Relationship With Humans
Though Mauritius had previously been visited by Arab vessels in the Middle Ages and Portuguese ships between 1507 and 1513, they did not settle on the island. No known records of Dodo encounters survive, although the Portuguese name for Mauritius, "Cerne (swan) Island", may have been a reference to the Dodos. The Dutch Empire acquired the island in 1598, renaming it after Maurice of Nassau, and it was used from then on for the provisioning of trade vessels of the Dutch East India Company. The earliest known descriptions of the Dodo were provided by Dutch travellers during the Second Dutch Expedition to Indonesia, led by Admiral Jacob van Neck in 1598. They appear in reports published in 1601, which also contain the first published illustration of the bird. Since the first sailors to visit Mauritius had been at sea for a long time, their interest in these large birds was mainly culinary. Although many later writings describe the meat as unsavoury, early journals state that it was tough but good, though not as delicious as the abundant pigeons.
The journal of Willem Van West-Zanen of the ship Bruin-Vis, written in 1602 and published in 1648, describes large numbers of Dodos hunted for food:
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They caught birds called by some Dod-aars by others Dronte. These were given the name Walghvogel during Van Neck's voyage, because even with long stewing they would hardly become tender, but stayed tough and hard with the exception of the breast and stomach which were extremely good ... The sailors brought 50 birds back to the Bruin-Vis, among them 24 or 25 Dod-aarsen, so big and heavy that scarcely two were consumed at meal time, and all that were remaining were flung into salt. |
An illustration made for the published version of the Van West-Zanen journal, showing the killing of Dodos, a seacow (now locally extinct), and possibly a Thirioux's Grey Parrot, was captioned with the following Dutch poem, here in Errol Fuller's 2002 translation:
For food the seamen hunt the flesh of feathered fowl,
They tap the palms, and round-rumped dodos they destroy,
The parrot's life they spare that he may peep and howl,
And thus his fellows to imprisonment decoy.
The appearance of the Dodo and the Red Rail led Peter Mundy to speculate, 230 years before Charles Darwin's theory of evolution:
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Of these 2 sorts off fowl afforementionede, For oughtt wee yett know, Not any to bee Found out of this Iland, which lyeth aboutt 100 leagues From St. Lawrence. A question may bee demaunded how they should bee here and Not elcewhere, beeing soe Farer From other land and can Neither fly or swymme; whither by Mixture off kindes producing straunge and Monstrous formes, or the Nature of the Climate, ayer and earth in alltring the First shapes in long tyme, or how. |
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