60°10”N, 24°55”E
MUSEUM OF ZOOLOGY
HELSINKI
John Gronvall has spent all day painting canvasses, sketching mountains and fells, capturing the winter light behind the willow grouse and Arctic foxes.
At six o’clock, he rinses his brushes and hangs his overalls on the coat stand, gives his colleagues a nod and takes the steps up to his lodgings, a small room above the exhibition halls in the Museum of Zoology.
But once home, he doesn’t open a book or put his feet up, but pulls on his coat, hurries out into the street and jumps on a tram.
He rides all the way to Munkkiniemi. He takes a shortcut through the park at the manor house.
In the summer, the gardens are beautiful, but now the plants have wilted, the greenery replaced with a flat wasteland offering no protection from the wind blowing in across the sea.
Gronvall quickens his step, pulls his coat tighter.
By the time he arrives at the door of the oology museum, the sun has dipped behind the horizon, making the trees in the yard cast long shadows over him, but the lights in the magnate’s window glow bright, as always.
He doesn’t know when Kreuger ever sleeps.
He can’t see Kreuger in the window, but out of habit he waves at it before taking the keys from his pocket, then steps inside and into the dim, its odour of wood and metal.
The darkness in the oology museum isn’t the soft, gentle half-light that the sunset leaves behind: this is an eternal, impenetrable night.
The space was designed to store birds’ eggs, and the only windows in the room are narrow slits at the top of the walls.
Building regulations wouldn’t allow an entirely windowless space, so small hatches were added to the walls, but they have been covered from the inside to make sure sunlight cannot get inside and destroy the museum’s collections.
To an egg collector, the sun is the greatest enemy of all.
In a matter of days, a blackbird’s egg, laid in among the hay, will lose its beguiling colour, the blue will fade and sunlight will singe the dotted patterning from the shells’ surface – but here they are safe.
Sensation gradually returns to Gronvall’s fingers, blue from the cold, the blood tingling as it forces its way through his contracted veins.
He flicks the switch, and an electric light reveals the glass cabinets running across the room, the sketches of birds displayed on the rafters and the bureaus leaning against the walls containing a great and magnificent treasure that the average passer-by will never see.
If this were any other evening, Gronvall would walk straight to the bureaus, pull out a drawer and check the condition of the specimens inside it, decide whether to change the cotton-wool padding for fresh, check whether dust has begun to harden on the surface of the shells, but today he heads directly to his workshop, for the magnate has sent word: their hotly anticipated delivery has finally arrived.
The egg is oval, a creamy off-white, its shell dappled with streaks and spots that remind him of Japanese ink sketches, but this work of art wasn’t drawn with a brush held in a human hand but by pigments secreted in the bird’s fallopian tubes that the auk’s body pressed into the calcium shell one hundred and fifty years ago, as the egg popped out of the bird and into the world.
The precise location of the rugged North Atlantic outcrop upon which the egg in front of him was laid, and the identity of the collector who climbed in among the rocks to claim it, remain a mystery.
History has forgotten what happened before the egg was placed on the table at a London auction house and Viscount de Barde raised his hand.
The known provenance of this egg begins at the moment when it became private property, as the auctioneer’s gavel came down on the table in the Year of our Lord 1795.
Now that very same egg is lying in a box on Gronvall’s desk, but a hundred and fifty years ago it was the happy nobleman who held it in his hands.
Viscount de Barde is thrilled at his purchase, though the price rose higher than he would have liked.
The great auk’s eggs are valuable indeed because they are things of such rare beauty, some with dark spots, others with wavy lines, each of them unique.
Auk’s eggs are fascinating in their own right, and the auk itself is a fascinating creature, a strange bird whose body, standing three feet tall, features atrophied limbs, more like flippers than wings, meaning that the auk doesn’t fly but swims instead, and its Welsh name pen gwyn, “white head”, gradually gave rise to the standard name for the black-and-white inhabitants of Antarctica.
