THE DODO QUERIES.
I beg to thank Mr. S.W. Singer for the further notices he has given (Vol. i., p. 485.) in connection with this subject. I was well acquainted with the passage which he quotes from Osorio, a passage which some writers have very inconsiderately connected with the Dodo history. In reply to Mr. Singer's Queries, I need only make the following extract from the Dodo and its Kindred, p. 8.:—
"The statement that Vasco de Gama, in 1497, discovered, sixty leagues beyond the Cape of Good Hope, a bay called after San Blaz, near an island full of birds with wings like bats, which the sailors called solitaries (De Blainville, Nouv. Ann. Mus. Hist. Nat., and Penny Cyclopædia, DODO, p. 47.), is wholly irrelevant. The birds are evidently penguins, and their wings were compared to those of bats, from being without developed feathers. De Gama never went near Mauritius, but hugged the African coast as far as Melinda, and then crossed to India, returning by the same route. This small island inhabited by penguins, near the Cape of Good Hope, has been gratuitously confounded with Mauritius. Dr. Hamel, in a memoir in the Bulletin de la Classe Physico-Mathématique de l'Académie de St. Petersbourg, vol. iv. p. 53., has devoted an unnecessary amount of erudition to the refutation of this obvious mistake. He shows that the name solitaires, as applied to penguins by De Gama's companions, [I should have said, 'by later compilers,'] is corrupted from sotilicairos, which appears to be a Hottentot word."
I may add, that Dr. Hamel shows Osorio's statement to be taken from Castanheda, who is the earliest authority for the account of De Gama's voyage.
H.E. Strickland.