Upstairs
23 March – 4 April
'THE BIRD JOURNEY' - Kate White
As soon as the rooks were ready for the sea voyage, arrangements were made (by Mr Ottywell) with Messrs Shaw Savill, & Company for their shipment - the Company generously agreeing to transport them freight free. The ship ASTEROPE, on which they were to travel, had not much accommodation for live-stock; hence only sixty birds (constituting the first batch) were place aboard her, together with the 30 cwt of food and a 400 gallon tank of water.
She sailed from London on 22 June, 1871 and at firstt all went well with the rooks, the man in charge of them being most attentive to them, and they themselves very lively as the ASTEROPE made her way down the English Channel. But he was a landsman who had never been to sea before. Consequently when the ship ran into very rough weather in the Bay of Biscay, he became a cot case and was quite unable to leave his berth. The crew having their duties to attend to, were unable to take his place, and so the birds were neglected and, from sheer starvation, began to die off fast.
Worse was yet in store for them; for the ASTEROPE, when rounding the Cape of Good Hope, shipped a tremendous sea which broke in the front of the poop and flooded the cabin wherein the hapless rooks were confined, drowning forty of them in one fell swoop. A further ten succumbed later from the ill effects of their drenching.
Nottidge sent a second batch of rooks numbering sixty-three together with some jackdaws, on the ship ROBERT HENDERSON which sailed from England shortly after the ASTEROPE; but the entire batch perished with only two jackdaws arriving at their destination along with a solitary male hedgehog - possibly one of the twenty which Nottidge had been keeping for transmission to the Society at first opportunity. Thus, all that the Society had gained as a result of these transactions with him was a collection of ten rooks, two jackdaws and one hedgehog.
Lamb, R.C. (1964) Birds, Beasts & Fishes - The First Hundred Years of the North Canterbury Acclimatisation Society, Christchurch: Caxton Press, (p. 47-48).
