Nevermore Read online

  Other Books by David Day

  Natural History and Ecology

  The Doomsday Book of Animals

  The Whale War

  The Eco Wars

  The Encyclopedia of Vanished Species

  True Tales

  Noah’s Choice

  Green Penguin Book Guide

  The Complete Rhinoceros

  Poetry

  The Cowichan

  Many Voices:

  Canadian Indian Poetry (Editor)

  The Scarlet Coat Serial

  The Animals Within

  Gothic

  Visions of St. Louis the Métis

  Just Say ‘No’ to Family Values

  History

  History & Literature:

  Heritage Anthology (Editor)

  Myth and Mountains:

  Heritage Anthology (Editor)

  Men of the Forest:

  Heritage Anthology (Editor)

  Children’s Fiction and Poetry

  The Emperor’s Panda

  The Swan Children

  The Sleeper

  Aska’s Animals

  The Big Lie

  The Walking Catfish

  Aska’s Birds

  The Wolf Children

  The King of the Woods

  Tippu

  Aska’s Sea Creatures

  Fantasy and Mythology

  The Burroughs Bestiary

  A Tolkien Bestiary

  Castles

  Tolkien: The Illustrated Encyclopedia

  Tolkien’s Ring

  The Tolkien Companion

  A to Z of Tolkien

  The Quest for King Arthur

  The Hobbit Companion

  Tolkien’s World

  Text © David Day, 2012

  Illustration © Tim Bramfitt, Peter Hayman, Mick Loates, Maurice Wilson, 2012

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  The engraving of the Dutch in Mauritius (1601) is by the celebrated Flemish engraver Johann Theodor de Bry of Liege (1561-1623).

  Cover and Book Design: Julie McNeill, McNeill Design Arts

  Editor: Allan Briesmaster

  To Allan Thornton and the Agents of the E. I. A., Watchmen of the Wilderness

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Day, David, 1947-

  Nevermore: a book of hours / written by David Day and illustrated by Maurice Wilson… [et al.].

  Issued also in electronic format.

  ISBN 978-1-926802-68-8 ISBN EPUB 978-1-926802-69-5

  I. Wilson, Maurice, 1914-1987 II. Title.

  PS8557. A93N482012 C813’.54 C2011-906253-4

  Fourfront Editions

  Quattro Books

  720 Bathurst Street, Suite 200

  Toronto, Ontario M5S 2R4

  INTRODUCTION

  NEVERMORE: A Book of Hours has been conceived in the form of a twenty-four hour vigil. Each hour is dedicated to one now-vanished animal species. And each of these hourly meditations is divided into four parts: Illustration, Reportage, Commentary, and Elegy.

  Illustration: an original commissioned portrait of each species by one of this book’s four distinguished wildlife artists: Tim Bramfitt, Peter Hayman, Mick Loates and Maurice Wilson.

  Reportage: testimonies by witnesses – who were often the first (or last) to see these animals alive – in the form of monologues taken from naturalists’ journals, explorers’ ships’ logs, travellers’ memoirs.

  Commentary: notations on the testimonies, the witnesses and the animal species which attempt to give them a scientific and historic context.

  Elegy: original elegies composed in poetic conventions and forms related to each animal’s geographic and cultural environment.

  In these epicedia, I am at one with Gary Snyder, who in his Turtle Island, wrote: “I am a poet who has preferred not to distinguish in poetry between nature and humanity.” In this book, human history and natural history are not separate disciplines: humans and animals share a common and interactive history.

  Through the reportage and commentaries here, the reader will see how the fates of these animals are directly linked to individuals and events in human history: Julius Caesar with the Aurochs, Xenophon with the Assyrian Onager, Marco Polo with the Elephant Bird, Christopher Columbus with the Eskimo Curlew, Hernando Cortez with the American Bison, Jacques Cartier with the Great Auk, Samuel de Champlain with the Passenger Pigeon, Captain Cook with the Hawaiian O-O, Vitus Bering with Steller’s Sea Cow, Charles Darwin with the Antarctic Wolf-Fox.

