The History of the 'Gluttonous' Dodo

This is the story of how an unassuming bird on a small island off the coast of Africa became entangled with the first truly global corporation and came to symbolise capitalist greed.

In the halls of London’s Natural History Museum hangs a familiar image: a bulbous, ungainly dodo, surrounded by parrots, ducks and a lizard. Painted by Roelandt Savery in the 1620s, when dodos probably still existed, it has been endlessly reproduced. Along with later depictions - from Alice in Wonderland to Disney - it fed into the longstanding image of the dodo as a portly, greedy creature.

Roelandt Savery, The Dodo, 1620's

But the dodo was not always fat. It became so in our imaginations.

We can't know exactly what a living dodo was like: the last one died by the end of the seventeenth century. Most images that were made while they still existed were produced by people who had never even seen them. Palaeontological evidence suggests a relatively agile bird, and new insights keep arising. Yet late seventeenth-century accounts described an overfed, sluggish animal.

Why is this?

In 1598, Dutch sailors blown off course on their way to the East Indies landed on Mauritius. They found what seemed a paradise: fresh water, abundant wildlife, and birds so unafraid that they could be taken “plentifully with their hands”. Among them were large, unfamiliar birds, thought to be the “swans” for which the island had been named.

After weeks at sea, the sailors were hungry. The parrots were most tender, but the “swans” were also eaten. The birds were described as “reasonable of taste yet tough”, with a “stomach large enough to provide two men with a meal”.

In the decades that followed, Mauritius became a regular pit stop for Dutch ships going to and from the East Indies. Scholars in Europe began to construct their own versions of the dodo. Most accounts were based on sailors’ reports and a handful of sketches or preserved parts. Such fragmentary evidence was open to interpretation. While the dodo was a Dutch bird, it was rarely, if ever, seen alive in Europe.

Het Tweede Boeck, 1601, Johann Theodor & John Israel de Bry

Carolus Clusius published the first scientific description in 1601, based on little more than a foot, a gizzard stone and travellers’ accounts. Later writers elaborated. The bird's form became increasingly exaggerated: “rotund”, “extream fat”, barely able to walk. Its beak was “hideous” and “greatly broad, as if formed for gluttony”. It could devour anything, even iron.

These images were partly linguistic artefacts . Early descriptions had called the birds “Wallowbirds” or Walgh-vogel - terms suggesting nausea or excess. Their meat was described as tough, greasy, and unpleasant to “delicate” palates. The bird that had been a useful food source for hungry sailors became something excessive and faintly repulsive.

The broader context of the dodo's identity also shaped its image. The dodo’s story unfolded alongside the rise of the Dutch East India Company, which was the first global trading corporation. Through the seventeenth century, vast quantities of goods flowed into Europe from across the world. This wealth came at a cost: violence, exploitation, and high mortality among sailors and colonised peoples.

At the same time, in Protestant Europe, overt displays of excess were morally suspect. Images of gluttony circulated as warnings against greed. Within this framework, the increasingly corpulent dodo became a fitting symbol: a creature whose very body seemed to embody overconsumption. And, as this symbolic weight grew, so did the dodo's corpulent figure in images: an animal bloated and weighed down by all the resources it helped the Dutch East India Company to gather around the world.

Like many island species, the dodo did not survive European arrival. Introduced animals and human activity drove it to extinction by the late seventeenth century. Yet its image endured. In Europe, where it had never truly existed, the inflated, ungainly dodo persisted as if nothing had changed.

The dodo has since become an emblem of extinction, a shorthand for irreversible loss. But its earlier iteration as a grotesque, gluttonous creature reveals how animals can become emblems of human cultural phenomena. The entire dodo population succumbed to the human greed that it represented. The dodo is not only an extinct species, but a constructed one: an animal shaped by trade, language, moral anxiety and imagination. Its body became a canvas onto which fears of excess were projected.

You can read my full 2015 academic paper on the Dodo from Archives of Natural History.

Adriaen van de Venne's 1626 depiction of a dodo

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If you enjoyed this, do check out my latest book, Enchanted Creatures: Our Monsters and their Meanings as well as my other writing.

Dodo history -- Copyright Natalie Lawrence 2026