288 The Animal-Lore of SJiakspeare’s Time. 
I have seene a whole coate of a man put into the tliroate of one of them 
in Panama, in the yeere 1521. (. Purchas , vol. iii. p. 979.) 
The court favourite referred to by Gonzalo was pro¬ 
bably identical with the bird noticed thirty years later by 
Roger Ascham, in a letter to Mr. Edward Raven, Fellow 
of St. John’s College, Cambridge, 1551. He writes:— 
“ At Mechlin we saw a strange bird. The emperor doth allow it 8d„ 
a day. It is milk-white, greater than a swan, with a bill some¬ 
what like a shovel, and having a throat well able to swallow, without 
touch of crest, a white penny loaf of England, except your bread he 
bigger than your bread-master of St. Johns is wont willingly to make 
it. The eyes are as red as fire, and as they say, it is an hundred years 
old. It was wont in Maximilian’s days to fly with him whithersoever 
he went.” ( Ascham’s Works , p. 854, ed. 1815.) 
Mr. Harting tells us ( Ornithology , p. 288) that Mr. 
Bartlett, the superintendent of the Zoological Gardens, 
whose practical knowledge of animals is almost unrivalled, 
is of opinion that the word pelican in the English transla¬ 
tion of the Bible should be flamingo, as this latter bird 
could exist in desert places, where the pelican, a lover of 
fish, would starve. Mr. Bartlett also asserts, from per¬ 
sonal observation, that the flamingo has the power of 
secreting a red fluid, which it mixes with the food for its- 
young, in the same way that the pigeon does, and that 
this may have given rise to the idea of the bird feeding 
her young with her own Blood. That some confusion 
existed as to the name of this bird is evident from a 
passage in a narrative included in Purchas’s collection of 
Travels. An Englishman was taken prisoner by the 
Portuguese and sent to Angola, in Africa, where he lived 
for nearly eighteen years. Describing that part of the 
country, he writes:— 
** Here is a kind of fowle that lives in the land bigger then a swan, 
and they are like a heron, with long legges, and long neckes, and it is. 
white and blacke, and hath in her breast a bare place without feathers, 
where she striketh with her bill. This is the right pelican, and not 
