The Curse of the Labrador Duck
Page 35
So far so good. Regrettably, the fellow who restuffed the duck had taken it upon himself to paint the legs, toes, and webs a uniform gray-blue. Even worse, he had painted the bill. The distal half was black, and the proximal half was mustardy yellow, overlain along the midline by a broad triangle of gray-blue. To give the taxidermist credit, he was thorough, having painted even the underside of the bill in the same mustard-yellow and battleship gray.
So I made my measurements, and drew little pictures in my notebook, and used a magnifying lens to examine wear to the tail and wing feathers. And as I poked and peered, the sun broke through the persistent British clouds, and a shaft muscled its way through Errol’s kitchen window, and fell on the duck. Something strange happened. In the afternoon sun, a few patches of particularly black feathers glowed an iridescent green. I was ready to blame my dirty contact lenses, but when I called Errol over, he said that he could see the green sheen too. Some birds have patches of iridescent green feathers, including some ducks. Was this a feature of Labrador Ducks that I had somehow missed? If the sun hadn’t come out, I wouldn’t have spotted it this time. Could all of the authors who described Labrador Ducks in life so long ago have missed this iridescence? There was certainly no green hue in Audubon’s painting. I looked, and turned my head, and blinked, and looked again, and convinced myself that the green iridescence was the result of a little subterfuge. I believe when the taxidermist was restuffing the duck, he found himself short of feathered skin in spots, and used bits from another duck, possibly a Mallard, to fill in the gaps.
And there we have it. Some sixty years ago, this Labrador Duck was owned by someone in a country house in Kent, then by naturalist Richard Ford, by Captain Vivian Hewitt, by Hewitt’s son, Jack Parry, by bookseller David Wilson, and by my chum Errol Fuller, after which it came into the possession of an art dealer, who sold it to Sheikh Saud of Qatar. And I suppose that is the end of my story. Barring some unforeseen discovery, I can claim to have seen absolutely every stuffed Labrador Duck in the world, and no one else could make that claim, and I am sure that no one ever will. This left only a quick trip to the shippers to exchange the duck for a receipt numbered 4513/04.
Of the owners of this duck, a pretty good chunk are known to be or suspected of being dead, or well on their way. Many other protagonists in the story are dead. To be fair, an historian friend of mine pointed out that the same can be said of any very old artifact, but part of me thinks that this particular duck is not particularly charmed. Could it be cursed? Let’s wish Sheikh Saud a very long and happy life.
I TOLD YOU earlier that I wouldn’t reveal the end of the story of The Maltese Falcon. Upon further reflection, this seems to be a tease. After all, your local video store is bound to have hundreds of copies of Spider-Man and Harry Potter, but the odds are about three to one that the clerk has never heard of The Maltese Falcon, and would probably confuse Humphrey Bogart with Harrison Ford.
At the end of The Maltese Falcon, the statuette that the crew have been following turns out to be a fake, and Caspar Gutman leaves to continue his search for the real one. In the movie, Sam Spade calls the police to put them on to Gutman as a murderer, but Gutman escapes police custody, and, presumably, continues his quest. They do capture the young lady and charge her with murder. The end of the book is a little more gruesome than the movie. Gutman dies in a shoot-out with police, and so never gets the falcon statuette that he has been following for seventeen years. I searched for this single specimen of the Labrador Duck for more than nine years. Unlike Caspar Gutman, I eventually found it, and didn’t die in the chase.
Epilogue
And that was that. I had been around and around the world with strange and wonderful traveling companions. I had examined fifty-five stuffed Labrador Ducks in thirty cities, and sampled nine eggs that later proved to have nothing to do with the birds I was after. From standing on Audubon’s hillside in Labrador to measuring my last duck, my adventures had taken me four years, nine months, and eighteen days. I had, as far as I could tell, seen every surviving stuffed Labrador Duck in the world. The end of the quest left me with a sense of elation at having completed a task that no one had ever attempted before, and that no one would ever bother to repeat. After all, twelve people have stood on the Moon, but I was the only person to have seen every Labrador Duck. But I also felt a sense of deflation that the journey was over.
To be completely forthcoming, there were several Labrador Duck specimens that I couldn’t account for, and, as friends have pointed out again and again, it is possible that new specimens remain to be discovered. How confident am I that I found them all? So confident that I will pay a reward of $10,000 to the first person who can direct me to a genuine stuffed Labrador Duck that I have not seen and described in this book.* I don’t want to buy the duck; I just want to examine it. After I have verified its legitimacy, you get the money. There is no point in trying to fake me out with a duck re-created from bits of other birds; I’ve seen it all before.
If you choose to embark on your own Labrador Duck quest, you might want to start with the specimens that may have been destroyed by wartime bombing in Liverpool, Amiens, and Mainz. Perhaps you know the reprobate that stole the duck from the American Museum of Natural History in New York; perhaps you are the reprobate. Altenburg probably never had a Labrador Duck, but it could be worth a peek if you are in the area.
These are all long shots, but there are other possibilities. In April of 1962, Paul Hahn of the Royal Ontario Museum received a response to his questionnaire about stuffed extinct birds from Everett F. Greaton, a consultant for the Recreation Department of the Department of Economic Development at the State House in Augusta, Maine. Greaton indicated that the bird section of the museum at the State House had a stuffed Labrador Duck. Hahn didn’t include that specimen in his catalogue, and forty years later, Kris Weeks Oliveri, Volunteer Coordinator at the Maine State House Museum, assured me that there is no sign of a Labrador Duck in their collection. Maybe it is sitting on a shelf in the Governor’s office.
