by Sam Kean
Given two things—his poverty and his obsession with biology—Dampier’s descent into piracy was probably inevitable. He took to sea after being orphaned at age fourteen, visiting Java and Newfoundland before an unhappy stint in the navy. He eventually sailed to the Caribbean in April 1674 at age twenty-two. After some bouncing around, he settled in the Bay of Campeche in eastern Mexico and made his living cutting logwood, a thick tree whose inner pulp made a brilliant scarlet dye. Dampier later described his fellow loggers as a motley bunch, disposed to “carousing and firing off Guns 3 or 4 days together… [T]hey could never settle themselves under any Civil Government, but continued in their Wickedness.” Though he probably caroused himself, Dampier also took long nature hikes in Campeche and was thrilled to see creatures he’d heard about before only in tall tales—porcupines and sloths, hummingbirds and armadillos. For someone who loved natural history, it was paradise.
His troubles started in June 1676, on one of those gorgeous early-summer days when it’s almost a privilege to work outdoors. But while the other loggers basked in the sunshine, Dampier noticed that the wind was shifting directions oddly: it “whiffled about to the south, and back again to the east.” Then the loggers noticed a mass of frigate birds overhead. These birds often accompanied ships from sea to shore, so most of the crew took this as a good omen; maybe supplies were coming. Dampier, however, frowned. The flock was Hitchcockian in its size and intensity, as if the birds were fleeing something. Most eerie of all was the local creek. Floods were a fact of life in Campeche; men often stepped directly from their beds into a pool of swamp water in the mornings. But that day the main creek started withdrawing mysteriously, as if sucked by a giant straw, until it was nearly dry in the middle.
The pirate-biologist William Dampier was a big influence on Charles Darwin, as well as a rogue and a scallywag. Painting by Thomas Murray. (More pictures are available, for all chapters, at samkean .com/books/the-icepick-surgeon/extras/photos.)
Two days after these auguries, a bank of demon-black clouds rolled in and unleashed hell. None of the loggers had ever imagined a storm of such intensity. The rain stung them like hornets, blinding them, and the wind slapped down their huts one by one, until a single shelter remained. The men staggered through the mud toward it, shouting to be heard, and scrambled to shore up this last refuge with wooden posts and ropes lashed to tree stumps. It barely survived. Soaking and shivering, they then huddled inside for hours—and emerged into an alien world. The empty creek had more than filled back up, flooding the land around them. Trees were strewn everywhere, their roots forming impenetrable thickets. Dampier and a few other loggers managed to row their last surviving canoe over to the bay and found a shoal of dead fish floating upside down. Of the eight ships anchored in the bay hours earlier, all but one had been swept to sea. The loggers begged food from the crew of the surviving ship, “but found very cold entertainment,” Dampier remembered. “For we could neither get Bread nor Punch, nor so much as a Dram of Rum.”
Dampier’s cinematic description of this storm was the first meteorologically detailed account of a hurricane, and it kicked off a lifelong preoccupation with wind and weather. More immediately, the storm rerouted the entire course of his life. All his logging equipment—axes, saws, machetes—had been washed away. He had no money and, without tools, no prospect of making any. As a result, he later wrote, “I was forced to range about to seek a subsistence.” This was a euphemism. “Ranging about” meant becoming a buccaneer.
Buccaneers were a distinct class of pirates1 then. Some pirates were so-called privateers, who had tacit permission from their home governments to harass enemy ships. English privateers usually focused on Spanish ships, and many an English home in the Caribbean was furnished with silks, pewters, and sleek carved chairs originally bound for Barcelona or Madrid. Privateering, then, was tolerated if not respectable. Buccaneers had no permission to raid anyone. They were simple criminals, and their home governments scorned them as much as their enemies did. The buccaneering crew Dampier joined stood even lower than most, because instead of raiding ships full of luxuries, they stormed pathetic little coastal camps, stealing from folks no better off than themselves.
We don’t know what exactly Dampier did on these raids because he skimmed over most of the details in his journals, perhaps out of embarrassment. He also had a habit of getting distracted by natural history. Describing an assault on Vera Cruz, for instance, he dispatches with the death of a dozen companions in a few words, and skates right past the fact that the raid was a bust: the townsfolk had fled with their valuables at the first sign of pirates, leaving the town devoid of loot. Instead, Dampier highlights the dozens of caged parrots left behind, which he and others packed onboard his ship like legitimate treasure. They “were yellow and red,” he gushed, “very coarsely mixed, and they would prate very prettily.” No plunder, no matter—parrots were prize enough for him.
Dampier eventually returned to England in August 1678 and entered into a mysterious marriage with a woman named Judith, a lady-in-waiting to a duchess. Trying to go straight, he used her dowry to purchase some goods and sailed to the Caribbean again in January 1679 to trade them, promising his bride he’d return within a year. He broke that vow. A few months after arriving, he accompanied some sailors to Nicaragua on a trading trip, and the crew made a pit stop at a city in Jamaica that was a favorite haunt of lowlifes. Dampier later claimed to be shocked—shocked!—when the crew decided to throw their lot in with some pirates there and go buccaneering instead. In truth, some historians believe that Dampier knew full well that he’d meet pirates in Jamaica, and went there for the explicit purpose of returning to the high seas.
