22 Scott, Forgotten Feathers. [znd'Tuiy 



about nomenclature. His mind was much occupied with 

 schemes of exploration and travel, and to such a voyager, who 

 was pushing his path through uncharted oceans and stumbling 

 upon continents by the way, birds could hardly be of more than 

 subsidiary interest. 



Nearly 220 annual migrations of feathered folk have happened 

 since William Dampier first recorded birds on our shores. In 

 1686, a common sailor, he first saw Australia. His ship touched 

 our coast at a point that has been conjectured to be either 

 Bathurst or Melville Island, in the North. On this visit he seems to 

 have seen very little bird-life. " We saw no sort of animal, nor any 

 track of beast but once," he says, " and that seemed to be the 

 tread of a beast as big as a great mastiff dog. There are a few 

 land-birds, but none bigger than a Blackbird, and but few sea- 

 fowls." 



But on his next voyage to Terra Australis, in 1689, Dampier 

 saw more birds, and has more to say about them. In August 

 of that year, sailing in the Roebuck, he sighted Australia, cruised 

 along the west coast for a io^w days to find an anchorage, and 

 rested in Sharks' Bay. 



On the voyage across from South Africa he observes that his 

 vessel was " accompanied with fowls all the way." Several were 

 Pintado-Birds, which were met with " for 200 leagues from the 

 coast of Brazil to within much the same distance of New 

 Holland." The Pintado-Bird he says is " a southern bird and 

 of the temperate zone, for I never saw of them much to the 

 northward of 30 degrees south." His description of the bird is 

 that it is " as big as a Duck, but appears, as it flies, about the 

 bigness of a tame Pigeon, having a short tail, but the wings very 

 long, as most sea-fowls have, especially such as these that fly far 

 from shore and seldom come asight it ; but they lay, I suppose, 

 ashore. There are three sorts of these birds, all of the same 

 make or bigness, and are only different in colour. The first is 

 black all over ; the second sort grey, with white bellies and 

 breasts ; the third sort, which is the true Pintado, or Painted- 

 Bird, is curiously spotted white and black." 



Pintado is a Portuguese word, meaning painted. Friar Marco 

 de Nica, a Spanish writer about Central America, named the 

 Indians whom he met there Pintados, because " I saw 

 their faces, breasts, and arms painted " (Hakluyt's " Voyages," 

 iii., 368). The word was applied to the Petrels by the Portuguese 

 sailors who travelled round the Cape to the East Indies. 

 English sailors got the word from these, and it is not infre- 

 quently met with in accounts of early English voyages. The 

 true Pintado-Bird is, I understand, the Cape Petrel. 



The only birds that Dampier mentions that he saw while at 

 Sharks' Bay were "Eagles of the larger sorts of birds, but five 

 or six sorts of small birds. The biggest sort of these were not 



