Ambassador to the Penguins: A Naturalist's Year Aboard a Yankee Whaleship - Hardcover

Mathews, Eleanor

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1567922465 ISBN 13: 9781567922462

Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher, 2003

Synopsis

In 1912, a young naturalist named Robert Cushman Murphy was offered the opportunity of a lifetime to spend a year on one of the last Yankee whaleships out of New Bedford, on a voyage to the Antarctic. Only recently married, Murphy had many regrets at leaving his wife Grace so early in their life together, but he saw that the chance to journey to the end of the world, to bring back new specimens, to record what he saw, was also the chance to launch a stellar career.

During the voyage, Murphy kept a journal, packing it with observations of his experiences on board, both as a naturalist and as a witness to a disappearing way of life. When he was not taking photographs and developing them in seawater, or skinning birds to take back to the American Museum of Natural History, he was watching his shipmates raid penguins' nests or harpoon whales and boil down their stripped carcasses. This journal, recorded in the voice of a man who relished the world around him, was later published as Logbook for Grace and became a bestseller. Murphy himself went on to become a world authority on oceanic birds.

Eleanor Mathews, his granddaughter, has now taken this extraordinary diary, updating & supplementing it with never-before-published information and his own original photographs. She presents his voyage in a compelling third-person narrative, maintaining his voice while expanding the tale for modern readers. As a story of seafaring life, a portrait of the whaling industry still under sail, an account of a natural history expedition, and a love letter to an absent wife, it was described as a book to set on the shelf beside Moby-Dick & Two Years Before the Mast. Logbook for Grace has disappeared; but we can proudly offer Ambassador to the Penguins to replace it.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

From July 1912 to May 1913, the young naturalist Robert Cushman Murphy sailed on one of the last Yankee whale ships to South Georgia, at the edge of the Antarctic penguin territory. His mission was to gather information and specimens of wildlife for the American Museum of Natural History, but in addition to his scientific records, he kept for his wife a personal account of the trip, which was published in 1947 as Logbook for Grace. In this enjoyable and informative book, Mathews, his granddaughter, has rewritten this logbook in the third person, rounding out Murphy's notes with previously unpublished details and adding photographs he made and developed himself during the voyage. Murphy described the birds and sea life he encountered and presented a vivid picture of life aboard the whaler: the irascible captain, the rowdy sailors, the terrible food and inadequate medical supplies, the constant battle with rats and cockroaches, and the grisly business of killing whales and elephant seals and reducing their blubber to oil. Especially touching are the passages Mathews quotes in which her grandfather expresses his longing for his wife, left behind after only a few months of marriage. As all the quotations from the logbook attest, Murphy was an accomplished writer with a fine-tuned sense of humor. Mathews, a cartographer, graphic designer, software developer and writer, does an admirable job of reworking his impressive account of his voyage. Her handsome book is a fitting tribute to a man who went on to become one of this country's most distinguished naturalists and environmentalists.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Robert Cushman Murphy--ornithologist, oceanographer, photographer, and prescient conservationist--recognized his calling early and found encouragement at the American Museum of Natural History, where staff secured him a college scholarship and, in 1911, a berth on an Antarctica-bound whaling ship. Also lucky in love, Murphy had the blessing of his brand-new wife, Grace, who insisted that he go even though they would be out of touch for two years. Murphy coped with their separation by keeping a special journal, which he published to great acclaim as Logbook for Grace, but which has been all but forgotten. Mathews, Murphy's granddaughter, skillfully and zestfully recounts the entire gripping story of Murphy's arduous and successful specimen-collecting expedition, shares Murphy's stellar photographs, and retains many of his vivid descriptions of the ship and its crew and his utter astonishment over whales, seals, and, seabirds, from majestic albatrosses to comic penguins. While the irrepressible Murphy painstakingly documented the wildlife of South Georgia Island, calling the animals he reluctantly killed and carefully preserved "martyrs to science," his shipmates indulged in wanton slaughter of whales and seals, a contrast that inspired Murphy, who became an international expert on oceanic birds, to work equally hard at raising environmental awareness. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1567922465
• ISBN 13: 9781567922462
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 353