The last notice of the dodo's existence is found in a manuscript journal—in the Sloane Collection—kept by a 'Mr Ben. Harry,' who was chief officer of the English ship Berkley Castle, on a voyage to and from India in 1679. It appears that, the ship becoming leaky on their return voyage, they 'made for the Marushes,' where they repaired the vessel, and landed and dried the cargo. At this point of their proceedings, we shall let this intelligent mariner speak for himself: 'Now, having a little respitt, I will make a little description of the island, ffirst of its producks, then of its parts: ffirst, of all winged and feathered ffowle, the less passant are dodos, whose fflesh is very hard. The Dutch, pleading a property in this island because of their settlement, have made us pay for goates one penny per pound.'
Though the Dutch did not form a regular settlement on the Mauritius till 1644, yet their vessels and those of other nations frequently called for supplies; and many persons—runaway seamen and others—lived on the island. It is not surprising that the awkward, slow-paced dodo, incapable of flight, and whose nest, as we are told by Cauche, never contained more than one egg, became totally extinct soon after coming into contact with man. Nor would man alone be directly the dodo's destroyer; his immediate followers, the cat, hog, and dog, must have been fatal neighbours to its young. Leguat, a gentleman of education, spent several months on the Mauritius in 1693, but makes no mention of the dodo. He says: 'This island was formerly full of birds, but now they are becoming very scarce;' and further adds: 'Here are pigs of the China breed. These beasts do a great deal of damage to the inhabitants, by devouring all the young animals they can catch.' Less than a century, then, sufficed to extirpate the dodo. It was first seen in 1598—it was last noticed in 1679; and as Leguat, in 1693, does not mention it, we may conclude that it became extinct at some period between the last two dates. In 1712, the Dutch evacuated the Mauritius, and three years afterwards the French took possession, naming it l'Ile de France. With this change of population, the very tradition of the dodo's existence on that island was completely lost.
The relics of the dodo, still left to admiring naturalists, are few, but, in a scientific view, very precious. They consist in all of a head and leg in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, a leg in the British Museum, and a head in the Royal Museum (Kunst-Kammer) at Copenhagen. The head and leg at Oxford are the sole remains of Tradescant's dodo. After the death of the last of that family, Ashmole obtained possession of their museum, which he subsequently presented to the University of Oxford. This dodo can be clearly traced to have been in the Ashmolean Museum until the year 1755, when, having been suffered to fall into decay, it was, by the order of the vice-chancellor of the university, and a majority of the visitors, condemned to be burned! For a long time after, the dodo was forgotten, or the fact of its once having existed was treated as a mere myth, till Dr Shaw, in 1793, rummaging among the refuse of the museum, rediscovered this identical head and leg. The question arises: How were these relics preserved? Did some university magnate desire their retention from the flames? Did some conservative curator slily conceal them before the fatal mandate was executed? No! Even this paltry palliation must be refused to the learned Vandals. It is to Ashmole himself that science is indebted for these remains of the last specimen of a whole species. That litigious old Chancery lawyer, when he presented his museum to Oxford, did so under certain restrictions, which he drew up with his own hands, and which the university was bound to obey. One of these rules decrees, that any specimen in a bad condition should not be totally destroyed; but any hard parts, such as the head, horns, or feet, should be put away in a closet. This head is still in tolerable preservation. The singular form of the beak and nostrils, the bare skin of the face, combined with the partly feathered head, which the old writers compared to a hood, are still strikingly apparent. Of the history of the leg in the British Museum, little is known. It formerly belonged to the Royal Society, and is in all probability the same that is mentioned in the catalogue of a museum that was offered for sale in London by a person named Hubert, in 1664. It is certain that the leg at Oxford, and that at London, did not belong to the same bird; for though they are right and left, and their perfect agreement in character proves their identity of species, yet one is nearly an inch longer than the other. The head at Copenhagen was described by Olearius as early as 1666, in the catalogue of the museum of the Duke of Schleswig at Gottorf. In 1720, that museum was removed to Copenhagen, but it was not till within the last few years, when the history of the dodo excited so strongly the attention of naturalists, that this head was successfully sought for, and disinterred from a mass of rubbish, by Dr Reinhardt.
Many have been the conflicting opinions among naturalists with respect to the class of birds the dodo should be placed in. Space will not permit us to enter into these discussions. Suffice it to say, it is generally agreed now that the dodo was a gigantic, short-winged, fruit-eating pigeon. The English naturalist, Mr Strickland, who has devoted an amazing amount of labour and research to the elucidation of this mysterious question, and Dr Reinhardt of Copenhagen, were the first who referred the dodo to the pigeon tribe, having arrived almost simultaneously, by two distinct chains of reasoning, at the same conclusion; and their opinion is corroborated by a dissection that was lately made of part of the head at Oxford.
There can be no doubt that the dodo was one of those instances, well known to naturalists, of a species, or part of a species, remaining permanently in an undeveloped state. As the Greenland whale never acquires teeth, but remains a suckling all its life; as the proteus of the Carniolian caverns, and the axolotl of the Mexican lakes, never attain a higher form than that of the tadpole; so the dodo may be described as a permanent nestling covered with down, and possessing only the rudiments of tail and wings. Nor are we to consider such organisations as imperfect. Evidently intended for peculiar situations and habits of life, they are powerful evidences of the design displayed in the works of an All-wise Creator. Wandering about in the forests of the Mauritius, where, previous to the advent of man, it had not a single enemy, the dodo, revelling in the perpetual luxuriance of a tropical climate, subsisted on the nuts that fell from the surrounding trees. Its powerful bill enabled it to break, and its capacious, stone-supplied gizzard to digest, the hardest shells and kernels; and thus a kind of frugivorous vulture, it cleared away the decaying vegetable matter. In no other place than an island, uninhabited by man or any other animal of prey, could the helpless dodo have existed. Some fancy it may yet be found in Madagascar. Vain idea! Its carnivorous enemies among the lower animals, would have cut short the existence of the dodo, even if man had never planted his conquering footsteps upon that island.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Walgen, to nauseate; vogel, a bird.
[2] Waerachtigh Verhael van de Schipvaert op Ost-Indien, Ghedaen by de Acht Schepen in den Jare 1598.
[3] A hole is here burned in the manuscript, as if by the ash of a tobacco-pipe. At the first hiatus, the word wanting is, without doubt, saw; and at the second, the letters, of can.