The oddest omission in the first edition of Bernardin's Journey was that of the Dodo, which he remedied in the projected second edition. The dodo, totemic bird of Mauritius, embodied a sad ecological allegory about European expansion, for whether it was Dutch sailors or the hordes of rats, pigs and monkeys that finished off this heavy,flightless bird (with a sharp, powerful beak) is irrelavant because all its predators came from outside the island, together.

Buffon called the dodo a "dronte" and gave an accurate description of it in his Histoire naturelle, claiming that it had died out because it was flightless, stupid and ugly (113). But the name dodo came to represent this large bird, not "dronte"; dodo, claimed to be from the Portuguese doudo for stupid (though not in my two-volume Portuguese dictionary), was used by sailors because the bird was so stupid and so easily killed, and this name stuck.

Masauji Hachisuka tried to establish that the last living dodos were described in Benjamin Harry's visit to Mauritius in 1681, though Perry Moore found a reference in a sailors journal about capturing two live dodos in 1688 (114).By 1693, some 80 years before Bernardin's account, François Leguat enumerated many Mauritian birds, but did not mention the dodo. (115).

By 1755 the dodo at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, though partially destroyed by fire, began to intrigue specialists, who even questioned whether it had really existed or not (no complete specimen survives). Only in 1828 did J.S. Duncan at Oxford prove that the dodo (raphus cucullatus [Didus ineptus]) had existed, and from then it entered popular mythology as one of nature's freaks.

Popularised by Lewis Caroll in the opening of his Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), with a famous drawing by Sir John Tenniel, the bird became a verbal cliché ("dead as a dodo") and was finally exported back to Mauritius as an imperial emblem on stamps, in tourist brochuresm and as the name of an elite white French club (116).

In 1874 George Clark found a skeleton in Mauritius, symbolically preserved in the "La Mare aux songes" near today's airport, where "songe" is not a dream but the edible Calidium/Caladium esculentum, added t o the best Creole dishes. David Quammen made the dodo the symbol of the way man has caused, and is causung, so many species to disappear; according to Carl Jones in Mauritius, its extinction made man realize for the first time that he had caused the loss of a species. Interestingly, he suggests that the word dodo was the bird's song, its swan song, "doo-doo". In a recent television programme (Extinct), a DNA test proved that the dodo was from the Asian pigeon family. (118)

113. The entry by Buffon is quoted in full by Bory de St. Vincent, vol 2, pp302-307, who called the dodo "un oiseau monstreux".

114. In Evers and Hookoomsing, 2001, p.6. See also Frances Staub's essay in same edition, arguing with Kitchener's report in the New Scientist (18 September 1993) about the dodo's seasonal fatness, what it fed on (vacoas seeds, wild figs, palm dates) it's famous gizzard stone etc.

115. Leguat p. 65

116. See Laetitia van den Heuvel's excellent essay, "Dodos Virtual Reality", in Evers and Hookoomsing, 2001, pp-77-89, and Geneviève Dormann's novel Le bal du dodo, 1989. Thanks to Professor Hookoomsing for sending me a copy.

117. Quammen, p 267.

118. See Also "Dodo Flew to its Grave", Natural Scientist, 3 March 2002.