I beg to thank Mr. S.W. Singer for the further notices he has given
(Vol. i., p. 485.) in connection with this subject. I was well
acquainted with the passage which he quotes from Osorio, a passage
which some writers have very inconsiderately connected with the
Dodo history. In reply to Mr. Singer's Queries, I need only make the
following extract from the _Dodo and its Kindred_, p. 8.:--
"The statement that Vasco de Gama, in 1497, discovered, sixty
leagues beyond the Cape of Good Hope, a bay called after San
Blaz, near an island full of birds with wings like bats, which
the sailors called _solitaries_ (De Blainville, _Nouv. Ann.
Mus. Hist. Nat._, and _Penny Cyclopædia_, DODO, p. 47.), is
wholly irrelevant. The birds are evidently penguins, and
their wings were compared to those of bats, from being without
developed feathers. De Gama never went near Mauritius, but
hugged the African coast as far as Melinda, and then crossed
to India, returning by the same route. This small island
inhabited by penguins, near the Cape of Good Hope, has been
gratuitously confounded with Mauritius. Dr. Hamel, in a
memoir in the _Bulletin de la Classe Physico-Mathématique de
l'Académie de St. Petersbourg_, vol. iv. p. 53., has devoted
an unnecessary amount of erudition to the refutation of this
obvious mistake. He shows that the name _solitaires_, as
applied to penguins by De Gama's companions, [I should have
said, 'by later compilers,'] is corrupted from _sotilicairos_,
which appears to be a Hottentot word."
I may add, that Dr. Hamel shows Osorio's statement to be taken from
Castanheda, who is the earliest authority for the account of De Gama's
voyage.