During the mid-nineteenth century, Western naturalists discovered the fragments of large femur bones and giant egg fragments from a giant bird. As they continued their explorations and analysis, more bones and fossilized eggs confirmed the existence of dozens of species of extinct giant birds. Flightless and enormous, often exceeding ten feet tall and weighing over five hundred pounds, these birds created a sensation, adding to the excitement of natural – history collection and the growth of museums with exotic specimens across the globe. Yet the initial discoveries were not made in the same place, but rather on the islands of New Zealand and Madagascar.
The discovery of the moa of New Zealand and the Aepyornis of Madagascar added to their reputation as areas of keen scientific interest.Footnote 1 Yet it was their similarities, even more than their enormous size, that intrigued the scientific community. Already, flightless birds, with their broad geographic distribution, played a role in some of the major scientific theories of the day. Charles Darwin considered the geographical reach of giant birds crucial to the development of his theory of natural selection – particularly the difference in size of the two species of rhea from South America that he discovered on the voyage of the Beagle as well as the ostrich of Africa.Footnote 2 Further, the birds' isolated location on far-distant islands made them a site of inquiry for the emerging field of biogeography. Despite this prominence, the history behind the discovery and understanding of these extinct birds has only been analysed in isolation, if at all. And yet there are striking similarities not just in how the two birds were studied, but also in how naturalists and explorers understood the birds in relation to each other, suggesting that a global framework composed of interactions between naturalists, theories and specimens was part of their scientific interpretation.
By the time of the discovery of the Aepyornis on Madagascar, the moa of New Zealand had already begun to be examined, its structure classified and typed, its habits and lifespan theorized. So while the Aepyornis fit into the image of Madagascar as a world full of unusual creatures, it was hailed as another example, if largest in physical size, of giant extinct birds. As such, the Aepyornis was often interpreted by an existing set of knowledge and an operating exchange of global networks involving a diverse range of naturalists. Still, these specimens raised the question of how such similarities could be found across such a vast geographic distance.
Part of the reason why a global dimension has been obscured has been due to a historiography that often places science in an imperial dynamic. The debate over how naturalists in the field interacted with naturalists back in the metropole operating in museums, libraries and laboratories has tended to focus on power dynamics, on the ability of one side to exert scientific authority over the other. Increasingly, scholars have stressed the importance and influence that the periphery had on these debates, offering important new ways to conceptualize the production of science. However, this focus has meant that less attention has been paid to the interaction between locales. Instead of a dynamic built on dual transmission of knowledge between metropole and periphery, the role of global networks needs to be better understood, particularly how information circulated and shifted.Footnote 3 Indeed, Richard Grove's work has revealed how the combination of viewing isolated locales as contained units and placing them in a larger context provided a more nuanced understanding of the process of scientific inquiry.Footnote 4
In this sense, the histories of New Zealand and Madagascar, such as they exist, are no different. For all of its scientific curiosities, New Zealand's history and science have often been embedded in debates about British colonial policies, and seen as a product of empire, rather than an imperial location with global connections.Footnote 5 And what study of the natural history of Madagascar has been done has primarily focused on French colonialism.Footnote 6
The discovery of unusual fauna often involved naturalists attempting to understand them through other, similar species, a tendency to cast the unknown into a more familiar setting.Footnote 7 Yet the choices involved in selecting what features or characteristics to compare, and thus the interpretation of these results, involved a degree of subjectivity. For instance, after its discovery in 1901 a debate emerged over whether the okapi of Central Africa, with its striped hindquarters, was a type of zebra, or, with its head, a giraffe.Footnote 8 Richard Owen received marsupials from Australia, and comparing them with fossils from Britain led him to conclude Australia was a more primitive, and more ecologically unstable, place due to a lack of large carnivores.Footnote 9
The debate over the moa and Aepyornis reveals several important features about how global networks interpreted and explained the scientific choices made during the nineteenth century. First, these networks were often quite diverse, drawing upon a range of talents, abilities and educations to discover, classify and explain new species. Naturalists ranged from amateurs to museum scientific staff to missionaries. Jim Endersby has argued that the dynamic between core and periphery often involved a tension where the centre tended to homogenize results in an attempt retain authority over local collectors.Footnote 10 Yet the influence of local naturalists loomed large in the interpretation of these specimens.
Second, the success of this effort was often tempered by, and contingent upon, the local. Unusual conditions and species often meant that local collectors developed an authority over species that those operating, for example, from a museum back in the metropole and at the mercy of what specimens they could obtain could not always match. Yet this interplay went beyond a simple center–periphery model. Often overlooked is how these peripheries engaged with each other. Here, global networks were crucial; they maintained lines of communication for the exchange of ideas and specimens between locales even as they included and augmented knowledge from leading authorities and professional publications. Further, these global networks served to justify each other's findings and enhance the importance of the local, particularly its peculiar qualities. They were often informal – personal correspondence or word of mouth – as well as publications. Yet even as global networks helped provide authority and prominence, they facilitated viewing these new discoveries through an existing prism of knowledge. Although these may not have been controlled by a central authority, they did produce templates and patterns that often influenced the interpretations of new discoveries. As such, naturalists understood the Aepyornis of Madagascar through the moa of New Zealand.
