Of Dodos and Dutchmen: Reflections on the nature of history

Critical Quarterly

Volumn 47, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 32-47

  Gooding, Francis ^a  

^a NONE

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Indexed keywords

EID: 61249267975     PISSN: 00111562     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8705.2005.00664.x     Document Type: Review

References (10)

1. See, for instance, Collingwood's The Idea of History (1946; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)
2. The anthropologist Hugh Brody succinctly makes this point in his book The Other Side of Eden (London: Faber and Faber, 2001): 'In the absence of language, inheritance is limited to the gene pool
3. Parents pass on to their offspring a bundle of genes and very little else. But with language, they can pass on vast bodies of knowledge, moral codes, forms of social arrangement. And with language, it is possible to think. With thought it is possible for each generation to transform knowledge and ideas, which are then passed on to the generation that follows' (pp. 292-3). John Lukacs, too, asserts this connection between language and history making: 'history is an essential form of thought which has no method or jargon or language of its own, since it is written and spoken and thought in words, in the everyday language of men and women' (quoted from Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past (1985; London: Transaction, 2002), xxvii)
4. This information concerning the Dodo, and that which follows, is taken from Fuller (ibid.) and David Gibbs et al., Pigeons and Doves: A Guide to the Pigeons and Doves of the World (East Sussex: Pica Press, 2001); on the matter of nomenclature, I have followed Gibbs et al. as being more recent
5. Quoted in Fuller, Extinct Birds, 125
6. Auguste Toussaint, in his History of Mauritius (London: Macmillan, 1977), notes that when they first appear on European maps, they are named in corrupted Arabic (p. 16)
7. P. J. Moree, A Concise History of Dutch Mauritius, 1598-1710 (London: Kegan Paul International, 1998), 9
8. Quoted in Moree, Concise History of Dutch Mauritius, 13
9. Toussaint, History of Mauritius, 23
10. Fuller gives the following extract from L'Estrange's diary: 'About 1638, as I walked the London streets, I saw the picture of a strange fowle hung out upon a clothe and myselfe with one or two more in company went in to see it. It was kept in a chamber, and was a great fowle somewhat bigger than the largest Turky Cock, and so legged and footed, but stouter and thicker and of a more erect shape, coloured before like the breast of a young cock fesan, and on the back of dunn or dearc colour. The keeper called it a Dodo, and in the ende of a chymney in the chamber there lay a great heape of large pebble stones, whereof he gave it many in our sight, some as big as nutmegs and the keeper told us that she eats them (conducing to digestion)' (Extinct Birds, 117)