This evocative souvenir from the so-called heroic age of polar exploration sold to an online bidder for £6400 (plus 25% buyer’s premium) at Wilson55.
The egg, estimated at £1000-1500, was consigned by a vendor whose father and grandfather had been keen bird’s egg collectors.
It came with a typewritten explanatory note signed by Ponting that reads: This box contains the egg of an Adelie Penguin, – the most grotesque bird in all the world, which was brought back by me from the Antarctic regions, where I was a member of Captain Scott’s Expedition on which he and four comrades – Captain Oates, Dr Wilson, Lieutenant Bowers and Petty Officer Evans – perished on their return journey from the South Pole. The Adelie Penguin breeds farther South than any other known creature. This egg was found by me, in November 1911, seven miles from Captain Scott’s Winter Quarters, Lat: 77.30 S., 750 miles from the South Pole. HG Ponting
Herbert George Ponting was the photographer and filmmaker for the expedition and took many images of the Adelie population – the most widespread penguin species in the Antarctic. This egg has been ‘blown’ through a hole to one side but was otherwise intact.
Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed expedition, which arrived in Antarctica on January 4, 1911, hoped to be the first to reach the South Pole but it also had scientific objectives. The study of penguins, believed at the time to represent the evolutionary ‘missing link’ between birds and reptiles, was a key part.
Three emperor penguin eggs that survived the journey home went to the Natural History Museum. Another Adelie penguin egg collected by Ponting in 1911 or 1912 sold at Christie’s in 2000 for a hammer price of £3200. An Adelie egg from Terra Nova sold for £9000 at Stroud Auction Rooms (now Harper Field), Gloucestershire, January 2019. Housed in a glazed mahogany case, it was part of a group of items consigned for sale by direct descendants of Captain Thomas Newland Rosser (1857-1935), a dockmaster in Cardiff for where the whaling ship set sail in June 1910.
A taxidermy Adélie penguin given to the vendor’s family by the Terra Nova’s doctor and parasitologist Edward Leicester Atkinson (1881-1928) was sold by Essex auction house Sworders in March 2010 for £10,500. The buyer was Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, New Zealand.