Discoveries and the location of tales
Western naturalists' discovery and understanding of the moa and Aepyornis stemmed not just from fossil evidence, but also from their perceptions of the local environments and their collaboration with the local Maori people of New Zealand and the Malagasy of Madagascar. Local folklore, particularly on Madagascar, spurred on ideas about the giant birds, from their behaviour and diet to their continuing existence somewhere on their islands. It was only after rich fossil evidence emerged and a scientific analysis had begun that Western naturalists began to emphasize how knowledge about the birds was an exclusively Western domain. Further, the discoveries of the moa helped to substantiate the idea of the Aepyornis of Madagascar. Despite geographical distance and the stark environmental differences, legends and local folklore about these giant birds created a bond between them for Western naturalists.
During the nineteenth century, the British viewed New Zealand, with its temperate climate, as an ideal colony and during the 1840s they began to bring it into the imperial realm. This involved not only purchasing land and setting up a colonial structure to govern, but also sending out explorers and surveyors to master the land.Footnote 11 While idealized for its temperate and accessible climate, New Zealand had a reputation for a distinct natural history, particularly its absence of land mammals. Yet nothing ‘attracted greater attention’ than its fossils of giant birds.Footnote 12 Indeed, the discovery of the moa further enhanced New Zealand as a keen area of interest for naturalists.Footnote 13
The initial moa discoveries were made during the 1830s. In 1834, Joel Polack, a trader who would promote colonization, was shown by Maori several large bones and learned of the existence of giant birds.Footnote 14 While Polack did not obtain any specimens, his report was quickly followed by the discovery of large bones in the late 1830s: John Rule obtained a fragment of a leg bone and would bring it to London in 1839; the missionary William Colenso heard tales of a giant bird in 1838 and his colleagues William Williams and Richard Taylor were shown bones in 1839.Footnote 15 This was a revelation that redirected Western attempts at understanding New Zealand. Fantastic tales about the moa mixed with Maori sayings and descriptions that hinted at its continued existence. Colenso reported the tale of two Americans who saw a giant bird onshore but were so frightened by its appearance that they failed to shoot it.Footnote 16 For a brief time, fossil discoveries, coupled with these tales, led to a push to find any moa that may have survived hidden in the recesses of New Zealand.
Western naturalists, however, were to be disappointed in their quest. Indeed, Colenso quickly argued that despite some stories the moa no longer existed, basing his argument on his repeated investigations in areas of reputed moa sightings that failed to find a living bird and on the fact that no Maori had actually seen one.Footnote 17 Colenso hypothesized that the word itself was a source of confusion. Recently, Atholl Anderson has contended that moa was a common Polynesian word more attributed to a chicken rather than a giant bird and that its usage by the Maori in response to European inquiries is more revealing of Maori awareness of Europeans searching for the giant bird and their own new association of moa with the fossilized remains than it is empirical evidence of Maori familiarity with the giant bird itself.Footnote 18 Still, what mattered during these initial periods of discovery was that local tales enhanced the discovery of bones and fuelled searches for a living moa. The acceptance of these stories underscored the continued reliance of Westerners upon local knowledge of the environment.
As the possibility of discovering a living moa dissipated as none was found, an increasing number of fossil finds removed the birds from local folklore and placed them within the domain of Western science and Western expertise. Taylor discovered the first major deposit of moa bones in a swamp in 1843. This was quickly followed by similar discoveries: in 1846 one site had four hundred bones, and in 1847 Taylor discovered another deposit of over five hundred bones.Footnote 19 By the 1860s bones were seen as littering the islands, often in swamp sites, caves or dunes.Footnote 20
Madagascar, on the other hand, had a very different history. While New Zealand was colonized, Madagascar's rugged terrain, disease-ridden coasts and centralized polity in the centre of the island, the Merina kingdom, contributed to its remaining independent until the French colonized the island in 1895. Despite its political isolation from Western imperialism, Madagascar attracted attention for the wonder of its natural history. Whereas New Zealand was remarkable for its absence of mammals, Madagascar teemed with life. Naturalists found Madagascar to be a strange world, one of wonder and imagination, and full of scientific potential. The naturalist Richard Baron wrote, ‘So numerous and curious are its forms of animal life, so rich and varied its vegetable productions, that no lover of nature could fail to be inspired with a desire to dive into and explore its mysterious depths.’Footnote 21 It was Madagascar's remarkable diversity and new species, both fauna and flora, that excited so many naturalists and led them to the island.
