From the Literary Gazette, July 3 1847
By Heinz-Joseph Lücking, via Wikimedia Commons.
Do-do1! Vasco de Gama*
Sailed from the Cape of Good Hope with a crammer,
How he had met, in the Isle of Mauritius,
A very queer bird wot was not very vicious,
Called by the name of a do-do;
And all the world thought what he said was true2.
Do-do! This wonderful creature
Exhibited one remarkable feature,
That though it was plain he a bird was by his bill,
Devil a wing was on either side visible,
Sich a do-do-do!
There’s nothing like finding out something new.
Do-do! A Dutchman shot him,
And looked at the bird’s latter end when he got him,
Where, wondrous to mention, of tail there was not a trace,
But five little curling grey feathers he’d got in place.
Jist a do-do-do!
No wonder Mynheer3 looked puzzled and blue.
Do-do! Our bird was no Cupid,
But preciously ugly and grievously stupid ;
So the sailors at first, though for fun they befriended him,
For a taste of his gizzard fore long put an end to him:
Yet the do-do-do
Might have lived on if he could have flew!
Do-do! The Hollander boiled him,
And spitchcocked4 his gizzard, and otherwise spoiled him;
And to prove what an eatable species of bird he’d caught,
The claws and the bill of his dinner aboard he brought-
Do-do-do-do-
All that remained of a genus quite new!
Do-do! Although we can’t see him,
His picture is hung in the British Museum5;
For the creature itself, we may judge what a loss it is
When its claw and its bill are such great curiosities.
Do-do! Do-do!
Ornithologists all have been puzzled by you!
Do-do! Monsieur de Blainville6,
Who hits very hard all the nails on his anvil,
Maintains that the bird was a vulture rapacious,
And neither a wader nor else gallinaceous7:
A do-do; a do-do,
And not a cock-a-doodle-doo!
Do-do! John Edward Gray8, sir,
Doubted what Mr. de Blainville did say, sir,
And held that the bird was a vile imposition,
And that the old Dutchman had seen a vile vision—
A do-do! a regular do!
And didn’t believe one word was true!
Do-do! Alas for our wisdom!
Strickland9 has come to the judgment and his doom,
By a hole in the head and a bone with a ridge on,
So that our rara avis10 is only a pigeon,
Our do do only a doo11,
A regular doo, like a turtle-doo!
Do-do! Yet I have a fancy
That we in the mystery something more can see –
That Vasco de Gama12, jist begging his pardon,
Cotched a gull with clipped wings in a b—r’s13 garden,
And called this do, a do-do,
And the bill and claws saved from the poultry stew!
Moral.
Do-do! Alas, there are left us
No more remains of the Didus ineptus14,
And so, in the progress of science, all prodigies
Must die, as the palm-trees will some day at Loddiges15
And like our wonderful do-do,
Turn out not worth the hullabaloo!**
*Mr. Strickland decidedly objects to Vasco de Gama having his name mentioned as the first discoverer of the Do-do. Vasco, it is said, saw only a penguin. But as Vasco de Gama sounds infinitely better in verse than Captain Von Neck16, the true discoverer, the poet avails himself of the license accorded to his tribe.
**[Editor’s Note] The humour of this bit of philosophy in sport will be apparent enough to every one present at the British Association, where the description of the Dodo, a bird found on three islands of the Indian Archipelago by the early Portuguese navigators, and only extinct within the last two centuries, occupied the long evening lecture by Mr. Strickland on Monday, and hours of discussion in Section D17 on the following morning, when in spite of the Prince of Canino’s18 contending for its being of the cock-a-doodle species, it was generally voted to be a gigantic pigeon, and a percher, though destitute of wings.
The subject gave rise to some diversion among graver inquiries. Since our return from the congress another pleasant correspondent has sent us the following:
First verse of a ditty intended to have been sung in opposition to Prof. Forbes’s verses on the Dodo, at one of the dinners of the Red Lions at Oxford, 184719.
Of all the queer birds that ever you’d see,
The Dodo’s the queerest of Columbidae20;
For all her life long she ne’er sat on a tree,
And when the Dutch came, away went she.
Tee wit, tee woo, I’d have you to know,
There ne’er was such a bird as our famed Dodo.
