hummock my eyes roamed northwards and spotted a bird glide over the big hummocky rise towards the northwest. At first I thought it was a kittiwake, but I soon saw that it resembled more an Arctic skua."
This was more or less repeated in the travel narrative subsequently written by Nansen, which was widely read, although missing the fact that Nansen had been on "a very prosaic errand."' (113)
-
QuotesJohn Murdoch, 'An Historical Notice on Ross's Gull,' Auk 16 (2) (1899), pp. 146-155
Description:'Murdoch... gives a good description of the challenges of preparing specimens (his first specimen of Ross's Gull was eaten by "Eskimo Dogs");
"Arctic taxidermy has its drawbacks. The carpenter's shop, where I had to work, would not warm up in spite of the little Sibley stove in it, and by the time I had a skin turned inside out and the skull cleaned, the skin would be so stiff from freezing that it would not turn back, and I used to have to warm it at the stove before I could finish the skin. Besides the metal top, which our commanding officer thought was such a neat and cleanly thing to put on my skinning table, used to become uncomfortably numbing to the fingers."' (107)
'During the 1881-83 expedition to Point Barrow, John Murdoch and colleagues had secured and prepared more than one hundred specimens of Ross's Gull at a time when there were around fifteen specimens around the world. Murdoch wrote that another naturalist (Elliot Coues) "half seriously took me to task for 'vulgarizing this beautiful bird.'" Murdoch was forbidden from publicizing the number of specimens collected, in case the Smithsonian was overwhelmed with requestsm although it is equally likely that the Smithsonian did not want the rare specimens to be devalued.' (110)
-
Related toFridtjof Nansen
Description:McGhie notes that 'When the Norwegian scientist and Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930) first encountered the birds [Ross's Gulls] on his famous Fram expedition, he wrote the following in his diary: "Friday 3 Aug 1894. Latitude 81°5'.... Today at last my longong has been satisfied, I have shot Ross's Gull (Rodosthetia [sic] Rossii), and 3 of them in one day. This elusive, strange and rarely seen inhabitant of the mysterious north, a world to which no one knows is coming and going, is that thing, from the first moment I saw these tracts and my eyes surveyed the lonely plains of ice, I had always hoped to discover."' (101-102)
'Nansen shot and prepared eight specimens of the bird in 1894, when he was on his expedition attempting to drift over the North Pole, frozen into the ice, and then travelling by sled to Franz Joseph Land. Seven of the specimens were prepared as study skins and their bodies preserved in alcohol. The eighth bird, which was headless (he shot its head off accidentally), was also preserved in alcohol. Nansen presented the whole collection to the University of Christiana (Oslo).' (108)
'The most insightful commentary on encounters with Ross's Gull comes from Fridtjof Nansen... As a seaman, Nansen would have been well aware of the usefulness of gulls as guides to land. He and his companion shot many other gulls and birds of different species for food, so the shooting of birds, which stands out to modern readers, was an everyday act of the party.' (113)
'Two particularly fascinating images are included in Collett and Nansen's account of the birds seen on the Fram expedition, a photograph and a color illustration. The photograph... shows two of the three birds shot on August 3, 1894, a doctored version of a photograph included in Nansen's Farthest North... tidied up for mor "scientific" presentation. The second image... wiuld have been prepared with reference to the study skins Nansen had collected. This illustration is singularly interesting as it shows a young Ross's Gull posed, as usual, in profile in the foreground, sitting on an ice floe; another individual flies behind it. The background shows the Fram with the ship's crew on the adjacent ice. This is very unusual: the seemingly "scientific" illustration incorporates an element of adventure by portraying the men of the expedition, locating them in the Arctic and within the same visual narrative as the bird.' (116-119)
-
Related toSir John Richardson
Description:'In October 1823 the collections from Parry's second Arctic and earlier voyages were handed over to specialists to catalogue and describe; the two "new" gulls [identified as such by Fridtjof Nansen] were included among these collections. Birds were to be described by the naturalist John Richardson (1787-1865), a scottish surgeon-naturalist and explorer. He recognized the gull as belonging to a new species and planned to call it Larus rossii in order to honor its discoverer, basing his description on one of the specimens but mentioning the other, making them a holotype ("main type") and paratype ("supplementary" type)...
Richardson announced his new species at a meeting of the Wernerian Society in Edinburgh. He held back from publishing his description of the new gull so that the description could form part of the official account of the exedition, a more illustrious place of publication.' (104)
-
Related toJames Clark Ross
Description:'Ross's Gull was first made known to Western science in 1823 when two specimens were shot in Greenland. The event took place during the course of William Parry's (1790-1855) second voyage in search of the Northwest Passage, part of Britain's imperial project of exploration. The two birds were shot by James Clark Ross (1800-1862) and one of his companions.' (103)
'James Clark Ross lived for almost forty years after his discovery of the species. He was the archetypical Polar hero,the first to reach the North Magnetic Pole (he also tried for the South); through his lifetime "Ross's Gull" existed as a kind of personal possession of this famous celebrity and society figure. From the time of its first description, Ross's Gull has had a particularly strong association with its discoverer, whose exploits feature in many accounts of the bird and its history.' (104)
-
Related toHenry Eeles Dresser
Description:McGhie notes Dresser's role in the association of Ross's Gull with British ornithology: 'Henry Dresser (1838-1915) was a leading British collector; he began collecting birds' eggs and skins when he was a teenager, and by the end of his collecting career (sixty years later) he had one of the finest private collections in Britain. Writing in 1867, when he was twenty-nine years old, he asked an American correspondent to try to obtain any Ross's Gull specimens he could from the Smithsonian Institution, writing that "I feel the want of them much in my collection." The bird represented a gap. Twenty years later, after having had to borrow skins to describe in his famous History of the Birds of Europe (1871-82), he wrote once more to the Smithsonian Institution requesting specimens, again unsuccessfully. After a further five years he eventually met with success, leading him to write to the curator at the Smithsonian, "I cannot tell you how greatly indebted I am for your kindness in the matter. R. rosea especially is most welcome as I have so long wished to possess it. Dresser gave the Smithsonian four specimens of birds chiefly from Japan in return for the rare gulls. It had taken him nearly thirty years to obtain the skins of Ross's Gull. His continuous efforts to obtain them show just how desirable these specimens could be to collectors.
When Russian ornithologist Sergei Buturlin (1872-1938) discovered the regular breeding grounds of Ross's Gull in Siberia in 1905, Henry Dresser arranged for Buturlin's account of the discovery to be published in Britain in the leading ornithological journal, Ibis, produced by the British Ornithologists' Union. Buterlin was elected as a Foreign Member of the Union following the publication. Dresser also arranged for the sale and exchange of Buturlin's Ross's Gull specimens to European and American collectors and museums. Dresser's access to such privileged information and specimens on the one hand, which came as a result of his business links with America and Russia, and to the highly elitist scientific societies and publishing circles on the other hand, helped propel his own career as an ornithologist. Even early in his collecting career (in the 1870s), Dresser intended to bequeath his collections to a public museum when he was finished with it, and sometimes used this intention as a means of obtaining specimens from other museums. Gis collections were sold (for a nominal sum) to the Royal Scottish Museum (Now the National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh) in the late 1880s and to the Manchester Museum in 1899 (skins, including two of Ross's Gull) and 1912 (eggs, including ten of Ross's Gull).' (109-110)