But this wonder came from a faith that science could unlock Madagascar's secrets. As naturalists explored and attempted to comprehend Madagascar better, they altered their image of the island from an unknown world to one mastered by science. Unlike the moa, which in many ways seized a pre-eminent place in New Zealand's natural history, the Aepyornis, the giant bird of Madagascar, was just one further example of a strange animal. For naturalists, the Aepyornis was not unique: they immediately connected it to a wider history, particularly the moa.
Naturalists who travelled to Madagascar during the nineteenth century were often familiar with earlier European knowledge of the island. One of the most famous and widely read was the work of Etienne de Flacourt who arrived on Madagascar in 1647 and became the governor of a small French colony on the south-east coast. Beset by disease, hostile Malagasy and French government neglect, the colony suffered. Flacourt would return to France to lobby for better supplies only to die on his return voyage to the island. However, he left behind one of the earliest and foremost accounts of Madagascar, including a large section dedicated to the remarkable natural history of the island.Footnote 22 In his work, Flacourt recorded several strange creatures, including ‘a large bird which haunts the Ampatres and lays eggs like the ostriches; so that the people of these places may not catch it, as it seeks the most lonely places’.Footnote 23
For naturalists in the nineteenth century, tales of the giant birds carried some validity because they came from a combination of Western, ancient and Malagasy sources. As Westerners explored Madagascar, they learned of Malagasy legends and stories of giant birds that had once roamed the island. Flacourt's descriptions corroborated Malagasy tales. Hearing these tales, Europeans began to link the giant birds of Madagascar to the tales of Sinbad and Marco Polo, which spoke of the roc, an ancient bird of such great size and power that it could ‘seize an elephant in its talons and carry him high into the air, and drop him … having so killed him … [the bird] eats him at his leisure’.Footnote 24
Long before the actual discovery of the Aepyornis in 1851, Western naturalists made connections between tales of the roc and the global existence of giant birds, particularly the discoveries on New Zealand. Indeed, during the 1840s the tales of giant birds, alongside the discovery of the moa, made Madagascar a presumed site for the discovery of a giant bird, with its position near Africa and its renown as a land of unusual fauna.Footnote 25 In his book on Marco Polo, which won him the Gold Medal from the Royal Geographic Society, Henry Yule linked the discoveries of the moa in New Zealand and the Aepyornis of Madagascar, arguing that the existence of these giant birds had probably fuelled the tales of giant birds such as the roc.Footnote 26 And in a curious similarity, in New Zealand Taylor quoted, in support of the bird's survival, a Maori who had told him that the moa ‘select[ed] the most lonely places’ – a phrase shared by Flacourt.Footnote 27
As in New Zealand, evidence emerged in Madagascar that often corroborated local tales and encouraged the idea that a living Aepyornis might still be discovered. As evidence, including fossils and eggs, emerged during the 1850s, it combined with tales of the roc and knowledge of the moa, to support opinions that the giant bird might still live: ‘It is not, indeed, altogether impossible that in the inmost and inaccessible recesses of these wide stretching forests, there may still linger specimens of those gigantic creatures called Aepyornis maximus.’Footnote 28 Naturalists often explained that Malagasy believed the bird to still exist and that it possessed the power of flight and preyed upon large animals.Footnote 29 By the 1870s, while no living bird had been found, enough fossil evidence had been collected for the Madagascar missionary and naturalist James Sibree to declare that the ‘well-known account of the rukh or gigantic bird, long thought to be entirely fabulous, has during the last few years been discovered to have basis in fact in the existence of the now extinct Aepyornis’.Footnote 30
Crucially, the moa had helped to legitimize the Aepyornis. Folklore about giant birds was seen as evidence rather than superstition. Together, the two began to be cast not as fiction or even as anomalies, but as part of a larger scientific process that had to be more fully understood. This process, however, relied not only upon similar patterns of scientific inquiry, but also upon developing theories to account for the existence of large flightless birds on such distinct and distant islands.
Fossils
The first moa bone to be known to Europe was presented by Rule to the Victorian naturalist and fossil expert Richard Owen at the Hunterian Museum. Owen read a paper in 1839 declaring the existence of a large, flightless bird, akin to the ostrich. The moa's discovery created a sensation, with Prince Albert even arranging to meet Richard Owen for his announcement of the identification of the new species.Footnote 31 More bones would follow starting in 1843, confirming Owen's original hypothesis.