I. O. W.
Notes
- For the purposes of this poem at least, it’s pronounced ‘doo-doo’. I don’t know if that was a common pronounciation at the time, or just Forbes being Forbes. The rhyme with ‘know’ in the verse in the editor’s footnote suggests it was the latter. Although one school of thought holds the name comes from the bird’s pigeon-like call, which would probably sound more like Forbes’ version. ↩︎
- For much of the 1840s there was a long debate going on about the origins and classification of the dodo, involving all the men named in this poem and many more. At the time the poem was written, and as it narrates, everything was all still up in the air (unlike the dodo), but as it suggests, there was growing and strong support for the idea the dodo was related to pigeons, bolstered by Hugh Strickland’s examination of its bones. A paper by Strickland and Alexander Melville in 1848 (a year after this poem was written) established that it was, in fact, a relative of pigeons (it’s in the same family, but in its own subtribe). ↩︎
- Mijnheer, Dutch for ‘sir’. ↩︎
- An older, alternative spelling of ‘spatchcocked’, ie a culinary preparation of chicken or other bird that’s had its backbone removed and its breasts flattened out. Also known as ‘butterflying’. ‘Spitchcock’ is still in use to describe the same thing done to eels. ↩︎
- At this time the British Museum housed natural history collections; the Natural History Museum in London didn’t open until 1881. ↩︎
- Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville (1777-1850), French naturalist, anatomist (and friend, later enemy, of Cuvier, as well as his successor in the chair of anatomy at Paris), and coiner of the word ‘palaeontology’. ↩︎
- A term for heavy-bodied ground-feeding birds, related to domestic chickens and to pheasants. They can, generally, fly, at least for short distances. ↩︎
- John Edward Gray (1800-1875), zoologist, keeper of Zoology at the British Museum, founder of the Royal Entomological Society and taxonomist. Also something of a bully as a boss, by some accounts, and by others, necessarily tough in order to keep a bunch of often-unruly scientists in check. ↩︎
- Hugh Edwin Strickland (1811-1853), ornithologist and systematist who proposed what’s known as the ‘Strickland Code’, a system for naming organisms that was based on the twelfth edition of Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae and helped to codify the principle of priority in nomenclature. This is where the scientific name of a species, genus etc is based on the oldest name known. A British Association committee, which included Charles Darwin, produced a report which became the Code in 1842 and was fairly quickly adopted internationally. Prior to this (and after it, for a while; not everyone accepted it, notably a large contingent of British scientists who argued the tenth edition of Linnaeus should be the basis – but it was an important step), there was no real priority in naming and scientists would apply their own names and reassign others with abandon, which can get (and no doubt got) hugely confusing when tracking down older names for species and genera. The principle still applies today and you can read more about it in the International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature Code, in chapter 6 here. ↩︎
- Rare bird. Both literally and figuratively; the expression can be used for any unusual or unique animal (or person). ↩︎
- The Scots word for a dove. ↩︎
- Vasco da Gama (d. 1524), the Portuguese explorer whose first voyage established the route from Europe to Asia round the Cape of Good Hope. He and his crew may have been the first Europeans to visit Mauritius (although the Mauritian historian Alfred North-Coombs has speculated he didn’t visit it, but was shown its location on a map by an Indian pilot; and it was Diego Dias who actually landed there a few years later, so Forbes isn’t quite right when he says the Dutch were the ‘true discoverer[s]’). And he is also probably at least partly to blame for a lot of what came later re: European imperialism and colonialism. ↩︎
- I censored this word, as it’s racist and highly offensive today. ↩︎
- The dodo’s generally-accepted Latin name at the time, and a bit of a mean one. It’s now called Raphus cucullatus, which was the earlier name given to it (see the note on Strickland). ↩︎
- The Loddiges family ran a famous plant nursery in East London. ↩︎
- Jacob Corneliszoon van Neck (1564-1638), Dutch naval officer who led one of the early expeditions of the Dutch East India Company to Indonesia. During this voyage, he and his fleet put in at Mauritius and an illustration of this, in his journal of the voyage, includes the first published image of a dodo. ↩︎
- Section D was the Zoology section at the British Association for the Advancement of Science. ↩︎
- Charles Louis Bonaparte (1803-1857), naturalist, ornithologist and nephew of Napoleon. He travelled a lot and named a lot of bird species. He was wrong about the dodo, though. ↩︎
- Presumably it never was sung, or recorded, which is a shame. I haven’t yet been able to identify I.O.W. ↩︎
- The pigeon family. ↩︎
Sources
International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature Code, chapter 6.
Literary Gazette and Journal of the Belles Lettres, Arts, and Sciences, July 3, 1847.
Strickland, H.E., Rules for Zoological Nomenclature, 1842 and after.
The Discovery of Mauritius Island, mauritius-holidays-discovery.com
