Ambassador to the Penguins: A Naturalist's Year Aboard a Yankee Whaleship
by Eleanor Mathews
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Book Summary Information
Author: Eleanor MathewsEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2003-11-01
ISBN: 1567922465
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: David R Godine
Book Reviews of Ambassador to the Penguins: A Naturalist's Year Aboard a Yankee Whaleship
Book Review: a gorgeous book....
Summary: 5 Stars
While my husband reads a steady and salty diet of historical sailing sagas, I generally feed on fiction. But when he finished AMBASSADOR TO THE PENGUINS, he passed the book over the wicker table that sits between our armchairs and insisted I dig in. Set in 1912-13, the book intimately follows Robert Cushman Murphy who worked as a naturalist for ten months aboard a Yankee whaleship. Under the leadership of the cranky and parsimonious Captain Cleveland, the Daisy sailed for South Georgia Island in the Antarctic waters, successfully gathering blubber and spermaceti from the hapless whales it encountered along the way, unsuccessfully hoping for the valuable ambergris.Through Murphy's meticulous observations of every albatross, cockroach, shark, and crew member, I felt as though I was on the ship with him. His delight at every encounter with the natural world---penguins, whales, leopard seals, and skua colonies---pulled me into his scientist's mind. I worried about the marooned prisoner colony on the islands of Fernando de Noronha, the slaughter of elephant seals, and the ferocious storms Murphy braved on solo trips in his dory to gather specimens. I fretted over the crews' symptoms of beriberi late in the voyage, and the disappointments at ports when Murphy got no word from home. Fortunately for all readers, the young naturalist had made the difficult decision to leave his new bride, Grace Emeline, to leave on the chance-of-a-lifetime trip. The resultant letters to Grace, from which the author (his granddaughter) produces many of his quotes, are full of celebration, despair, and humor. This gorgeous book with plenty of photographs, illustrations, and excellent writing, held me spellbound. It may take me a few days to get my land legs back under me and start to live in our "easy" century.
Summary of Ambassador to the Penguins: A Naturalist's Year Aboard a Yankee Whaleship
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.
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