21/28 December 2019 | New Scientist | 75obtained, or whether it was even alive when
it arrived in the country.
Contrary to popular belief, very few
live dodos were ever shipped to Europe
and only one or two survived the journey.
The most colourful idea about the Oxford
dodo’s provenance has it as a live specimen
seen in London in around 1638. A retired MP,
Hamon L’Estrange, describes visiting a house
that was displaying “a great fowle, somewhat
bigger than the largest turkey-cock... The
keeper called it a Dodo.” It is possible that this
bird ended up in the Tradescant collection.
Another possibility is that it was collected
by Emmanuel Altham of the Company of
Merchant Adventurers of London, who visited
Mauritius in 1628. He wrote to his brother
that he was sending back a dodo as a gift,
but there is no evidence of a bird ever arriving.
The third possibility comes from an
Ashmolean museum catalogue from 1836.
It says that a diplomat called Thomas Herbert,
who visited Mauritius in 1629, “probably”
brought the dodo to England. He described the
bird in his travelogue and knew both Ashmole
and Tradescant the Elder, but if he did return
with a dodo, he omitted to mention it.
Regardless of its provenance, in the 1600s, a
dodo was just another exotic dead bird among
many. It had yet to acquire its iconic status.
What happened next, however, launched the
dodo on its trajectory to international fame.
Tradescant the Younger had no male heir,
so promised to leave his collection to Ashmole.
But when he died in 1662, his will bequeathed
everything to his wife Hester. Ashmole
disputed it, pursued his claim through the
courts and won. Even as he was plotting
against Hester, he was thinking about securing
his legacy. He offered his collection (and
Tradescant’s) to the University of Oxford
on the condition that it build a museum
and name it after him. The university took the
bait and the Ashmolean Museum was created.
In 1683, the collection – 12 cartloads – arrived
in Oxford by barge.
The dodo, now undoubtedly dead, was
put on display. Taxidermy in those days was
a haphazard affair, though, and by 1755, the
specimen was beyond repair. It was supposedly
thrown on a bonfire, but as the flames rose
to its Roman nose, the curator dived in to
save what he could – or so the story goes.
The mundane reality is that the unsalvageable
bits were discarded and the rest kept.
For the next 70 years, the museum was
a doldrum of decline, known locally as the
knick-knackatory. Successive apathetic curators
did little more than collect dwindling entry“ As the flames rose
to its Roman nose,
the curator dived
in to save what
he could”
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