Most important, the nobility of preservation arises from the nature of history itself. We needn’t fret because we have no specimens of Cambrian quartz from Florida, or cannot photograph a Jurassic rainbow. Such simple objects, directly formed under unchanging laws of nature, do not vary in interesting ways from time to time or place to place. But complex objects of history, unpredictable in principle, and generated but once in all their detailed and unrepeatable glory, must utterly disappear from human understanding unless we preserve a record of their actual existence. Millions of species lived and died without leaving a single fossil sign of their residence on Earth. And we shall never greet them—a sad thought for a paleontologist with an insatiable desire to grasp the full richness of life’s past. To know a physical phenomenon, we must understand the laws that govern its generation. To know a historical entity, we must preserve a record. Blessed be the recorders and collectors (see chapter 9 on a poignant and unusual case of preservation).
I want to consider the curator’s role—as heroic rather than futile—in preserving the merest scraps of a record in three inaugural losses of particular symbolic importance: the extinction of the first large terrestrial mammal in 1799; the extirpation, in the 1680s, of the first animal clearly driven to death in historic times by human agency; and the genocide of the first human group encountered by Westerners in the New World, greeted in 1492 and obliterated by 1508.
Two common features intrigue me, and tell us something important about human psychology and the conceptual prejudices of Western life. First, in each case, only a paltry record could be salvaged, and all prominent preservationists focus upon this particular sadness as symbolizing the senselessness of loss. Second, and almost oddly in contradiction, all major commentators also denigrate the lost creatures as doomed by their own inadequacies—as if to expiate any guilt for the rapaciousness that made preservation necessary in the first place! Must we always blame the victims because we can’t bear the truthful conclusion that baleful events really didn’t need to occur? Inadequacy must lead to eventual doom, but excellence need not wither.
In 1799, a South African hunter shot the last blaauwbock, or blue antelope (Hippotragus leucophaeus). This species, already reduced to a tiny population living in a small area, did not come to the attention of Europeans until 1719, and did not receive a formal description until 1766. Western culture surely delivered the coup de grâce, but the blaauwbock had already been doomed either purely in the course of nature, or partly though deterioration of habitat caused by domestic sheep introduced to the region by native Africans as early as A.D. 400. This short interval of knowledge, and the animal’s rarity, led to near disappearance of all palpable records. Only four mounted specimens survive in museums—the “four antelopes of the apocalypse” of my previous essay devoted to this story (reprinted in an earlier volume of essays, Dinosaur in a Haystack). All commentators have invoked the extreme paucity of preserved remains to carry the moral of this particular tale, and of the generality thus represented.
The first recorded extinction by human agency has become an almost automatic symbol, universally known and cited in all modes of communication—conceptually, iconographically, and even linguistically. “Dead as a doornail” only refers to immobility, for a doornail is a bolt, not a fastener. “Dead as a dodo” means totally and forever.
The Mascarene Islands—Mauritius, Réunion, and Rodrigues—located east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, have lost many species of birds to direct and indirect results of human activity. But the prototype and grand-daddy of all extinctions also occurred here, with the death of all three species in a unique family of flightless pigeons—the solitaire of Rodrigues, last seen in the 1790s; the solitaire of Reunion (probably more closely related to the dodo), gone by 1746; and the celebrated dodo of Mauritius, last encountered in the early 1680s and almost surely extinct by 1690.
Although Portuguese sailors reached the previously uninhabited Mascarenes in the early sixteenth century, no mention of the dodo has been found before the narrative of the Dutch voyage of Jacob Cornelius Van Neck, who returned to Holland in 1599. The botanist Carolus Clusius provided the first scientific description in 1605, after observing the foot of a dodo in the home of his friend, the anatomist Peter Paauw.
Large dodos weighed more than fifty pounds. They grew a bluish gray plumage on a squarish, shon-legged body, surmounted by a large head, free of facial feathers, and bearing a large bill with a strongly hooked tip. The wings were small and apparently useless (at least for any form of flight). Dodos laid single eggs in ground nests.