Owen's discovery, however, was not without controversy. Indeed, Owen's original announcement of a large flightless bird came from a single femur and his subsequent analysis and even assembled skeletons emerged mostly from jumbled and partial skeletons, often with broken bones.Footnote 32 Although many hailed his piecing together a skeleton from a fragment as an accomplishment, others disputed this ability or pointed out the contributions of local collectors, from Colenso to Rule, who had excitedly commented that it had possibly come from a large, extinct bird, and who had corrected Owen's initial dismissal of the specimen as a beef bone by informing him that New Zealand lacked such mammals prior to European settlement.Footnote 33 Such controversies were not merely about Owen's proclamation; they were often part of an attempt to promote the importance of local knowledge.
Still, these controversies were secondary to the debate about the moa itself, a topic complicated by the discovery of the Aepyornis. And it was this debate about the nature of the moa that coloured the first discoveries of the Aepyornis. In 1851, the French zoologist Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1805–1861) obtained some bone fragments and a gigantic egg twelve inches in diameter with a volume of two gallons – six times the volume of an ostrich egg. Fully aware of the work on the moa of the last decade as well as the reputation of Madagascar and the writings of Flacourt, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire estimated the new bird's height as exceeding that of the moa and named his discovery Aepyornis maximus.Footnote 34 Further explorations of the island in the late 1860s began a series of discoveries of bones and egg fragments throughout Madagascar.Footnote 35 Analysis of the leg bones concluded that the Aepyornis exceeded in bulk even the giant bird in New Zealand, making it the largest bird ever.Footnote 36
As naturalists attempted to learn more about these giant birds a debate emerged over how such similarities could occur over such a vast distance. Looking at the fossils and bones sent back to Europe, conclusions at first varied. Part of the difficulty was that a complete skeleton was never found and so the Aepyornis had to be pieced together from many separate skeletons to form a whole. By this time, Owen had been already been working on the moa, so when Owen received specimens from Madagascar, they fit into an existing idea about giant birds.Footnote 37 As early as January 1852 at a meeting of the Zoological Society of London, Owen compared the Aepyornis findings with the moa.Footnote 38
Many naturalists, and most Madagascar experts, including the famed French naturalists Alphonse Milne-Edwards and Alfred Grandidier, argued for a direct connection between the Aepyornis and the moa.Footnote 39 By the 1890s, the two had worked for years on the natural history of Madagascar and were widely regarded as the pre-eminent experts on the island. As new fossils arrived Milne-Edwards and Grandidier created a scientific family of giants birds on Madagascar, with the Aepyornis representing one genus alongside a genus they called Mullerornis, which was slightly smaller than the Aepyornis. They based their evaluation mostly upon a comparison of numerous leg bones and vertebrae, although in a few instances they possessed skull, sternum and pelvis bones from which they drew parallels to the moa of New Zealand.Footnote 40
Some naturalists remained doubtful of this connection. One of these was Charles Andrews (1866–1924), who took the lead in London during the 1890s in analysing Aepyornis bones. Andrews doubted the close alliance between the Aepyornis and the moa, seeing their resemblance as ‘merely the result of convergence resulting from similar conditions of life’. As species, he kept their development further apart and criticized the French naturalists, writing, ‘It is to be hoped that the authors just mentioned [Milne-Edwards and Grandidier] have taken some particular bone as the type specimen of each species, and that names have not been given to miscellaneous collections of conjecturally associated bones.’Footnote 41 While Andrews echoed the fears of some naturalists, part of the apprehension derived more from the sheer number of new species the two French naturalists were quickly classifying as they sifted through hundreds of fossils, and less from their conclusions linking the Aepyornis to the moa. Indeed after the journal Natural Science had been criticized for personal attacks on Grandidier and Milne-Edwards, they clarified that their criticism was aimed not at the men or even at their theories, but merely at the measurements that led to three distinct species of Mullerornis.Footnote 42 So while some conclusions were made from incomplete evidence and did not go unchallenged, by the end of the nineteenth century the Aepyornis was framed as part of a global story, and many naturalists believed that the birds of Madagascar and New Zealand were related.
Upon visiting the British Museum a New Zealand visitor remarked on finding the moa and Aepyornis skeletons side by side and commented on their close resemblance.Footnote 43 There were subtle differences in their skeletons: when placed next to each other the moa appears sleeker and taller while the Aepyornis is heavier and squatter. But the construction of the skeletons obscured how limited knowledge about the flightless birds actually was.Footnote 44 For example, how the birds held their head remained a matter of dispute, yet both were placed with the necks erect, their skulls placed atop a vertical spinal column, in part due to Owen's original assembling of a moa, which accentuated the height of the bird.Footnote 45
Even more than their skeletons, illustrations of the moa and Aepyornis are strikingly similar, both underscoring the limited amount of knowledge available about the birds, and reflecting a tendency to see the birds as closely related.Footnote 46 In both images, the giant bird dominates the scene and exhibits the same pose and structure. Its central position in the frame and the background of smaller fauna accentuate each bird's height. Indeed, only the local fauna that surrounds the two birds can distinguish the moa, with kiwis near its feet, from the drawing of the Aepyornis, which had Madagascar's extinct pygmy hippo in the background. Despite geographic distance, understanding of one bird filled in questions about the other. And since these giant birds were each increasingly seen as extensions of the other, ideas and theories were formed to account for their separation.
