A black and white photo of a woman with a king penguin in her arms on a boat is impossible to ignore! What is the story behind it?
By: Ann Kristin Balto // Norwegian Polar Institute
Photo: Jens Eggvin / Norwegian Polar Institute.
In 1931, Mathilde Wegger went on a voyage around “The South Polar Land”. She was accompanying Ingrid Christensen, who wanted a female companion with her during the long voyage around Antarctica on board MS Thorshavn. Mrs Ingrid Christensen was the wife of whaling shipowner Lars Christensen, who in the years from 1927 to 1931 studied whale populations in the Southern Ocean, carried out research and mapped uncharted areas.
Among the many animals found in these southern waters, whales were not the only species in focus; penguins also attracted attention. In the 1930s, many different attempts were made to introduce new animal species to areas where they did not naturally belong. In Norway, we know of the musk oxen that were brought to Dovre from Greenland. The idea was that new species could become a resource in the areas where they were released. That notion also applied to penguins. A few years after this picture was taken, the first king penguins were transported to Norway.
In 1936, SS Neptune arrived in Norway with nine king penguins on board. The birds were provided by Lars Christensen and everything was organised by the Norwegian Association for Nature Conservation. Two pairs of penguins were released on the island of Røst in Lofoten and two pairs and one juvenile were released at Gjesvær in Finnmark. In subsequent years, several penguin species would be introduced on Røst, namely macaroni penguins and South African penguins. The penguins were released on islands where they had easy access to the sea and where there were no predators.
The experiment was not a success, and there were no more sightings of penguins in Lofoten and Gjesvær after 1950. Long after the photograph of Mathilde Wegger with the penguins was taken, another picture of Mathilde Wegger sitting with Ingrid Christensen on the deck of Thorshavn inspired a novel about women in Antarctica. Australian author Jesse Blackadders came across the picture at a library in Sydney and was both curious and fascinated by the two women, and wrote the book Chasing the Light, which was published in 2013.