Note 54 — THE THIRD VOYAGE NORTH-WARD TO THE KINGDOMES OF CATHAIA and China, in Anno 1596.

Dit waren oprechte rotgansen—these were true brent geese. Apart from Phillip’s very curious “translation”, it is difficult to imagine how he could have supposed these geese to be of “a perfit red coulor”. And it is scarcely less incomprehensible how Barrow, in his Chronological History, etc., p. 147, should have reproduced this and other errors of Phillip without the slightest comment. By a contemporary writer, in the passage cited in the next page, the brent goose is well described as “a fowle bigger than a mallard, and lesser than a goose, having blacke legs and bill or beake, and feathers blacke and white, spotted in such manner as is our mag-pie”. It is figured and also described in the fifth volume of Gould’s Birds of Europe. ↑