The dodo was a rare flightless bird that lived in the island of Mauritius and is now extinct.
Which English speaker saw the dodo first?
William Herbert travelled extensively at the end of the 1620s and reached Mauritius in 1627. There he saw the dodo, but got back to English to write about it in a book published in 1634 called A relation of some years travel, beginning in 1626 into Africa and Asia. In it he describes the dodo as living only on this island and on neighbouring Rodrigues.
In English the word dodo was first used by Emmanuel Atlham. Perhaps his biggest claim to fame is being the captain of the Little James, the fourth ship sent out to America in 1620. His ship followed the Mayflower, Fortune and Anne. He arrived in 1623 at the age of only 23, managed to wreck the ship, lose his family fortune and find no other job than as an agent of the coast of India where he died young. For a man in the 1620s he was obviously a very well-travelled man. In letters to his brother in 1628 he describes the dodo for us “a strange fowl, which I had at the island of Mauritius called by the Portuguese a dodo”. He also promises his brother he will send some ginger and a dodo.
For sure the bird was taken to London. About 1638, there is a description of piece of cloth with a “picture of a strange looking fowl”. What was being exhibited was a dodo, a huge bird like a turkey but “stouter and thicker” with the breast of a pheasant .
The dodo is described by Oliver Goldsmith. The famous dramatist also wrote An History of the Earth and Animated Nature. In 1774, he described dodo meat as “good and wholesome” and comments that “three or four dodos is enough to dine a hundred men”. But he was describing something he had never seen. Almost certainly the dodo was extinct around about 1700.
But it took a long time for this extinction to be realised. A comment in a geological magazine in 1831 stated that “the dodo seems to afford us an example of the extinction of an animal in comparatively recent times”. This scientific realisation was followed shortly afterwards by an illustrated feature in Penny Magazine in 1833. There the dodo was described as extinct.
Life and death of the dodo
And by 1896 it was known even to the smallest children. Belloc wrote a children’s poem which summarised the life and death of the dodo!
The Dodo used to walk around,
And take the sun and air.
The sun yet warms his native ground –
The Dodo is not there!
The voice which used to squawk and squeak
Is now for ever dumb –
Yet may you see his bones and beak
All in the Mu-se-um
