At Bourbon, he says,—
"On y voit grandes nombres d'oiseau bleu qui se
nichent dans les herbes et dans les fougères."
This was in the year 1710. There were then, he says, not more than forty Dutch settlers on the Island of Mauritius, and they were daily hoping and expecting to be transferred to Batavia. As editor (La Roque) subjoins a relation furnished on the authority of M. de Vilers, who had been governor there for the India Company, in which it is said,—
"The island was uninhabited when the Portuguese, after having doubled the Cape of Good Hope, discovered it. They gave it the name of Mascarhenas, à cause que leur chef se nommoit ainsi; and the vulgar still preserve it, calling the inhabitants Mascarins. It was not decidedly inhabited until 1654, when M. de Flacour, commandant at Madagascar, sent some invalids there to recover their health, that others followed; and since then it has been named the Isle of Bourbon."
Still no notice of the Dodo! but
"On y trouve des oiseaux appelez Flamans, qui excedent la hauteur d'un grand homme."
Qu. 6. I know not whether Mr. S. is aware that there is the head of a Dodo in the Royal Museum of Natural History at Copenhagen, which came from the collection of Paludanus? M. Domeny de Rienzi, the compiler of Océanie, ou cinquième Partie du Globe (1838, t. iii. p. 384.), tells us, that a Javanese captain gave him part of a Dronte, which he unfortunately lost on being shipwrecked; but he forgot where he said he obtained it.
Qu. 7. Dodo is most probably the name given at first to the bird by the Portuguese; Doudo, in that language, being a fool or lumpish stupid person. And, besides that name, it bore that of Tölpel in German, which has the same signification. The Dod-aers of the Dutch is most probably a vulgar epithet of the Dutch sailors, expressive of its lumpish conformation and inactivity. Our sailors would possibly have substituted heavy-a——. I find the Dodo was also called the Monk-swan of St. Maurice's Island at the commencement of last century. The word Dronte is apparently neither Portugese nor Spanish, though in Connelly's Dictionary of the latter language we have—