I’ll give you one more lead, and then you are on your own. In November of 1844, Colonel Nicolas Pike shot a drake Labrador Duck at the mouth of the Ipswich River at the south end of Plum Island, New York. History doesn’t say whether or not the duck was doing anything to provoke the colonel. Perhaps Pike just really, really hated ducks. The bird was stuffed by John Akhurst, given to the Long Island Historical Society (now the Brooklyn Historical Society), and eventually deposited in the Brooklyn Museum. The Brooklyn Museum narrowed its focus in the 1930s and 1940s, and dispensed with its natural history collection.
At my request, Deborah Wythe of the Brooklyn Museum did some digging. Between them, Charles Schroth and Charles O’Brien at the American Museum of Natural History received from the Brooklyn Museum fifty-eight cartons of bird study skins in August, 1935. If birds are packaged like cigarettes, twenty-five to a pack and eight packs to a carton, we are talking about roughly 1,600 specimens. No mention was made of mounted specimens in general, nor about the Brooklyn Labrador Duck in particular. I have already examined every Labrador Duck specimen at the AMNH and it isn’t there. At Wythe’s suggestion, I tried the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, which apparently got many natural history specimens without much ceremony or documentation. Nancy Paine, who has the delightful job of Chief Curator at the Children’s Museum, informed me that I had hit another dead end. John Hubbard told me that the Bailey-Laidlaw Collection at Virginia Tech in Blacksburgh had received a chunk of the Brooklyn Museum’s collection, but Curt Adkisson, current curator, was able to tell me they do not have, and never did have, a Labrador Duck. It must be out there somewhere.
Good luck in your quest.
Acknowledgments
Iowe a great debt to many curators who agreed to give me access to their Labrador Ducks, which count among their most valued treasures, or who dug through their records to assure me that they didn’t have a Labrador Duck after all. That group includes Mark Adams, David Agro, Delise A
lison, Miloš Anděra, Ernst Bauernfeind, Ingrid Birker, Joe Bopp, Katrina Cook, Steve Cross, James Dean, René Dekker, Felicity Devlin, Siegfried Eck, Scott Edwards, Clemency Fisher, Michaela Forthuber, Anita Gamauf, Michel Gosselin, David Green, Andy Grilz, Ed Hack, Shana Hawrylchak, Stéphane Herbet, Janet Hinshaw, Rüdiger Holz, Norbert Höser, Shannon Kenney, Mary LeCroy, Georges Lenglet, Vladimir Loskot, Herbert Lutz, Brigitte Massonneau, Julia Matthews, Gerald Mayr, Brad Millen, Jiří Mlíkovsky, Nigel Monaghan, Bernd Nicolai, Dominique Nitka, Patrick O’Sullivan, D. Stefan Peters, Matthieu Pinette, Alison Pirie, Robert Prys-Jones, Josef H. Reichholf, Julian Reynolds, Nate Rice, Douglas Russell, Frank Steinheimer, Paul Sweet, Ray Symonds, Claire Voisin, Damien Walshe, Michael Walters, Marie-Dominique Wandhammer, Erich Weber, and David Willard.
Every writer should be so lucky as to have an agent like Rick Broadhead. My dear friends Pat and Jackie Walsh polished the burrs of the first draft. My editors Jim Gifford, Kerri Kolen, Franscois McHardy, and the rest of the crews at HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster were endlessly patient in guiding me through this publishing adventure. Jan Dohner put me on to Charles Darwin’s use of the term Labrador Duck. Alexandra Mazzitelli found details of Audubon’s original Pied Duck painting. Michael Duggan set me straight on Jacques Cartier’s claims about God’s opinion of Labrador. Mike Sorenson was a star in the genetics laboratory. Terry McLaughlin graciously filled the void on a rough day in Elmira. Captain Randall Sherman chatted happily about Theodore. Margot Morris set aside some precious eggs after a tough winter.
I speak only English, and even that is pretty shaky. Many colleagues have helped me by translating letters and documents, including Julie Rainard, Matthias Amrein, Antoine Sassine, and Samuel Schürch. Andrew Geggie provided endless help in answering my silly questions about the historical use of Canadian place-names.
Many friendships have been forged along the path to the Labrador Duck, and I am grateful for the support and wisdom of these new friends, including Chris Cokinos, Barbara and Richard Mearns, and Errol Fuller. My travel companions on these journeys have included Kathleen Chilton, Errol Fuller, Georgina Brown-Branch, Julie Rainard, Sarah Shima, Jane Caldwell, and my dear, dear wife, Lisa.
Copyright
The Curse of the Labrador Duck
Copyright © 2009 by Glen Chilton, Ph.D.
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EPub Edition © JUNE 2010 ISBN: 978-1-443-40394-8
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First Canadian edition
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Chilton, Glen, 1958–
The curse of the Labrador duck : my obsessive quest to the edge of extinction / Glen Chilton.
1. Chilton, Glen, 1958—Travel. 2. Labrador duck. 3. Voyages around the world. I. Title.
QL696.A52C473 2009A 910.4 C2009-903100-0
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* It took Andrew Geggie, a toponymist at Natural Resources Canada, to point out the link between the two communities. Geggie was also able to correct me when I tried to use my elementary-school French lessons to translate Bras d’Or into “arm of gold.” Somehow I had missed the rather obvious link between the names Bras d’Or and Labrador. Geggie explained that the name of the region was originally applied to coastal Greenland early in the sixteenth century by the Portuguese explorer João Fernandes, who was a landowner and cultivator in the Azores. “Cultivator” apparently translated into Portugese as “Llavrador.” João used his title of cultivator as a surname, and felt the need to apply it to anything that he discovered, even though he didn’t actually discover Greenland.
* I should make clear that this offer comes from me alone and not from my publishers or anyone else involved in bringing you this book. For more information, and for the full terms and conditions of the reward, visit my website, www.glenchilton.com.