  In the reportage, I have extracted what might almost be seen as “prose poems” from the chronicles of historic witnesses because these authentic voices often convey that sense of the astonishment experienced in those first encounters with these newly discovered creatures; and – as often – a sense of pathos with their ultimate passing.

  NEVERMORE: A Book of Hours is an adaptation of the Agrega, a Coptic – or Ancient Egyptian – word meaning “Book of Hours.” The Agrega is primarily used today by the Coptic Orthodox Church as a schedule for observing hours of prayer, instruction and meditation – and is comparable to the medieval Roman Catholic Horae, a Latin word meaning “Book of Hours.”

  Books of Hours were the most common type of surviving medieval illuminated manuscripts and personal devotional manuals. They were variable in content but all contained a schedule of hourly readings and prayers adopted from the daily rounds of monastic devotion known as the “canonical hours,” as well as being a calendar of prayers for saints and martyrs and a vigil for the souls of the dead.

  In NEVERMORE: A Book of Hours, the day is divided into eight Coptic canonical hours, and each of these is divided into three watches. Each watch is then assigned an “animal martyr” as the focus of meditation in order to cover the full twenty-four hours of this vigil.

  The Coptic Agrega was chosen in preference to the Latin Horae largely because the – now extinct – Coptic language is actually a demotic form of Egyptian hieroglyphics, and is linked to the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. These “coffin texts” used a similar structure of hours for the passage of the souls of the dead through the afterlife.

  This book is a requiem to vanished animals which I have tracked down in the museums and institutes around the world. Over the years I have touched the Aurochs horn, the feathers of the Passenger Pigeon, the pelt of the Shamanu, and the amulet of the Dodo’s skull. I have seen mounted specimens and preserved skins of the Bali Tiger, the Tarpan and the Thylacine. I have observed trophy heads of the Barbary Lion, the Blue Buck and the Quagga. And I have been amazed by the gigantic thigh bones of the Moa, the massive rib cage of the 7-ton Steller’s Sea Cow, and the phenomenal two-gallon Elephant Bird egg.

  These are now as much mythical animals as the dragon and the unicorn, but here I have attempted to give them a form of life in the only place they may now exist – the human imagination.

  History is not the past. It is the consciousness

  of the past used for present purposes.

  – E. H. Carr

  THE DODO AND THE PHOENIX

  FIRST WATCH 6 A. M. PRIME

  DODO – 1680 – Raphus cucullatus

  Sir Thomas Herbert – 1629

  Some Yeares Travaile, Mauritius

  First, here and here only is generated the Dodo, which for shape and rareness may antagonize the Phoenix of Arabia: her body is round and fat, few weigh less than fifty pound, are reputed of more for wonder then for food. Her visage darts forth melancholy, as sensible
of Nature’s injurie in framing so great a body to be guided with complementall wings, so small and impotent, that they serve only to prove her a bird. The halfe of her head is naked seeming couered with a fine vaile, her bill is crooked downwards, in midst is the thrill, from which part to the end tis of a light greene, mixt with pale yellow tincture; her eyes are small and like to Diamonds, round and rowling; her clothing downy feathers, her traine three small plumes, short and inproportionable, her legs suting to her body, her punces sharpe, her appetite strong and greedy.

  Sir Thomas Herbert was appointed by King Charles I to the first English ambassadorial mission to the court of the Shah of the Persian Empire. This mission (1627-29) was an attempt to negotiate a silk trade route (bypassing the Ottoman Turkish Empire) through lands and waters controlled by the Persians. It was on his return journey – via India and Africa – that Herbert’s ship The Hart stopped in Mauritius and he wrote this first account of the Dodo in English.

