I feel that the word “woggin” would have been one likely to appeal to Patrick O’Brian, author of the Aubrey / Maturin series of nautical historical novels, about the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic Wars era. In that series the author uses -- and clearly revels in -- much seagoing period jargon / slang. However, going by what I can see from those books by the author, in my possession – although his dual heroes, and their various ships, encounter “true” penguins in the southern reaches of the globe; and, briefly, great auks in the North Atlantic; the word “woggin” does not feature in shipboard discourse. The books’ characters are -- after all -- naval types, not whalers...
The great-auk episode occurs in the novel The Surgeon's Mate: in which Captain Jack Aubrey and his ship’s surgeon and good friend Stephen Maturin, are travelling on a Canadian ship from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Britain; after experiencing various imbroglios in the United States, consequent on the War of 1812. In the area of the Grand Banks, Maturin – an impassioned amateur naturalist – is chatting with the ship’s second mate, and the conversation gets around to great auks (the species then becoming very rare; but at that time still a few decades away from ultimate extinction). It turns out that the second mate has had to do with great auks, chiefly in the shape of killing them in large numbers. Maturin has a struggle to stay civil with the guy – still, he’s only trying to be friendly and helpful. They refer to the creatures as “penguins” and “garefowl”; but the w-word does not feature. Maturin sees from the ship, in time, a couple of swimming great auks; and the second mate, hoping to please him, brings him a dead specimen which the ship’s crew had been planning to use as bait for fish.
