An account of the natural history and exploitation of the great auk ( <i>Pinguinus impennis</i> ) in ‘Histoire des pesches’, an illustrated eighteenth-century manuscript
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The hunting of the great auk ( Pinguinus impennis), which led to its extinction in the mid-nineteenth century, is well documented. However, the discovery of archives providing new details on this species is a rare event. A manuscript dealing with seabirds and their ‘fishing’, written in 1720–1722 by François Le Masson du Parc (1671–1741), an attaché for the Normandy maritime administration, was acquired in 2019 from an auction house. This unpublished and unstudied manuscript comprises the sixth and final volume of the ‘Histoire des pesches’. As part of a national policy to regulate French maritime fisheries, Le Masson du Parc completed the description of marine resources and fisheries in his ‘Histoire des pesches’ which was abundantly illustrated by Pierre Le Chevalier (1688–after 1763). However, this monumental work was never published and the manuscripts were dispersed after the author's death. The section recently purchased provides valuable information on the spatiotemporal evolution of many populations of North Atlantic seabirds, including the great auk, in a context of anthropogenic pressures. This species is named using several hitherto unknown Latin and vernacular names of great importance for the exploration or reinterpretation of archives. It is mentioned as common and one of the most popular birds consumed by cod fishermen on the banks of Newfoundland and that it was caught using baited hooks from boats. The text is accompanied by two illustrations, including a life drawing of three great auks, which are among the oldest known illustrations of the species. These 300-year-old archives constitute a valuable testimony for the historical ecology of this iconic, extinct bird.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.024 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".