Networks and scientific authority
In both Madagascar and New Zealand, Westerners produced similar scientific networks to explore, understand and promote their respective islands. These networks developed ideas and theories about the islands' natural history, lobbied for the importance of their locale to the scientific world, provided those who operated in such distant and isolated locales a scientific authority to their work, and crucially helped to forge a global outlook in their work as they tied together their local findings and the debates of their day. These networks were crucial to developing similar ideas and visions of the Aepyornis and moa while revealing how distant locales connected and participated in the wider scientific community.
The existence of these giant birds highlighted the need for scientific authority. On the one hand, their discovery created notoriety for the islands, and often for the naturalists who were discovering these fossils. Yet, on the other hand, naturalists needed a way to verify the scientific quality of their work as they uncovered such unusual finds.Footnote 47 Both areas attracted a diverse range of people keenly interested in natural history who took steps to bolster their own scientific credentials. In this way the sheer natural wonder and moments for discovery on the islands led not only to naturalists exploring the regions, but also to the development of scientific societies dedicated to providing a richer and more nuanced local understanding of their respective islands. Indeed, their distance from the metropole provided these naturalists with freedom for exploration as well as a need to verify their scientific credentials. Naturalists on Madagascar and New Zealand deliberately crafted a scientific authority through their discoveries and analysis through publications and scientific forums.
Part of this need emanated from the great range of people engaged in natural history. As sites of Western discovery with large indigenous populations, the islands attracted missionaries, who played a significant role in the production of science. While many missionaries filled their days dedicated to their task of spreading the Gospel, others took a keen interest in natural history, seeing in it another way to bring order and civilization to the natural world. As I have mentioned, on New Zealand, Williams and Colenso were among the first missionaries to obtain moa bones in 1841, while Taylor discovered large deposits of moa bones and wrote of his travels and discovery of the moa.Footnote 48 Further, the naturalist and moa expert Julius Haast frequently mentioned his long discussions with the missionary James Stack, who helped to shape Haast's understanding of the moa.Footnote 49
On Madagascar, missionaries played a pivotal role in natural history. Indeed, it was missionaries who were at the forefront of scientific discovery on the island. They collected specimens, explored and surveyed the island, took meteorological readings and engaged in a robust scientific debate over the variety of fauna and flora as well as the reasons behind its unusual qualities. Further, missionaries of the London Missionary Society were at the forefront of establishing a scientific forum, composed chiefly of the Antananarivo Annual, an annual publication dedicated to the natural history of Madagascar. Begun in 1875, it ran for twenty-five years, publishing over a dozen feature-length articles per edition as well as many smaller pieces and notes of discovery, ranging from biology, history and botany to ethnography, meteorology, geology and geography.
Naturalists on the islands forged strong professional reputations. Some examples reveal the range. Grandidier made several journeys to Madagascar during the mid-1860s, exploring the island and collecting vast amounts of specimens and data. Once back in France, Grandidier made the natural history of the island his life's work. In addition to his own research, specimens from other collectors and naturalists would continually be sent to Grandidier throughout the rest of the century as he became the pre-eminent authority on the island. Grandidier's analysis of the island culminated in his multivolume tome entitled L'histoire politique, physique et naturelle de Madagascar.Footnote 50
Besides Grandidier, who stood as an established and professional naturalist, there was Richard Baron. Baron arrived in Madagascar as a missionary. Yet he was quickly captivated by the island's natural history, becoming a highly regarded geologist and botanist, collecting specimens (he sent over seven thousand plants to the Royal Botanical Gardens), and producing copious articles about the island, as well as serving as an editor and major force behind the Antananarivo Annual. For his efforts he was made a fellow of the Linnean Society and was invited by the French to join their scientific society on the island, the Académie Malgache, in 1902.
