Dodos on Folio 141

On 1 October the historian Benjamin Breen wrote on Res Obscura about a Dutch East India Company ship's log from 1615 that mentions dodos on Mauritius. He found it by setting Claude Opus 5.5 to read through the Company's digitised archives, and he thinks no one had noticed it before. I opened the page on the Nationaal Archief's server and read the entries myself.

17 April 21 April

Nationaal Archief, The Hague, VOC 1.04.02, inv. 1059, scan 0277, folio 141. The header reads Laus Deo adij april 1615 onder Mauritius: "Praise God, the ... of April 1615, off Mauritius". Tap a red box. My readings are mine, from the image; words I am not sure of are in grey.

What the page says

The dodos come up twice, four days apart. On 17 April the ship sent its boat with a letter to two other Company ships, the Walcheren and den Engel, and sent hunters ashore, who brought some tortoises and dodos on board. On 21 April the crew took on water and "caught many tortoises, dodos, and some geese and parrots". Breen's text quotes the second entry. His transcription is an image I could not read here, so it may well include the first.

Breen spells the word dodeersen in his quotation and dodersen in his caption. On the scan I read dodersen in both entries.

Where it falls

• 1598 First recorded mention, by Dutch sailors.
• 17 and 21 April 1615 This log: dodos brought aboard, then caught. Breen notes that the record previously had a gap from 1611 to 1616.
• 1616 A Portuguese Jesuit's "ostrich" on Mauritius, from a French translation. Breen's guess is that this bird went on to Jahangir.
• c. 1625 Ustad Mansur paints a dodo in Jahangir's menagerie, perhaps the most accurate picture of a live one. Some date it to around 1615.
• 1628–1633 Peter Mundy claims to have seen two dodos in Surat.
• 1638 Cornelis Saftleven's dodo head, probably the last original depiction.
• 1662 The last widely accepted sighting.
• 1681 Long thought the last account; now thought to describe red rails, though the date still has defenders.
• 1688 The last claimed sighting, in Isaac Lamotius's hunting records.
• 1693 Roberts and Solow's statistical estimate of extinction (95% range 1688–1715).

One line in the post

Breen calls the dodo the bird "that famously went extinct due to overhunting around 1681". That is the old version on both counts. Wikipedia gives 1662 as the last widely accepted sighting and Lamotius's 1688 as the last claimed. It also says hunting by humans "is no longer believed to be the main cause". The usual account is the animals the sailors brought with them, together with the loss of the forest.

What stands on what