Until modern manufacturing
introduced mass production, nails were hand made and so valuable. If a nail
could be re-used, it would be. But when nails were used to make a door, they
were bent over at the ends, called ‘clinching’, to increase their hold on the
planking. Such a nail could not be pulled out and re-used –it was dead, dead as
a doornail. The phrase is a very old one – the poem Piers Plowman, from
about 1360, has the line,
“That fey withouten fait is febelore then nougt, And ded as a dore-nayl”[That they without faith are feebler than nought, And dead as a doornail].
Shakespeare uses it in Henry VI Part II (Act 4
Scene 10), when Jack Cade says,
“…if I do not leave you all as dead as a doornail, I pray God I may never eat grass more,”
and right at the
beginning of Chapter One of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens is
“…Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.”
George Clark - Report on the excavation of Dodo bones, from The Ibis !866 |
In 1865, inspired by Strickland and
Melville’s The Dodo and its Kindred, a Mauritian schoolmaster, George
Clark, excavated some subfossil Dodo bones from the swamp of Mare aux Songes in
Southern Mauritius. His reports inspired contemporary interest in the Dodo, and
Lewis Carroll introduced one as a major character of his Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland, also from 1865 (it is said the Dodo represents Carroll,
whose real name was Charles Dodgson. Due to a stutter, he introduced himself as
Do-Do-Dodgson). The expression ‘dead as a doornail’ began to be changed in
popular parlance to the similarly alliterative ‘dead as a Dodo’.
Tenniel's Dodo - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland |
It is probably
from Tenniel’s illustration from Alice that the Dodo is instantly
recognizable to most people today. We all know what happened to the Dodo.
But
have you heard of the Solitaire?
Yesterday I mentioned the Mascarene Islands,
which, in addition to Mauritius, included the islands of Rodriguez and Bourbon
(now called Réunion). Rodriguez lies
about three hundred miles to the east of Mauritius, and is about fifteen miles
long by about six miles wide. The island was uninhabited until 1691, when a
group of French Protestant refugees led by François Legaut landed there and
remained for two years. Legaut and nine other volunteer colonists were
Huguenots, who boarded the small frigate La Hirondelle in Amsterdam,
bound, as they thought, for the island of Bourbon. Nobody thought to tell them
of a change of plan – Bourbon was under French control, and the organiser of
the party, the Marquis Henri du Quesne (under sanction of the Dutch East India
Company), wanted to avoid a confrontation with the French, so he had Leguat and
eight of his followers abandoned on the uninhabited Rodriguez instead.
Leguat's Map of Rodriguez - Voyages - 1708 - Look closely and you will see the Solitaires all around the island. |
They
stayed there for a year, and then tried to escape in a small boat, which was
damaged on a reef, killing a man. In 1693, they tried again and navigated the
three hundred nautical miles in an open boat to Mauritius, where initially they
were welcomed by the Dutch authorities. An argument with an avaricious Governor
altered all this, and Leguat and his companions were imprisoned in terrible
conditions on a tiny islet far offshore (another man died attempting to
escape), before they were shipped to Batavia for trial. The Dutch Council there
eventually found the three remaining survivors innocent, and they returned to
the Netherlands in 1698 (remember the crew of the Pandora, and their
treatment by the Dutch at Batavia).
Title Page - F Leguat - Voyages 1708 |
Leguat moved to England and wrote a
fascinating account of his adventures, published in English and French
simultaneously, in two volumes, in 1708. Legaut was a meticulous recorder of
detail and it is largely from his work that we have knowledge of the Rodriguez
Solitaire. He devotes over three pages of description to the bird, which he
calls the Solitaire, possibly because he had heard of the Solitaire that lived
on the island of Bourbon, although he had never been there, so had not seen it.
Le Solitaire - from Leguat Voyages 1708 |
The Rodriguez Solitaire was, as the name implies, a solitary bird, and strongly
territorial. The Solitaire was, it seems, more slender than the Dodo, with
longer neck and legs, a shorter beak and more developed wings, but similar
enough to belong to the same family. As with its Mauritian cousin, the
Rodriguez Solitaire was wiped out by man, and by pigs, cats and rats introduced
by man onto its isolated home. Joseph-François de Cossigny looked to bring back a
live specimen in 1755, but none were to be found. Gone in less than 60 years.
Frontispiece - F Leguat - Voyages - 1708 |
Detail of the above frontispiece |
On Bourbon (now Réunion) was another flightless bird called the Solitaire.
Bourbon lies about 120 miles southwest of Mauritius, and the first account we
have of it is in An Account of a Voyage to the East Indies of the Pearl
(1613), in which John Tatton writes of,
“… a great fowl of the bigness of a Turkie, very fat, and so short winged that they cannot flie, beeing white, and in a manner tame; and so are all other fowles, as having not been troubled nor feared with shot. Our men did beate them down with sticks and stones”.
Five
years later a Dutch navigator, Bontekoe, records “…Dod-eersen, which have
small wings, and so far from being able to fly, they were so fat that they
could scarcely walk,” Fifty years later (1668), the Frenchman Carré writes
of
“I here saw a kind of bird which I have not found elsewhere: it is that which the inhabitants call the Oiseau Solitaire, for, in fact, it loves solitude, and only frequents the most secluded places … the flesh is exquisite; it forms one of the best dishes in this country, and might form a dainty at our tables.”
A British Naval officer
reports ‘curious birds’ on Bourbon in 1763, although we cannot be sure of what
species, but a comprehensive scientific survey of Bourbon in 1801 by Bory St.
Vincent makes no mention of the bird, so we may safely assume that they were
extinct by then.
Dodo |
If mankind had so little regard for the living birds, it will
come as no surprise to you to learn that the dead ones were treated with an
even more cavalier attitude. By the time Strickland and Melville were writing
(1848), there were only three physical remnants of the Dodo in museums.
Dodo's foot |
The
British Museum had a foot, a cranium was in a museum in Copenhagen, and the
relics of a stuffed Dodo that, in 1656, was listed in a catalogue of
Tradscant’s Museum. This was bequeathed to Elias Ashmole, and was part of his
collection that formed the basis of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. In 1755, the
Trustees of the museum undertook an inventory, and ordered the neglected,
decaying specimen to be destroyed. Only the head and a foot were saved from the
flames, which remain in the Ashmolean.
Dodo's head at Oxford (top) and a reconstruction |
Dodo's skull |
Strickland and Melville dissected this
head and compared it to specimens of the Rodriguez Solitaire, establishing
their kinship. The second part of their book is an osteological report on their
findings, but it’s not easy going. Take this example, taken at random: -
“The sub-crescentic supra-orbital tract is rough, and perforated by periosteal vascular foramina; a series of larger size extend from the notch on the antorbital process to the supra-orbital foramen or notch, and indicate its inner boundary; hence the supra-orbital plate appears formed, as it were, by a separate ossification of the periosteum extending outwards to protect the eyeball.”
And there are over fifty pages in a similar vein.
Contemporary advert for The Dodo and its Kindred |
Hugh Edwin
Strickland carried on an engrossing conversation on the theme of the Dodo in
the pages of Notes and Queries magazine from February 1850, until his
untimely encounter with the express train at Retford in 1853. Further studies
have placed the Dodo in the Columbidae family – it was a gigantic type
of pigeon.
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