On New Zealand, the German Julius Haast made a name for himself as one of the foremost authorities on the moa. Labelled the ‘moa-man’, Haast not only collected fossils, but also was deeply engaged with the interpretation of the moa. As Ruth Barton has effectively argued, while the metropole often held the patronage and finances as well as acting as a clearing house in which for specimens to find themselves, areas such as New Zealand remained vital to the interpretation of science because men such as Haast possessed unrivalled local knowledge.Footnote 51 In New Zealand, Haast became an authority on natural history and built a distinguished career around the moa. He founded the Canterbury Museum, which in 1871 had seven complete moa skeletons; by 1873 it had sixteen. The moa became so prized internationally that Haast often traded with other museums for rare specimens. Besides London and the British Museum, which sent him an ostrich, among other fossils, Haast and the Canterbury Museum received rhea skeletons from Buenos Aires; an elephant, tiger and python from the Indian Museum in Calcutta; and other specimens from Bombay, Auckland, San Francisco, Cape Town, Adelaide, Stockholm, Florence and Santiago. The museum also obtained a replica of the giant Aepyornis egg. The museum was essential to tying the moa to the rest of the world.Footnote 52 As John Mackenzie has argued, museums, with their focus on order and classifying the world, operated as symbols of modernism, yet it was their circulation of specimens and exchange of ideas across the world that helped to meld exotic locales and contributed to a search for connections and explanations among even the most unusual specimens.Footnote 53
Alongside the Canterbury Museum, Haast was also part of the New Zealand Institute, which was founded in 1867 in part to coordinate scientific debates within the colony. Through its journal, Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, as with the Antananarivo Annual, the institute provided a forum to discuss the science of New Zealand, publishing articles ranging from ethnography and agriculture to history and moa findings. In the inaugural address, Governor Sir George Ferguson Bowen declared the purpose of the institute to be ‘a public museum and laboratory, and a public library … to promote the general study and cultivation of the various branches and departments of art, science, literature, and philosophy’. In emphasizing the scientific disciplines, he captured an idea of how central science was to the development of the colony of New Zealand. Further, he later declared every colonist to be in part a ‘scientific observer’, a typical attitude of the day, but one that also underscored the very need to have a space to deliberate these scientific observations and make sense of them.Footnote 54 Yet such institutions were not just part of the colonizing project;Footnote 55 they were instrumental in fitting such places into a global framework.
Crucial to the robustness of scientific debate and inquiry on the islands were scientific forums that provided a community to exchange ideas as well as verify information and theories. Instead of random amateur naturalists, forums such as the Transactions of the New Zealand Institute and the Antananarivo Annual on Madagascar helped to secure scientific authority for those working in distant places. Both publications offered a way to understand their respective islands, ranging from the people to the natural history, and a way to keep up to date with the latest scientific theories. In doing so, they replicated the proceedings and debates back in the scientific metropole, and thereby not only provided an air of scientific authority but also pushed for the need for local understanding of such diverse and unusual environments to better understand how they fit with a global whole.
With this scientific authority, naturalists on the islands played a central role in explaining the origins and extinctions of these giant birds. Further, this scientific community was not only quite well connected, with major figures and museums often exchanging information, but also quite diverse, with contributions from far-flung areas and from an eclectic group of people such as missionaries, ship's captains and travellers. Together, the theories that emerged to explain these giant birds not only stressed local conditions, but also attached their findings to a global framework. In this manner, the explanations behind the Aepyornis and the moa had a similar trajectory and achieved similar conclusions that went beyond the birds themselves.
Origins
As evidence of these birds mounted, the debate began to centre on how islands thousands of miles apart had distinct birds closely related to each other. Even naturalists who viewed Madagascar as a continent unto itself contended that the island possessed curious connections to distant places such as New Zealand and the Americas.Footnote 56 While many travellers and journals had come to define the Aepyornis by explaining that it was ‘allied to the New Zealand moa’,Footnote 57 this only raised a more fundamental scientific issue. How could flightless birds separated by a vast expanse of ocean have common ancestors?
Debate swirled around ideas about sunken continents and ancient land bridges, including many who revived and endorsed the idea of a great southern continent. Such land masses provided a way for fauna to migrate and disperse across vast areas. Over time, many species died out, leaving remnants such as the moa or Aepyornis, which lived on in isolation. Indeed, Owen initially linked the moa to giant birds in the Americas through an ancient sunken continent before later abandoning the idea for a theory of a flying moa.Footnote 58 On New Zealand, naturalists, including Haast and the geologist F.W. Hutton, endorsed the concept of a lost continent. Hutton articulated a widely held argument that the distribution of these birds across the southern hemisphere logically supported the existence of a sunken continent.Footnote 59 In this way, New Zealand was envisioned as the vestige of a great southern landmass no longer in existence. Such a theory not only harked back to earlier geographic conceptions of the need for a southern continent, but it effectively answered the question of how giant birds with so few differences could exist in such distant locales.
On Madagascar, the theory of the lost continent of Lemuria emerged as a way to explain Madagascar's incredible, yet unique, natural history. While Lemuria, first proposed in 1864 by the naturalist Philip Sclater, attempted to explain Madagascar's unusual mammal population, it often found its strongest supporters among those who studied birds.Footnote 60 Indeed, the discovery of extinct giant birds solely in the southern hemisphere, mostly on islands, gave credence, if not to Lemuria specifically, at least to the concept of a lost giant southern continent.
