People have been fascinated with emperor penguins since they were first encountered in Antarctica. They were likely first studied by naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster in the 1770s, during James Cook’s second voyage to the Southern Ocean, which is why their species name is Aptenodytes forsteri. Surgeon Edward Wilson began studying them in 1901, and later left the 1911 Terra Nova expedition and walked 62 miles to steal penguin eggs. And in 1915, Ernest Shackleton’s expedition lived with emperor penguins for months when their ship Endurance was stranded in floating ice. Ship’s master Frank Worsley kept a diary of their interactions.
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For the next five months, the men experienced all that a drifting ice floe can offer: cracks suddenly opening up beneath their tents, leopard seals lying in wait for a meal of penguin at the edge of the floe, a shortage of fresh water while all around lay a vast desert of sea ice too salty to drink. But in spite of all the dangers in those liminal spaces between ice and water, penguins proved to be their most cherished companions. Then, as winter closed in and the last remaining penguins and seals disappeared, the men were left with the loneliness of the sea ice. “Our craving,” wrote Worsley, “to see some living, breathing creature, any creature at all, may be imagined when I say that we missed them as though they had been our personal friends.”
Early explorers’ delight in the penguins did not prevent them from eating them or taking them as specimens. Read about the early research into penguins at the Atlantic.
Source: neatorama