Ambassador to the Penguins: A Naturalist's Year Aboard a Yankee Whaleship Book

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.

Publishers Weekly

From July 1912 to May 1913, the young naturalist Robert Cushman Murphy sailed on one of the last Yankee whale ships to South Georgia, at the edge of the Antarctic penguin territory. His mission was to gather information and specimens of wildlife for the American Museum of Natural History, but in addition to his scientific records, he kept for his wife a personal account of the trip, which was published in 1947 as Logbook for Grace. In this enjoyable and informative book, Mathews, his granddaughter, has rewritten this logbook in the third person, rounding out Murphy's notes with previously unpublished details and adding photographs he made and developed himself during the voyage. Murphy described the birds and sea life he encountered and presented a vivid picture of life aboard the whaler: the irascible captain, the rowdy sailors, the terrible food and inadequate medical supplies, the constant battle with rats and cockroaches, and the grisly business of killing whales and elephant seals and reducing their blubber to oil. Especially touching are the passages Mathews quotes in which her grandfather expresses his longing for his wife, left behind after only a few months of marriage. As all the quotations from the logbook attest, Murphy was an accomplished writer with a fine-tuned sense of humor. Mathews, a cartographer, graphic designer, software developer and writer, does an admirable job of reworking his impressive account of his voyage. Her handsome book is a fitting tribute to a man who went on to become one of this country's most distinguished naturalists and environmentalists. (Dec.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.