 Mauritius had previously been visited by Arab vessels in the Middle Ages and Portuguese ships between 1507 and 1513 , but was settled by neither . No records of dodos by these are known , although the Portuguese name for Mauritius , " Cerne ( swan ) Island " , may have been a reference to dodos . The Dutch Empire acquired Mauritius in 1598 , renaming it after Maurice of Nassau , and it was used for the provisioning of trade vessels of the Dutch East India Company henceforward . The earliest known accounts of the dodo were provided by Dutch travelers during the Second Dutch Expedition to Indonesia , led by admiral Jacob van Neck in 1598 . They appear in reports published in 1601 , which also contain the first published illustration of the bird . Since the first sailors to visit Mauritius had been at sea for a long time , their interest in these large birds was mainly culinary . The 1602 journal by Willem Van West @-@ Zanen of the ship Bruin @-@ Vis mentions that 24 – 25 dodos were hunted for food , which were so large that two could scarcely be consumed at mealtime , their remains being preserved by salting . An illustration made for the 1648 published version of this journal , showing the killing of dodos , a dugong , and possibly Mascarene grey parakeets , was captioned with a Dutch poem , here in Hugh Strickland 's 1848 translation : 
