Æpyornis Island

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"Æpyornis Island"
Short story by H. G. Wells
The cover of Pearson's Magazine that illustrates "Æpyornis Island", 1905.
CountryUnited Kingdom
Genre(s)Science fiction
Publication
Published inPall Mall Budget
Media typePrint
Publication date27 December 1894

"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 (the giant elephant-bird) was a giant flightless bird that lived in Madagascar. It became extinct probably in the 17th or 18th century; it is thought that it was hunted excessively by humans. The bird was more than 2 metres (6 ft 7 in) tall, and its egg weighed about 10 kilograms (22 lb). Fragments of the eggs are still found.[2]

Story summary

The narrator starts a conversation with 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 for four years, 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 iron rods. They find several whole eggs but one is dropped by an assistant who says that he was bitten by a centipede. Butcher beats the assistant, as a result of which both natives conspire to

developing
due to the tropical heat.

The canoe drifts onto an

scientific name
Aepyornis vastus.

References

  1. ^ Æpyornis Island title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, accessed 16 Sept 2014.
  2. ^ "Aepyornis maximus"Prehistoric Fauna. Retrieved 11 March 2020.

External links