Ubdugs and Bunderloghs

For almost completely non-polar reasons, I’ve been reading Kipling’s original Jungle Book. It’s interesting, both from a historical perspective and the perspective of an ex-Disney animator* but there was also an intriguing linguistic thing that came right back to Cape Evans.

When the Afterguard (officers and scientists) moved from the Terra Nova’s wardroom to the ‘wardroom’ of the Cape Evans hut, they split into two factions, depending which side of the hut they slept on. Those in the 'Tenements’ (Birdie, Cherry, Oates, Atch, and Meares) were the 'Bunderloghs.’ At least, that’s how I’ve seen in spelt in secondary histories; it comes from an article in the South Polar Times in which a rabbit (Crean’s?) makes scientific observations on the inhabitants of the hut and deliberately obfuscates names with cod-phonetic spellings. In his discussion of them, he compares them to 'the Indian Banderlogs’, which is similarly nonsense …

… except that the monkey people in The Jungle Book, notorious for their anarchy, short attention span, and disruptive behaviour, are named the Bandar-log. Now you know.

On the other side of the hut was the 'Opium Den’, whose denizens were known as the 'Ubdugs.’ Having discovered that there was a provenance for Bunderlogh, I was curious where Ubdug might have come from. Google has only brought me one source, but it’s possible: a Carroll-esque poem by an American children’s writer named Charles E. Carryl, which was published in 1885, and contains the verse

All nautical pride we cast aside
And we ran the vessel asho-o-ore
On the Gulliby Isles where the poopoo smiles
And the rubbily ubdugs roar
Composed of sand was that favored land
And trimmed with cinnamon straws
And pink and blue was the pleasing hue
Of the ticke-toe teaser’s claws

This was titled 'A Capital Ship’ or 'The Walloping Window-Blind’; curiously, the poem was also published under the title 'A Nautical Ballad’ but that version does not contain any reference to Ubdugs. Would they have known this poem? Most of them were children in the 1880s and '90s; it might have crossed their paths. Where else would they have got the word from? Could it have been suggested by 'rubbily,’ given 2/3 of the Ubdugs were geologists? We may never know. But it’s fun.

*The lore has it that the director told the crew not to read the book if they hadn’t already. Boy, he wasn’t kidding: the Disney version is nothing like the original.