Issue 56: a real, live dodo in London
Issue 56: a real, live dodo in London
A rare, documented 17th Century sighting of the ill-rated bird outside its homeland.
If you had been walking the narrow, dusty, cobbled streets of early modern London, passing alongside the timber framed buildings, and stepping over the open sewer (or kennel) that ran down the middle of the roads, you might have stumbled across something wonderful.
For in the capital at that time – near Lincoln’s Inn Fields around 1638, to be precise – was housed the only known documented dodo to make it alive to the UK.
Historian and theologian Sir Hamon L’Estrange (1605-1660) documented his encounter with the now famously extinct bird in a manuscript commenting on Sir Thomas Browne’s ‘Pseudodoxia Epidemica’ (or ‘Vulgar Errors’). He wrote:
“About 1638, as I walked London streets, I [saw] the picture of a strange fowle hung out upon a cloth [can]vas, and myselfe, with one or two more then in company, went in to see it. It was kept in a chamber, and was somewhat bigger than the largest turkey-cock, and so legged and footed, but stouter and thicker, and of a more erect shape, coloured before like the breast of a young cock-fesan, and on the back of a dunne or deare colour. The keeper called it a dodo; and in the end of a chymney in the chamber there lay a heap of large pebble-stones, whereof hee gave it many in our sight, some as big as nutmegs; and the keeper told us shee eats them (conducing to digestion); and though I remember not how farr the keeper was questioned therein, yet I am confident that afterwards she cast them all againe.”
The dodo, Raphus cucullatus, lived solely in Mauritius. The island was ‘discovered’ by Europeans in 1598. The Dutch originally named the flightless bird a ‘walghvogel’ – literally ‘nausea causing bird’. Apparently, it wasn’t good for eating!
Sadly, less than 100 years after the Dutch first set foot on the island, the dodo was extinct. It was too tame with humans and its ground nesting habitat was easily destroyed by the animals introduced to the island by Europeans. The last recorded sighting of the bird was in 1662.
There are scant historical records of any live dodos outside of Mauritius. Some experts suggest a figure of 17 exports, however, aside from the aforementioned London dodo, there are only three other known documented sightings of live specimens off the island, plus an unsubstantiated clue.
Between 1628 and 1634 two live birds were reported in the menagerie of the Mogul emperor Jahangir in Surat, India. In 1647 a live dodo is recorded as being shipped by the Dutch from Mauritius, via Batavia (now Jakarta), to a small island off Nagasaki, and presented to the Lord of Hakata.
The third account comes from a 1626 pen and ink drawing by Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne. The caption accompanying the illustration mentions a live bird in Amsterdam. Interestingly, the image is similar to, and produced in the same year as Roelandt Savery’s dodo painting. Savery was living in Amsterdam at the time.
One other tantalising reference comes in the form a letter from English diplomat Emmanuel Altham to his brother, sent in 1628. Altham, stationed in Mauritius at the time, wrote that he was sending a dodo home as a present to his family. But there is no record as to whether it arrived alive, or indeed at all. Perhaps it and the Lincoln’s Inn Fields dodo are one and the same? But we’ll never know for sure.
The Oxford University Museum of Natural History has remains of a dodo which have long been rumoured to be the live bird L’Estrange documented from the 1630s.
What is known for sure is that it was a mounted specimen originally part of the collection of John Tradescant (gardener to Charles I) and his son, John the younger. The collection was acquired by John Jr’s friend, Elias Ashmole, on the former’s death in 1662, and became part of the founding collection of the Ashmolean Museum (now part of the Oxford University). But given the museum’s 2018 discovery that the Oxford dodo died from a gunshot to the back of the head, rather than natural causes, the link to Lincoln’s Inn Fields seems very unlikely.