For proponents of this idea, the spread of bird species across island regions that remained distinct from mainland areas suggested the existence of lost continents. The fossils of flightless birds were often a key piece of evidence.Footnote 61 The naturalist Henry O. Forbes argued for a giant southern continent where New Zealand, the Chatham Islands and the Mascarenes, including Madagascar, formed a perimeter that had shrunk to these isolated islands and Antarctica. Central to his evidence was the discovery of birds such as the moa, Aepyornis and the dodo.Footnote 62 Milne-Edwards also saw birds as a crucial piece of evidence suggesting a giant ‘Mascarene continent’ that would explain the fossil structures across the Indian Ocean, from the Mascarene Islands to New Zealand, including the similarities between the Aepyornis and the moa.Footnote 63
Although the scientific community moved away from theories about lost continents due to the lack of geological evidence, particularly the depths of ocean soundings, how New Zealand and Madagascar possessed such similar giant birds remained a compelling scientific matter. Even in the twentieth century, after theories such as Lemuria and the southern continent had been largely abandoned, people still wondered. In 1908, the National Geographic Society asked questions about the origins of New Zealand's flightless birds and how birds scattered across the Indian Ocean into the Pacific could be so closely related.Footnote 64 While some would continue to support some version of a lost southern continent, the incredible similarities between the two giant birds bolstered theories that could account for their global distribution and relationship.
Although there were those on both Madagascar and New Zealand who argued that the islands should be treated separately and as part of their own geographic regions, more began to see the connections between the islands and not just the uniquenesses. This was an important transition born not just out of fossil records of the giant birds, but in a framework that had begun to see the world as a connected unit. Naturalists often lobbied to maintain the unusual quality of their respective islands and its endemic life at the same time as they adopted and championed theories that stressed the similarities. Isolated uniqueness was a curiosity, yet a giant flightless bird that shared a similar ancestor with another bird half a world away brought not only explanatory power, but crucially the prestige of new scientific theories. The existence of giant flightless birds on Madagascar and New Zealand but also the rhea of South America, the emu and cassowary of Australasia, and the ostrich of Africa suggested a deeper framework and helped buttress Darwinian ideas as well as the emerging field of biogeography.
In this way, Alfred Russel Wallace's theory of biogeography provided part of a solution with its stress on ancient global connections followed by isolation that developed new species. While biogeography remained debated, it provided a reasonable explanation for the diversity as well as the similarities of species across global distance, allowing it to collect supporters from the ranks of the proponents of lost continents and those who argued for the uniqueness of specific locations.Footnote 65 Indeed, it was this balance of providing for unique local features but stressing a mechanism for global similarities that won over naturalists in New Zealand and Madagascar.Footnote 66
Extinction
If the Aepyornis and the moa no longer existed, what had caused the demise of these giant birds? In both cases, a similar theory for extinction was proposed that not only fit emerging archeological evidence, but also confirmed ideas and perceptions about the indigenous peoples of these islands. Here, local folklore about the giant birds became evidence of a collective memory of the birds that suggested responsibility for their deaths. Indeed, placing the blame on primitive peoples served to justify Western operations on the islands while obscuring other environmental causes for extinction.
On Madagascar, naturalists theorized that the disappearance of the Aepyornis coincided with the arrival of the Malagasy on the island. How the Aepyornis perished, however, was just as crucial as the timing. Theories emphasized sheer brutality – a wanton and deliberate destruction of the Aepyornis. Evidence of bones with knife marks enhanced a characterization of a bloodthirsty and primitive people who hunted as much for pleasure as for necessity. The Malagasy were inherently destructive to the environment.Footnote 67 Indeed, the demise of the Aepyornis led to an explanation for the disappearance of the rest of Madagascar's megafauna, including the pygmy hippopotamus and the giant lemur. Grandidier concluded ‘that it was under his [Malagasy] eye, and probably as a result of his action, that all these species have disappeared of which the subfossil remains only now reveal to us their former existence’.Footnote 68
Such a theory was enhanced by global similarities. On New Zealand, the debate waged over which people exterminated the moa – was it the Maori, when they first arrived at New Zealand, or was it a race that pre-dated the Maori?Footnote 69 Whoever killed the moa did so on a massive scale. As Haast wrote, they ‘slaughtered the huge birds wholesale on and near the spit, afterwards holding there their feasts; and, as I shall show further on, having such an enormous amount of game, they used only the main portion of each carcass for their meals’.Footnote 70 Who killed the moa was important because it was influenced by who Westerners thought the Maori were.Footnote 71 B.S. Booth argued against the Maori killing the moa because of an idea of the noble savage where wholesale slaughter was anathema, referring to knowledge of American Indians and their use of the American buffalo.Footnote 72 Yet others saw the Maori as ‘primitive man’, who upon their arrival in New Zealand, killed out of hunger, but in vast numbers.Footnote 73
Such a debate went beyond seeing indigenous peoples as either noble or savage, and instead reflected a vision of how Westerners viewed their interactions with these people. For some, the unique fauna of the islands, in particular the giant birds, suggested a primitive place, too isolated for natural competition to have occurred.Footnote 74 The linkage between brutal destruction of an environment and a people was strengthened by preconceived notions of how primitive peoples behaved as well as the crucial rejection of Western methods or culture. Yet these methods were not seen as committed solely due to savagery. While the Maori and Malagasy possessed a heritage of primitive behaviour, they shared a common Polynesian heritage. As such, they both were seen in a similar racial hierarchy.Footnote 75 Indeed, for Westerners, the Maori and Malagasy were examples of peoples who had progressed beyond their earlier primitive selves, and were often categorized positively. Their various levels of acceptance of Christianity as well as their use of agriculture and a hierarchical political structure revealed their potential to be civilized. As such, their slaughter of giant birds fit into a Western hierarchy of peoples and their progression toward civilization, rather than simply belonging to a condemnable past.