What could be easier to catch than a lumbering giant flightless pigeon? Dutch sailors didn’t like the meat, and originally called the dodo a Walgvogel, or nauseating bird. But some portions, well cooked, tasted good enough—and no ship’s victualer could afford to sneeze at such a free and bounteous supply of meat on the hoof (or vestigial wing), so to speak. Still, capture for human consumption probably didn’t seal the dodo’s fate, for extinction occurred primarily by indirect effects of human disturbance. Early sailors brought pigs and monkeys to the Mascarenes, and both multiplied prodigiously. Both species apparently feasted on dodo eggs, easily acquired from the unprotected ground nests—and most naturalists attribute a greater proportion of deaths to these imports than to direct human action. In any case, no one ever saw a live dodo on Mauritius after the early 1680s. In 1693, the French explorer Leguat spent several months on Mauritius, looked hard for dodos, and found none.
Dodos provide a particularly good illustration for my two conflicting principles: lament at the paucity of preserved remains, and blame for death largely laid to the victim’s inadequacy. Human contact may have lasted less than a century, but dodos were both locally abundant and well documented. In this context, remarkably little remains in our museums as a testimony to this prototype of all extinctions. Several seventeenth-century paintings and drawings exist, some made in Europe, and apparently from life. We have no absolute proof that living dodos ever arrived in Western nations, but strong circumstantial evidence suggests that nine or ten birds might have come to Holland, two to England, one to Genoa, two apparently to India, and one, perhaps, even to Japan. H. E. Strickland, author of the classic 1848 monograph on the dodo, spoke of this paucity of evidence:
We possess only the rude descriptions of unscientific voyagers, three or four oil paintings, and a few scattered osseous fragments, which have survived the neglect of two hundred years. The paleontologist has, in many cases, far better data for determining the zoological characters of a species which perished myriads of years ago.
A few partial skeletons and many scattered bones, most excavated from Mauritian bogs after 1850, now grace our museums, but remarkably little evidence remains from birds that humans saw alive. Copenhagen has a skull, Prague a bit of a beak. Of flesh and blood, we have only one preserved foot in the British Museum, and a head and foot in Oxford. What a paltry legacy for an animal that occupies such a central place in our legends and history!
The tale of the last dodo is especially poignant. A complete stuffed specimen existed in the collection of John Tradescant, developer of the first important English museum of natural history. Tradescant, bequeathed his collection to Elias Ashmole, who then founded the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University. There the specimen languished and rotted away until, in 1755, the directors of the museum consigned the “LAST OF THE DODOS” to the flames (to cite Strickland’s words in his own upper case). An astute curator managed to save the head and one foot—virtually the only fleshly evidence now existing for the first animal driven to extinction by modern humans. Nearly a century later, the great geologist Charles Lyell described this desecration in words redolent of pain, and expressing the solemn duty of all true curators: to preserve the remains when we cannot rescue the living, and to maintain the records when we cannot even conserve the remains—lest we forget, lest we forget:
Some have complained that inscriptions on tombstones convey no general inform
ation except that individuals were born and died—accidents which happen alike to all men. But the death of a species is so remarkable an event in natural history, that it deserves commemoration; and it is with no small interest that we learn from the archives of the University of Oxford the exact day and year when the remains of the last specimen of the Dodo, which had been permitted to rot in the Ashmolean Museum, were cast away.
Strickland used the same argument to justify the time and expense of publishing a monograph on “the first clearly attested instance of the extinction of organic species through human agency.” We may well mark his prophetic words in our current age of greatly accelerated anthropogenic extinction:
We cannot see without regret the extinction of the last individual of any race of organic beings, whose progenitors colonized the pre-Adamitic Earth . . . The progress of Man in civilization, no less than his numerical increase, continually extends the geographical domain of Art by trenching on the territories of Nature, and hence the zoologist or botanist of future ages will have a much narrower field for his researches than that which we enjoy at present. It is, therefore, the duty of the naturalist to preserve to the Stores of Science the knowledge of these ancient and expiring organisms, when he is unable to preserve their lives; so that our acquaintance with the marvels of Animal and Vegetable existence may suffer no detriment by the losses which the organic creation seems destined to sustain.