  The Dodo was the world’s largest member of the pigeon family: a giant flightless dove the weight of two large domestic turkeys. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to briefly encounter the Dodo in 1507, but the Dutch were the first to record its existence in 1581, and name it Dodoor because it resembled a gigantic version of the Dutch Little Grebe or Dodaers, meaning “plump-arse.” Sometimes called the “Devil’s Chicken,” the Dodo’s desirability as food for sailors varied with the seasons. When fruit was abundant, it was succulent, but during the lean season, the flesh was very tough and ill-tasting.

  The claim that “dodo” is derived from the Old Portuguese duodo meaning “fool” appears to be without foundation. A more recent theory suggests the name was simply imitative of its 2-note pigeon-like call: “doo-doo.” The Dodo’s reputation as a creature “unfit” for survival seems odd considering its evolution and survival over five million years; or twice as long as humans have existed.

  WHITE DODO – 1770 – Victorianis imperialis

  James Tatton – 1631

  Voyage of Captain Carleton, Reunion

  There is a store of Land-fowl, both small and great, plenty of Doves, great Parrots and such like; and a great fowl of the bigness of a Turkey, very fat, and so short-winged that they cannot fly, being white, and in a manner tame; and so are all other fowles, as having not been troubled or feared with shot.

  Dodos were originally believed to have inhabited all three of the Mascarenes: those remote Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius, Rodriguez and Reunion. Fought over by the Portuguese, Dutch, French and British, Rodriguez was eventually successfully colonized by the French East Indian Company. An island with an area of just 110 sq. km., it was inhabited by 60,000 plantation slaves. Like all the Mascarenes, Reunion originally had no land mammals and virtually no predators, but was rapidly invaded by feral cats, dogs, rats, monkeys, pigs and goats, all of whom fed on the indigenous species. The result has been that virtually all of the Mascarenes’ endemic animal species and nearly half of its endemic plant species are either endangered or extinct.

  Just as the Dodo is on the Mauritius coat of arms, the White Dodo has become the emblematic bird of Reunion. Indeed, in the 1990’s the national television network adopted it as the hero of a major animated television series. However, recent archaeological excavations have proved that the legendary White Dodo of Reunion was not a Dodo at all.

  It was, in fact, a White Flightless Ibis – Threskiornis solitarius – which became extinct in 1770. This large white flightless bird of Reunion was related to the Sacred Ibis of Egypt. A remarkable and unique species, but it was not a member of the Rhaphidae family of the Mauritius Dodo and the Rodriguez Solitaire.

  DODO – 1680 – Raphus cucullatus

  Sir Hamon L’Estrange – 1638

  L’Estrange Diaries, London, England

  Upon a street there was a house near Lincoln Fields where I discovered the picture of a strange fowle hung out upon a clothe. Upon paying for entry, there I saw on display a great fowl, bigger than the largest Turkey Cock, but stouter and thicker and of a more erect state. The keeper called it a Dodo, and in the end of a chimney in the chambers there lay a heape of large pebble stones, whereof hee gave it many in our sight, some as big as nutmegs and the keeper told us she eats them conducing to digestion.

  Sir Hamon L’Estrange was an English theologian who while walking in central urban London stopped at a house to examine a live captive Dodo. L’Estrange’s interest in the Dodo may also have been provoked by Herbert’s account. His Some Yeares Travaile was a popular book of the day.

  Curiously, upon its demise, this Dodo was acquired as a stuffed exhibit by John Tradescant (creator of Charles II’s “physics garden”) for his “cabinet of curiosities.” This was eventually integrated with the collection of the antiquarian Jacob Ashmole to form the basis of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Here, the world’s only intact Dodo was kept, until the deteriorating specimen was accidentally incinerated, although fortunately the head and one foot were rescued. The excavations of the dry swamp bed of the Mare Aux Songes in Mauritius resulted in the discovery of numerous new skeletal remains of Dodos in 1865; and in 2005.