Extinction went beyond the disappearance of a species – it involved a whole new discussion of what the loss of species meant to a wider debate on natural history and science as well as culture. Even by the 1840s, extinction remained a fairly new idea, one that destabilized theories about the fixity of species or the permanent order of the natural world fixed in Christian scripture. Still, by the nineteenth century, Westerners had witnessed not only extinction, but also extinction caused by people. The case of the dodo of Mauritius provided an illuminating example of the ‘best-known example of the extermination of a species by the agency of man’ and directly linked to the plight of other flightless birds such as the moa and Aepyornis.Footnote 76 The dodo's bizarre and comical features, with its squat body, huge beak and flightless wings, were immortalized in illustrations, preserving its memory, and thus its loss, in European eyes.Footnote 77 While the dodo's destruction was often seen as a result of the role of people, crucially to some nineteenth-century observers it was an earlier and thus less scientific people, in this case uneducated seventeenth-century Dutch sailors, who hunted the dodo to extinction.Footnote 78 The example of the dodo fit the demise of the moa and Aepyornis and served as proof of what a careless and unchecked human population could do.
Ascribing extinction not just to the presence of people, but also to their primitive nature, to their bloodthirsty destructive inclination, obscured other reasons, including the introduction of diseases, invasive species, and shifts in climate and habitat. Humanity may have been a contributing factor, but the introduction of foreign species often proved dire.Footnote 79 Even today the dodo's demise is linked to direct human action rather than to an alteration of an ecosystem, such as pigs, which may have ravaged the dodo's eggs and proven far more destructive than people.Footnote 80 Europeans and Polynesians introduced foreign species to all of these isolated islands – a fact not unknown, although its significance was often overlooked at the time. On New Zealand, even before the days of James Cook and other European explorers who released dogs, rats, pigs and goats onto the islands, Polynesians brought with them hunting dogs as well as rats. Rats proved particularly devastating, often decimating the populations of many small animals, including small birds, as well as insects, before also taking their toll on the moa through the loss of eggs as well as food systems.Footnote 81
While the disappearance of the giant birds was at the center of their appeal, it was a mystery whose answer, hunted to death by an inferior, or at best improving, race, added a sensational, and educational, twist. By blaming extinction squarely on the arrival of humans on the islands, Western naturalists offered a lesson, grounded in empirical science, that fit into another justification for a civilizing mission in New Zealand and Madagascar. Without Western assistance, they believed that the Malagasy and Maori would continue to destroy their environment.
Conclusion
Although endemic to their islands, the moa and Aepyornis were studied as part of a greater story. It was their connections that were invaluable in an age where concepts such as Darwinism and biogeography relied heavily upon a global outlook. While the Aepyornis and the moa were a source of scientific pride to the naturalists of their respective islands, their discoveries helped to reinforce each other: theories and discoveries made more sense in the light of a corroborating find half a world away. Indeed, it was the very puzzle of how islands so distinct and distant from each other could have produced such similar birds found nowhere else in the world that contributed to the development of global scientific theories as naturalists engaged with concepts such as lost continents, the spread of fauna, and the role of people in extinction.
Further, naturalists were interconnected not just through the metropole, but also through each other in far distant locales. There was a pattern to discovery and the process of understanding natural history that relied upon a world framework involving the circulation of knowledge through global networks, comparisons, struggles between naturalists in the field, budding local societies and the resources and prestige of the metropole. Indeed, both the Aepyornis and the moa reveal that it was a global circulation of knowledge, informed by networks ranging from letters to scientific literature to informal personal connections, that crafted an understanding of the unusual natural history of these distinct islands. Instead of a process of the metropole taking information across the world and fashioning theories, local naturalists actively participated in a global framework even as they inserted their own particular interpretations.