Yet, for all these expressions of sadness and determination, few naturalists ever spoke well of the poor dodo while it lived, or even later when theory demanded a rationale for the dodo’s extinction, and “blaming the victim” seemed an easier course than admitting an eminently avoidable tragedy. What creature has ever been subjected to more ridicule and derision? To be sure, the dodo was not a lovely creature by our conventional standards of beauty. The bird seemed inept, again by our inappropriate criteria—a waddling creature, incapable of flight and condemned to raising nestlings on the open ground. But have we not been taught to look behind overt appearance? Could we not, in words of the great British anatomist Richard Owen, champion “the beauty of its ugliness”?
On the contrary, we did nothing but deride and stigmatize. Diverse theories for the dodo’s etymology agree on only one point: whatever the derivation, the intent was surely pejorative. Some ascribe dodo to a Portuguese word for “foolish” (unlikely, since the few Portuguese sailors to the Mascarenes never mentioned dodos). Others derive the name from dodoor, a Dutch word for “sluggard.” Most seventeenth-century sources cite some orthographic variant of dodaers—the name generally used by Dutch sailors, and meaning, roughly, “fat ass.” Moreover, the official scientific names show no more gentilesse. Linnaeus called the species Didus ineptus—Didus as a Latinization of dodo, and ineptus for obvious reasons. Modern ornithologists often use the earlier name Raphus, given by the naturalist Moehring as a Latinization of the Dutch reet, a vulgar term for “rump.”
From the very beginning, even while the dodo lived in prosperity on Mauritius, European descriptions dripped with disdain. For example, in 1658, the naturalist Bontius began the tradition of blaming the victim, even before the eventual outcome, by linking the dodo’s deficiencies to ease of capture: “It hath a great, ill-favored head . . . It is a slow-placed and stupid bird, and which easily becomes a prey to the fowlers.”
After 1690, the chorus of disdain only increased, for now the dodo could be blamed for its singular fate. Consider the mid-eighteenth-century description of that ultimate arbiter of taste in science, the preeminent naturalist Georges Buffon, best remembered today in general culture for his motto, “le style c’est l’homme même” (the style is the man himself). Buffon, as cited in chapter 20, regarded the sloth as a prototype of ugliness and inadequacy among mammals. Thus, in labeling the dodo as a sloth among birds, Buffon could not have made his judgment more clear or cutting:
The body is massive and almost cubical; it is scarcely held up by two fat and short legs. The head is so extraordinary that one might take it for a fantasy of a painter of grotesques. This head, mounted on a thick and goiterous neck, consists almost entirely of an enormous beak . . . All this results in a stupid and voracious appearance . . . Its heaviness, which usually presupposes strength in animals, here only produces lethargy . . . The dodo is, among birds, what the sloth represents among mammals: one might say that this bird is made of brute and inactive matter, where the vital molecules are too sparse. It has wings, but the wings are too short and too weak to raise it into the air. It has a tail, but the tail is disproportionate and out of place. One might take it for a tortoise decked out in the covering of a bird—and nature, in giving it such useless ornaments, almost shows a desire to add embarrassment to bulk, clumsiness [gaucherie in the original French, almost an English word now as well, and referring literally to left-handedness] of motion to the inertia of mass, and to give the creature a gross heaviness all the more shocking when we realize that it is a bird.
Interestingly, only H. E. Strickland, the dodo’s most assiduous student and monographer, spoke well of the bird in his 1848 treatise. We may disdain this creature by our own standards, for even Strickland admitted that “we must figure it to ourselves as a massive clumsy bird, ungraceful in its form, and with a slow waddling motion.” But who are we to judge, when God created each animal with optimal features for its own designated mode of life:
Let us beware of attributing anything like imperfection to these anomalous organisms, however deficient they may be in those complicated structures which we so much admire in other creatures. Each animal and plant has received its peculiar organization for the purpose, not of exciting the admiration of other beings, but of sustaining its own existence. Its perfection, therefore, consists, not in the number or complication of its organs, but in the adaptation of its whole structure to the external circumstances in which it is destined to live. And in this point of view we shall find that every department of the organic creation is equally perfect.
