Tom over at Free Speech Backlash recently put out a call for writers, to which I responded.  However, as so often is the case in life, I’ve not contributed a single word since our initial exchange, but he obligingly sent a piece to me.  And, boy, what a piece it is!

Everyone loves penguins—or so I thought.  Tom makes a pretty compelling case for why they’re actually quite frustrating creatures.  More interestingly, however, this piece—about rehoming thousands of angry penguins—points out how mass media hysteria and environmental lunacy misses the penguins for the icebergs (in this case, bleeding hearts over obnoxious animals win out over concerns about oily water getting into a nuclear power plant).

It also gives a humorous look at humanity’s hubris, especially in the sciences.  There are few things that induce such delicious Schadenfreude in yours portly like witnessing an expensive boondoggle with official scientific backing going fins up.

With that, here is Tom with “Treasure Island”:

Tyler has asked me to tell my penguin story, about capturing 2,000 African penguins, for their own good, of course. But first, a little of how I ended up rounding up penguins, some of the most disgusting creatures known to man, sex maniacs, with no decorum or sense of shame.

When I started my career, lassoing penguins was less than a dim prospect. I had only ever wanted to go to sea; the lure of exotic shores and dark, dusky, nubile maidens – then few and far between in the pale, ginger, Northeast England I grew up in. And off I went, aged 16, an apprentice engineer in the merchant marine. By about 23, wild oats sown and dusky maiden count satisfactory, I started to study, eventually reaching Chief Engineer on large tankers and cargo ships. After 20 years sea service, I came ashore into ship management and ten years after that, became an ‘expert’ – a very marine casualty investigator, looking into the cause of maritime accidents and, more importantly, arranging the facts for lawyers and insurance types, to help try to get someone else to pay. It’s a mucky world.

Back to penguins. In June 2000 I was informed that large bit of hull-plating had fallen off a large Greek-owned bulk carrier, TREASURE, sailing from Brazil to China with a cargo of 140,000 tonnes of iron ore, allowing the South Atlantic Ocean to flow into one of her nine cargo holds. A very dodgy situation. Her owners arranged for her to seek refuge near Cape Town, South Africa, and I was sent to see why important bits of her had fallen off, and to help in the salvage and/or repair work. By the time I got there, things had gone from bad to worse.

The local coastguard had ordered the owner to remove the 1,400 tonnes of fuel TREASURE was carrying. Ships burn Heavy Fuel Oil, the worst of the worst. It’s crude oil with the best bits taken out. Very nasty. But the owner did nothing. Unkind gossips later speculated that he wanted the ship sunk, to claim the insurance. The South African coastguard said that, if he didn’t remove the fuel, they’d have the ship towed out to sea and sank. A tow was arranged, but a God-awful tow. We told them, we did. Not that way lads, tow her stern first (backwards) as her bows (the pointy bit at the front) is low in the water because of the flooding. But they didn’t listen. The tow got under way, the wrong way, and when they hit heavy weather, the inevitable happened and, on 23 June, TREASURE sank between Robben Island and Dassen Island, six nautical miles of the South African coast.

And, of course, some of the fuel oil leaked out, forming a roughly five-mile slick. This was a major worry. Tide tables and current flows were checked. The worry grew. There was some possibility that the oil would end up in cooling water intakes of the nearby Koeberg Nuclear Power Station: think Three Mile Island. Maybe worse. We were worried. The authorities were worried. The insurers were worried. Nuclear power plant failure is serious stuff, right? You’d think that the media would be worried, right?

Wrong. What they were worried about were the bloody penguins! Headlines all over the world: The Greatest Environmental Disaster! (since, well, the last greatest environmental disaster). Penguin Peril! African Armageddon! The world’s animal lovers united in outrage, demanding action. The South African government cracked and demanded priority for the hitherto unregarded penguins.

We practical men were united in the belief that penguins were pointless: you can’t eat them, and you can’t make them work, good only for shark food. Expressing this view, however, became as perilous as Galileo telling the Pope that the earth circled the sun. Under pressure, we consulted a professor of penguinolgy. A nice man. An academic, who know more about penguins than anyone else in the known universe, the African penguin his speciality. He was not, however, aware of much else. He proposed two actions: collect all oiled penguins, in the event over 20,000 of them. Give them a good clean up, and intensive care to make sure they ate well – over five hundred tonnes of fish by the end. That was done. Volunteers, thousands of them, and a few chancers, flocked to the cause. Everyone for miles around with a boat joined in (charging by the hour). The world’s supply of Sphagnum moss – perfect for purifying penguins – was cornered, raising its price considerably. A penguin paradise was built at great expense. They wanted for nothing.

The other idea Prof. had was to build walls around the island breeding grounds in danger of being contaminated. We gently pointed out that building walls in the sea, at a depth of over one hundred feet, might be a bit difficult. We could put floating barriers in the way, but in choppy seas oil could slosh over the top and we could give no guarantees. Aha says Prof., then you need to capture a minimum number of un-oiled penguins to start a new colony, on another island elsewhere, well away from the danger zone. Hmm. The un-oiled penguins were not a happy lot. They did not want to be caught, but never mind, we’ll have a go. How many do you want Prof? Oh, two thousand should do it. Two thousand? Yes, about a thousand each, male and female, adults, all in good health.

We stood there open mouthed. Tell us Prof. How do you tell a male from a female? Prof. launched into a learned lecture. We cut him short. In simple terms? Well, says he, it’s very difficult to tell male and female African penguins apart visually, as they look nearly identical. Males can sometimes be identified as being slightly larger and having a bigger, broader bill than females, but the most accurate way to differentiate them is through a blood test …

You could have heard a pin drop.

We stood there, a room full of marine engineers and naval architects, most having flown 6,000 miles from London thinking about the ship’s structural problems, now grappling with a perplexing penguin problem. The thought of asking if there were homosexual penguins was tempting (there are), but instead I simply asked if that means we have to catch many more than the basic two thousand, and send them ashore for blood tests and health checks? Yes, that’s about the size of it.

I can’t remember how many outraged penguins we caught in the end, probably well over 4,000, the rejects being herded with the oiled. The Chosen Ones, the Praetorian penguins, the splendid Sphenisciforme elite, were escorted onto a specially fitted out craft with a bow door, like a World War Two landing craft. These penguins had won the lottery. They would be Saved, and want for nothing. They were to be shipped off on a two-day cruise to a specially prepared paradise, a coastal nature reserve near East London, where they would breed, and form a reserve colony. The expense was astronomical and put one of the insurers involved out of business.

My involvement ended and I returned home. Later, I was shown a video of the pride of the penguin world arriving at their new home. It was like those videos of the Normandy landings. The craft ran up to the beach. The bow door was lowered. There was a short pause. The penguins waddled ashore, unopposed. They stopped and looked around. There was a collective shaking of heads, an outbreak of loud, indignant obviously negative penguin honking – and the ungrateful sods decided that they didn’t like their new home, jumped into the ocean and headed back to Cape Town from whence they’d came.

You’d need a heart of stone not to laugh.

Our picky penguins had been tagged with satellite and GPS trackers attached to the feathers on their backs, with glue, so that their movements in their new home could be monitored. The radar pictures of them swarming back to Cape Town was entertaining. Every now and again, well, more now than again, one would do a sharp turn left and head out into the Indian Ocean. Where’s he going? Oh, wherever the shark he’s inside is going. We cheered.

Is there a moral to this tale? Maybe: if you get involved with ships, expect the unexpected. There’s a reason a ship is always a ‘she’ …