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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Julian Hume, a British paleontologist, is one of the world's leading authorities on the dodo, the large, flightless bird that lived on the island of Mauritius--five hundred miles east of Madagascar, in the Indian Ocean--until its extinction, at the end of the seventeenth century. I met Hume a few months ago in the southeast corner of the island, at the muddy work site of an international group of scientists looking for dodo remains; such an activity had not been seen on this scale for nearly a century. The group called itself the 2006 Mauritius Dodo Expedition. Hume, who is an easygoing man in his mid-forties, was unshaven, and as filthy as a child in a detergent commercial. He walked me around the area of the expedition's interest: a field on the edge of a sugar estate, where an orange ditchdigger on caterpillar tracks stood silent, holding in its scoop a block of dripping, peaty-looking earth that it had extracted a short time earlier. The neat hole left by the scoop had filled with water, and a dragonfly traced the outline of this new pond in an unflagging rectangular circuit. The digger's driver had fallen asleep in his cab while awaiting instructions. A jet took off from the international airport nearby. To one side, Hume's colleagues grubbed through a previous scoop of mud, using water pumped by a generator. When the generator stopped for a moment, we could hear surf; the sea was only a few hundred yards away. In the other direction, a wooded slope led up to sugarcane fields, which, out of view, stretched on a flat plain for miles inland toward distant mountains.
Hume, who grew up in a working-class family on the south coast of En-gland, was a "bird and extinction freak" as a child, but he didn't start his formal scientific studies until he was in his thirties, and he finished his Ph.D. only in 2005. (A year later, he became a grandfather.) Today, Hume holds positions at the Natural History Museum in London and at the University of Portsmouth, but he is also a serious amateur artist, and in his spare time he makes careful, although inevitably approximate, paintings of dodos and other extinct bird species, working with acrylic paint on paper. Three of these have been published in the journal Nature. This dual approach to the subject might not seem fully respectable to some paleontological colleagues, but Hume argues that a study of extinct animals calls for an imaginative and extrapolatory frame of mind, of a kind not always valued in research science: a readiness to see what is not there.
It was in this spirit that Hume surveyed the Mauritius site--through the eyes of a Dutch seafarer of the late sixteenth century. As we walked, he described how Dutch ships first arrived on the island in September, 1598, when a party of sailors from an eight-ship exploratory fleet--on its faltering way to what is now Indonesia--came ashore at a beach not far from where we were. (The spot is marked by a strangely forbidding gray stone obelisk.) The ships had been at sea for four months. "The Dutch were out of drinking water, they were starving," Hume said. "And then they saw this green and tropical land. They could just plunge their hands into the water and catch a fish. There were parrots overhead--they could literally knock them out of the sky. There were giant tortoises, totally fearless."
Mauritius, which has an area of seven hundred square miles and a population of one and a quarter million people, was then uninhabited. Unusually in the history of European adventure and plunder, here was an island attractive to an imperial power--arable, fairly big, and well placed for trade routes--that had no prehistory and no indigenous people. Its first human settlers wore trousers and took notes. (Portuguese sailors had discovered the island around ninety years earlier--and it's likely that Arab traders had visited centuries before that--but, until the Dutch arrived, nobody had lived there. Nor had anyone written about it: the Portuguese published no maps or descriptions.) At a moment in history that is tantalizingly close to the present--centuries after the human occupation of, say, New Zealand or Madagascar--Mauritius was pristine. "If Stephen Hawking is right, and we can travel through time, then I want to be here in September, 1598, with my paints under my arm, and a big pad, and just start painting," Hume said longingly.
Today, Mauritius is a "trashed island," he said. "There were at least twenty-five endemic birds then. Only eight survive. Almost everything we can see now was introduced by humans." He was referring equally to the grasses, the birds, and the trees. "Those are royal palms from Cuba," he said, and pointed. "Those are traveller palms from Madagascar." He went on, "If you squint, you can see what the Dutch saw when they first landed." Squinting, we removed the trees and the sugarcane, the occasional flash of an Indian ring-necked parakeet, and ten rather dour scientists, most of them Dutch archeologists and paleontologists. We were left with little more than the green contours of the land and the blue of the sky.
On that first visit, the Dutch stayed offshore for two weeks, making a number of excursions onto the island. After the ships returned to Holland, reports and illustrations of the island's plenitude were published, including an engraving in which a pair of sailors take a ride along a beach atop a giant tortoise. Another engraving showed the first representation of the dodo: men are dragging nets for fish, while to one side a large upright bird, apparently rolling its eyes in resentment, walks past a palm tree, looking like a chick that has grown comically huge. (A nineteenth-century naturalist commented on the "gigantic immaturity" of the species.) According to the accompanying text, the bird was as big as a swan and had "a round rump with two or three curled feathers on it." The sailors referred to it as walghvoghel, which translates as "repulsive bird" and is thought to refer to the dodo's taste when cooked, although Hume's research has led him to a kinder interpretation--that the bird was considered repulsive for its indiscriminate omnivorousness. Still, according to the first reports the walghvoghel compared poorly to "other small birds"; its flesh was tough and oily. In common with the island's other birds, it was easily caught: "Because there were no inhabitants living there who made them afraid, so nor were they afraid of us, but just remained sitting, allowing us to beat them to death."
On later visits, the Dutch came to refer to the birds as dodaersen--fat-asses. In English, "dodo" was in use by the sixteen-twenties, perhaps through a simple process of linguistic evolution; but Hume likes the idea that the coinage...
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