  Still one might argue that there is a phoenix-like aspect to this story, as this famous specimen in Oxford was the inspiration for the creation of Lewis Carroll’s fictional Dodo in his Alice in Wonderland (1865). The Dodo was a private joke the author shared with Alice about himself. Carroll (a.k.a. Charles Dodgson) suffered from stuttering, and often introduced himself as Mr. Do-Do-Dodgson.

  The Dodo was the subject of a number of paintings by European artists: most notably Roeland Savery’s iconic bird of 1626. However, the Mughul artist, Mansur of Naggash – in the court of the Emperor Jehangir in Goa – created the most well-observed painting of a Dodo drawn from life, sometime between 1610 to 1624.

  SOLITAIRE DODO – 1780 – Pezohaps solitarius

  Francois Leguat of Bresse – 1708

  A New Voyage to the East Indies, Rodriguez

  The Females are wonderfully beautiful, some fair, some brown; I call them fair, because they are the colour of fair Hair. They have a sort of Peak, like a Widow’s upon their Beak, which is of a dun colour. No one feather is straggling from the other. The Feathers on their Thighs are round like shells at one end, and being there very thick, have an agreeable effect. They have two Risings on the Craws, and Feathers are whiter there than the rest, which lively represents the fine bosom of a Beautiful Woman. They walk with so much stateliness and good Grace, that one cannot help admiring and loving them.

  During the reign of Louis XIV, Francois Leguat was forced to flee to Holland; where in 1691, along with other prominent Huguenots, he was persuaded to attempt to establish a new French Protestant Refuge Colony in the “New Eden” of Reunion. They were promised two ships to service the colony of L’ile Eden, but instead they found themselves on a single small frigate that deserted them on Rodriguez Island.

  After two years in the failed Rodriguez colony, Leguat and the others escaped on a small boat to Mauritius, and were imprisoned by the Dutch both in Mauritius and Batavia for several years. At the age of 70 the wandering Leguat found sanctuary in London, and published his Voyages – 1689-98 in French, English and Dutch editions. Leguat’s account of his harrowing desert island adventures included descriptions of the Dodo that were entirely at odds with any previous tales; however, they have proved to be extremely accurate. Leguat recorded their mating rituals. Noting that these birds mated for life, he also remarked how they were far from passive when it came to protecting their young.

  The Solitaire was the intelligent, beautiful Cinderella of the Dodo (Raphidae) family. Nonetheless, these characteristics did not save it from sharing the fate of its less charming cousin. Nor did it save at least two dozen other indigenous Mascarene species (pigeons, parrots, rails, tortoises, snakes, and skinks) from extinction.

  LA MARE AUX SONGES

  Dodo – 1680

  The first ships appear off these shores

  Just as Galil
eo’s telescope reveals

  The dry seas of the moon

  Now, we dig and search for relics: a beak or a bone

  Of a creature that will be nevermore forever

  Something in the Dodo’s foolish Mona Lisa smile

  Provoked Mogul artists and Dutch masters

  And provokes us still, as we discover

  A human skull with an equally enigmatic grin

  Next to the bones of this flightless giant dove

  It is impossible to stave off thoughts

  Of our own eventual eclipse

  How will we be seen: tragic or comic?

  Hubristic, or an evolutionary mistake?

  In what arid sea and by whom will our relics be found

  When our monuments crumble away?

  I try to imagine Alexander or Ozymandias

  But instead, as darkness falls

  On the edge of this dry “Sea of Dreams”

  The moon with the bone-white face of Pagliacci

  Looms up before me

  Only then do I recall his murdered wife

  Columbina, meaning “Dove”

  And hear: “Le commedia e finita!”

  God’s judgement, delivered in Caruso’s terrible

  Perfect voice

  SINBAD AND THE RUKH

  SECOND WATCH 7 A. M. PRIME

  ELEPHANT BIRD or RUKH – 1700

  Aepyornis maximus

  Marco Polo – 1298

  Travels: Concerning the Isle of Madastar, Madagascar