Æpyornis Island

"Æpyornis Island", or "Aepyornis Island", is a short story by H. G. Wells, first published in 1894 in the Pall Mall Budget.^[1] It was included in The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents, the first collection of short stories by Wells, first published in 1895.

In the story, a man looking for eggs of Aepyornis, an extinct flightless bird, passes two years alone on a small island with an Aepyornis that has hatched.

Historical background

Aepyornis maximus skeleton and egg

Aepyornis maximus was a giant flightless bird that lived in Madagascar; it became extinct probably because it was hunted excessively by humans. The bird was about 3 metres tall and its egg was up to nine litres in capacity. Fragments of the eggs are still found.^[2]

Story summary

The narrator starts a conversation with a fellow Englishman, a rough individual named Butcher, in an unspecified foreign location. Remembering reports of a court case years earlier, in which Butcher sued his employer for salary accrued while cast away on a desert island, the narrator encourages him to tell the story related to the case:

Butcher, employed by a collector, is engaged in finding Aepyornis eggs. He is looking for them in a swamp on the east coast of Madagascar, helped by two native assistants in a canoe who are probing the mud with rods. They find several whole eggs but one is dropped, apparently when an assistant is bitten by something. Butcher, contemptuous of the natives, deals with the matter brutally, and he eventually finds himself adrift in the canoe with three Aepyornis eggs; his assistants are dead, one as a result of the bite and the other shot by Butcher. During the days adrift he eats two of the eggs, noticing that the embryo of the second egg is developing; the tropical heat, after centuries in the cold, salty mud, is causing this.

The canoe drifts onto an atoll. The Aepyornis egg hatches. Butcher calls the young bird Man Friday, after the character in Robinson Crusoe, as it is a welcome companion. For two years, Butcher enjoys the company, watching the bird grow and sharing food with it; he says to the narrator, "It was a kind of idyll, you might say. If only I had had some tobacco it would have been simply just like heaven."

Then the bird, now about fourteen feet high, begins to be aggressive, and Butcher has to spend his time in the lagoon or up a palm tree to avoid attacks. He eventually manages to kill it. He misses the companionship, but soon afterwards is rescued from the atoll. He sells the bones of the bird to a collector; since it is larger than Aepyornis maximus, scientists give it the (fictional) name Aepyornis vastus.

References

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