There has been a shortage of auk’s eggs recently, the birds have retreated to ever more remote islands, and the prices have gone through the roof, but de Barde raises his hand irrespective.
He wants this egg because it is so beautiful, and de Barde isn’t just a collector; he is a renowned painter too.
He has resolved to visually record the contents of his natural history collection, and to this end he fills canvases with arrangements of minerals, conch shells and vases from Antiquity, and in the corner of one of his paintings depicting the avian world, he immortalises the auk’s egg.
In de Barde’s painting, the auk’s egg rests under various stuffed birds, leaning against the breathtaking eggs of the cassowary and the ostrich, but soon after completing the canvas, the viscount shakes off his mortal coil, and his collection is acquired by the natural history museum of Boulogne.
And because de Barde had the extraordinary good fortune to own not one, not two but three great auk eggs, the museum is willing to barter and exchange one of the eggs for an ostrich skin.
The ostrich or “camel crane” is delivered to the museum by one Thomas Henry Potts, the son of an arms manufacturer who is more interested in birds and lizards than in calibres and gunpowder.
He bequeaths the museum an ostrich, accepting an auk’s egg as payment, but Potts cannot enjoy his acquisition for long as, shortly after sealing the deal, he leaves England and settles in New Zealand.
There he can forget the stink of the arms factory and his father’s hopes that he might one day take it over, and instead devote himself to the study of nature, though alas he is forced to leave his collection behind.
And so the egg finds itself on an auctioneer’s table once again, and this time it is Lord Garvagh who bids the highest. Gronvall shudders with empathy as he thinks of Lord Garvagh’s footman.
Perhaps he was dusting his master’s collection, and this was why he lifted the egg from its velvet cushion.
Perhaps the footman wanted to examine it against the light filtering in through the library window – this miniature work of art, shaped like a pear – and for a brief moment he understood the folly that had made the nobleman pay the price of a house for a single egg, but as he recalled the egg’s value, he rushed to return it to its rightful place.
It’s as though he sees the accident before it happens.
First, he walks in the wrong direction. The effect is evident before the cause, and the footman sees the egg rolling out of his hand long before the lid of the glass cabinet slips from his fingers, he watches it falling through the air and witnesses the moment its fragile calcium shell strikes the lacquered, hardwood floor.
From this moment onwards, the egg is known for this man’s clumsiness.
History has forgotten the bird that laid this egg and the name of the man who plucked it from its nest, but it will not forget the hands that let it slip.
The egg becomes known as Lord Garvagh’s Footman’s Egg, and the footman lost his job because of it.
We don’t know what happened to him after he was fired, but we can be sure he didn’t come away with a glowing recommendation.
The loss he caused is immeasurable, for while this particular egg travelled between the collections of three men, the species that laid it departed this world for good.
There was a time when the great auk dotted the shores around the North Atlantic.
It was a tasty bird, its feathers made plump pillows, its body was so oily that it burned like a lantern, and where there was a shortage of wood, a canny fisherman would set an auk ablaze on the fire.
Fishing and coastal communities had used the auk and its eggs for food through the centuries, until a new continent was discovered, the miraculous Americas, making longer and more difficult sea journeys necessary.
Crossing the Atlantic required great stores of provisions, and this great wingless bird was easy prey: in his memoirs, the explorer Jacques Cartier mentions that, in barely the space of half an hour, an expedition off Newfoundland succeeded in hunting so many auks that they needed two longboats to carry their carcasses.
But these days of plenty did not last forever.
After a few hundred years of crossing the Atlantic, the great auk is already a rarity, and this is when collectors become interested in the auk and its eggs.
Curators begin to compete with fishermen for the few birds that remain.
The auk lays only one egg every summer, and if that egg ends up in the hands of a poacher, the bird will leave its nest and return to the sea without any offspring.
In 1844, a group of fishermen come across a pair of auks on a small island off the Icelandic coast. They wring the delicious birds’ necks, and with that the auks are gone, so abruptly that not a single naturalist has a chance to publish a comprehensive study of the species, and suddenly nobody can remember how the auk called out to its young.