Whalers wrote about woggins all the time.
On December 20, 1792, the whaling ship Asia
was making its way through the Desolation Islands, in the Indian Ocean,
when the crew decided to stop for lunch. According to the log keeper,
the meal was a great success: “At 1 PM Sent our Boat on Shore After Some
refreshments,” he wrote. “She returned with A Plenty of Woggins we
Cooked Some for Supper.”
Right about now, you may be feeling peckish. But you may also be wondering: What in the world is a woggin?
New species are discovered all the time.
Unknown old species—extinct ones, found as fossils and then plugged
into our historical understanding of the world—turn up a lot, too. But
every once in a while, all we have to go on is a word. New or old, known or unknown, no one knew what a woggin was until Judith Lund, whaling historian, decided to find out.
Like all professionals, 18th-century
whalers had their share of strange jargon. A “blanket” was a massive
sheet of blubber. “Gurry” was the sludge of oil and guts that covered
the deck after a kill, and a “gooney” was an albatross. Modern-day
whaling historians depend on their knowledge of these terms to decode
ship’s logs—vital for understanding the sailors’ day-to-day experiences,
as well as gleaning overall trends. Being elbow-deep in whaleman slang
is just part of the job.
So when Lund ran into a word she didn’t
know, it caught her eye. Lund was at the New Bedford Whaling Museum,
trying to dig up some data on oil harvest rates. “I was reading a
logbook and charging along beautifully,” she says, “when I came across
the fact that whalemen on that voyage were eating woggins and swile.”
Lund had heard of swile—it’s whaler slang for “seals”—
but woggins were new. She asked the museum librarian, who didn’t know
either. “The woggin was a mystery to both of us,” she says. So Lund did
what any curious person would—started emailing everyone she could think
of, asking if they had ever heard of it.
One of these people was Paul O’Pecko, the Vice President of Collections and Research at Mystic Seaport.
“You know how once somebody mentions something to you, the piece of
information seems to jump off the page when you are not even looking?”
he asks. This quickly happened with woggins. As soon as Lund’s network
was alerted, more mentions from ship’s logs began flooding in. A Sag
Harbor vessel sailing in 1806 “kild one woglin at 10 am.” New Bedford
sailors from 1838 describe “wogings in vast numbers & noisy with
their shril sharp shreaking or howling in the dead hours of the night.”
In a 1798 diary entry, Christopher Almy of New Bedford writes of “one
sort the whalemen call woggins,” which have stubby wings. When they move
over the rocks, he says, they “look like small boys a walking.”
When Lund’s inquiry hit O’Pecko’s desk,
something splashed out of his memory, too. Years before, in his own
research, he had come across the story of Jack Woggin, a beloved ship’s
pet. He dug up the account from an 1832 whaling magazine,
and sent it along. “A person looking overboard saw a Penguin (Genus
aptenodytes), commonly called by the sailors a ‘woggin,’” writes the
author, explaining how Jack got on board. Here, finally, was the smoking
gun: a woggin is a penguin.
But the mystery was only half solved.
Penguins, as we understand them, live in the Southern Hemisphere. And
yet sailors in the north were also getting in on the action, reporting
that they had “caught 10 wogens” or “saw wargins.” “Whalemen were
noticing them before they went far enough south to see true penguins,”
says Lund.
At this point, it was Storrs Olson’s turn
to snap into focus. Olson, an ornithologist with the Smithsonian
Institution, had been added to the email chain early on, but the mystery
hadn’t gripped him. “It was something sailors ate, and they would eat
almost anything,” he says. “I did not pay a lot of attention at first.”
But when it became clear that woggins
were in the north, too, an intriguing suspect loomed: what if they were
great auks? Also flightless, with large, hooked beaks and white
eyespots, great auks went extinct sometime in the mid-1800s, hunted to
death for their oily meat and fluffy down. (Arctic sailors also burned them
for warmth, as there was often no wood where they were exploring.) As
such, we know very little about them, and they have achieved
near-mythical status among ornithologists, who grasp at every scrap of
evidence about how they lived.
Michael Dyer, another librarian from New
Bedford, had found another major clue: the notebook of a schoolboy named
Abraham Russell, decorated with a careful sketch of a “Sea Waggin found
on the banks of Newfound Land.” The drawing looked as though it had
been traced from a particular illustration of a great auk found in a
popular navigational guide. Further finds reinforced this theory, and
finally, the group of detectives nailed it down: A southern woggin is a
penguin. A northern woggin was a great auk.
Lund and Olson released their first woggin exposé in 2007, in Archives of Natural History. A follow-up was published this month.
(The new paper is a true rollercoaster—early on in the list of woggin
cameos, an explorer from 1860 reports that the birds “excited my wonder
and attention.” Mere lines later, sealers from 1869 are showing off “a
bag full of woggins’ hearts, which we can roast on sticks, and who
doubts that we shall make a heart-y supper?”)
“Our paper was received with considerable interest by the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary and the Dictionary of American Regional English,” it points out, suggesting that woggins may soon officially march into the historical lexicon.
Until then, Olson is using the woggins to
learn more about great auks—he has already expanded their probable
springtime range down to the coast of North Carolina, based on a
sighting from 1762. And Lund keeps the word in her back pocket, a new
species of diverting vocabulary. “I run across it occasionally, and it’s
amusing and interesting” she says. “The woggins live again.”
Now you know!
:o)
Very interesting. New learning for me today. Thank you, Ms coopfeathers.
ReplyDeleteYou are very welcome, Caddie! Glad you like unusual stuff, too! :o)
DeleteInteresting read! I can;t imagine what a woggin would taste like....
ReplyDeleteProbably like chicken - LOL! :o)
Delete