But, even more interestingly, Strickland still felt that he had to find a rationale based on inevitability, rather than contingent and preventable despoliation, for the dodo’s extinction. So he argued that species, like individuals, probably go through a determined cycle of birth, maturation, and death—and that humans therefore only hastened an ineluctable end:
It appears, indeed, highly probable that Death is a law of Nature in the Species as well as in the Individual; but this internal tendency to extinction is in both cases liable to be anticipated by violent or accidental causes. Numerous external agents have affected the distribution of organic life at various periods, and one of these has operated exclusively during the existing epoch, viz. the agency of Man.
But Richard Owen, England’s finest anatomist, would not let Strickland get away with such mush. In his own 1866 monograph on the dodo, Owen reasserted the bird’s inherent inferiority in absolute terms. Citing the justice of Linnaeus’s name, Owen wrote:
The brain is singularly small in the present species of Didus; and if it be viewed as an index of intelligence of the bird, the latter may well be termed ineptus.
Owen then attributed the dodo’s degeneration to an easy life on Mauritius, an island free of predators and competitors:
That there would be nothing in the contemporaneous condition of the Mauritian fauna to alarm or in any way to put the Dodo to its wits; being, like other pigeons, monogamous, the excitement, even, of a seasonal or prenuptial combat, might, as in them, be wanting. We may well suppose the bird to go on feeding and breeding in a lazy, stupid fashion, without call or stimulus to any growth of cerebrum proportionate to the gradually accruing increment of the bulk of the body.
Owen then specifically attacked Strickland’s notion of universal appropriateness and local perfection, citing the theories of two great French naturalists, Buffon and Lamarck, to support his notion of genuine degeneration:
The Dodo exemplifies Buffon’s idea of the origin of species through departure from a more perfect
original type by degeneration; and the known consequences of the disuse of one locomotive organ and extra use of another indicate the nature of the secondary causes that may have operated in the creation of this species of bird, agreeably with Lamarck’s philosophical conception.
Finally, Owen fired his ultimate salvo: Does not the simple fact of extinction, all by itself and tout court, seal the case for inadequacy?
Nevertheless the truth, as we have or feel it, should be told. In the end it may prove to be the more acceptable service. The Didus ineptus, through its degenerate or imperfect structure, howsoever acquired, has perished.
So, too, did the first human group encountered by Europeans in the New World—also on islands—perish quickly by rapacity, exploitation, and the sword. The previous essay tells a sad tale of the Bahamian Tainos, met by Columbus on October 12, 1492—and fully extirpated, following forced removal and indenture in Hispaniola, by 1508. Columbus spoke well of the physical appearance of the Bahamian Tainos, admiring their large stature and attractive appearance—“their forms being very well proportioned, their bodies graceful, and their features handsome,” as he wrote in his log. Yet Columbus also noted the ease of their potential exploitation: “They do not carry arms and have no knowledge of them. They have no iron . . . With fifty men they could all be subjected and made to do all that one wished.” Columbus collected nothing on the Bahamas—not even the single Cerion shell that could have resolved the issue of his landfall (see chapter 11)—so posterity received no legacy from the native Bahamians beyond a verbal record.
During the 1880s, the Western world, at the height of colonial expansion, and still untroubled by a history of exploitation (even genocide) against “inferior” peoples of other cultures, began to gear up for celebrations to mark the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s landfall. At the same time, one of my favorite scientists, Louis Agassiz’s last student, visited the Bahamas to pursue his work on the anatomy and embryology of marine invertebrates. As a man of general curiosity, W. K. Brooks, professor of zoology at Johns Hopkins University, turned his attention to other aspects of local natural history. He contemplated the fate of the original inhabitants, and he discovered that no anatomical remains had ever been recorded. He began to make inquiries and found that a few skeletons had been recovered from caves, but never properly described. Brooks secured the cooperation of local collectors, and studied this paltry legacy of the vibrant and complex culture first met by Europeans. Brooks published his results, the only anthropological research he ever pursued, in a technical article for the Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences (1889), and in a general article for Popular Science Monthly in the same year.