He did so for a few reasons. One, like every other person in history, Dampier longed to be rich, and there was always the chance that his band of buccaneers would stumble across a Spanish galleon groaning with doubloons and make their fortunes. But even deeper than that, Dampier couldn’t shake his memories of Campeche—the rambles through the woods, the exotic flora and fauna, the whole days lost to nature. Pirating was the only means he had to recapture that feeling. To be sure, pirating was also a dirty business, rife with assaults and murders. Over the years Dampier saw priests being stabbed, prisoners tossed overboard, and native Indians picked off with rifles and tortured for intelligence. There’s no reason to think Dampier stood aloof or was squeamish about his involvement. But Campeche had awakened a passion for natural history that was almost erotic in its intensity, and no matter how much he regretted buccaneering sometimes, his lust for new shores, new skies, new plants and animals, proved too strong. As he recalled, he was “well enough satisfied” wherever he ended up, “knowing that the farther we went, the more Knowledge and Experience I should get, which was the main Thing that I regarded.”
Dampier joined the Jamaica pirates as a navigator, and the subsequent voyage was a rambling adventure, involving several different crews and ships; it’s impossible to summarize neatly. They started off raiding cities in Panama, then sailed up to Virginia, where Dampier was arrested for unknown reasons; he refers to the incident only as some “troubles.” Then it was over to the Pacific coast of South America, including the Galápagos.
Every so often the crew made a decent score: gems, bolts of silk, a stock of cinnamon or musk. Once they seized eight tons of marmalade. Much more commonly a galleon would give them the slip on the open seas and they’d slink off to try another port. Or they’d endure a long and futile siege of a coastal town, only to learn that the citizens had snuck out their treasures under the pirates’ noses, leaving the buccaneers empty-handed.
Dampier and his crew nearly drowned during a fierce storm on their way to Indonesia. (Engraving by Caspar Luiken.)
Instead of making a fortune in South America, “we met with little… besides fatigues, hardships and loss,” Dampier recalled. They sometimes had to drink “copperish or aluminous” water from “stinking holes of rocks,” and they spent many a night outdoors with not
hing but “the cold ground for our bedding and the spangled firmament for our covering.” On one occasion, during a storm so violent that the men didn’t want to risk raising the sails, Dampier and another comrade had to scramble up the rigging and hold their overcoats open to steer the ship bodily.
Hoping for better luck, the crew eventually struck out for Guam, a daunting trip of more than seven thousand blank miles. They staggered ashore fifty-one days later, nearly starved. Had things gone on much longer, Dampier later learned, the crew was plotting to murder and eat the captain and the officers, including him. (The captain took this news in remarkably good humor. He turned to his navigator and laughed, “Ah, Dampier, you would have but made them a poor meal!” “For I,” Dampier explained, “was as lean as the captain was lusty and fleshy.”) From Guam, the crew made excursions to China and Vietnam, and Dampier later became the first Englishman to set foot on Australia. In addition to studying flora and fauna in each spot, Dampier took advantage of his time on the open sea to study winds and currents, developing into a first-class navigator. Even those who despised Dampier had to admit that he had a near supernatural ability to judge where land lay beyond the horizon by reading the winds and currents.
Throughout these trips, Dampier changed ships several times, joining different crews. Sometimes the changes happened amicably, with no hard feelings; Dampier simply wanted to go somewhere new, and “No proposal for seeing any part of the world which I Had never seen before could possibly come amiss,” he decided. In other cases, Dampier had to flee a despotic captain under harrowing circumstances, once by squeezing through a porthole in the dead of night. During such escapes, he typically took just one possession, the most valuable thing in the world to him—his field notes on natural history.
His final escape, in the South Pacific, proved particularly daunting. Longing to return home, he and a few comrades, including four Indonesian prisoners, slipped off to an island and secured a canoe there. On their first sally for freedom, they capsized, and Dampier spent three days drying his notes over a fire page by page. Their second attempt plunged them into a storm, and they spent the next six days on the open ocean thrashing their oars about and praying. “The Sea was already Roaring in a white Foam about us… and our little Ark in danger to be swallowed by every Wave,” Dampier recalled. Worst of all, he hadn’t been to confession in years, and scores of unnamed sins were weighing on his soul: “I made very sad Reflections… and lookt back with Horrour and Detestation, on Actions which before I disliked, but now I trembled at the remembrance of.” Miraculously, they finally reached land at Sumatra, where Dampier collapsed onshore and spent six weeks recovering his strength. He eventually wound his way home on various ships and pulled into London in September 1691, a dozen years after he’d promised his new wife he’d be back in twelve months.
As a lady-in-waiting, Judith had her own life and had managed just fine without her rascally husband. But the pirate now had to support himself and make a living. And with few other options—you can’t exactly put “buccaneer” on your resume—Dampier began organizing his field notes into a travelogue. That his journals had even survived the voyage was a miracle. They’d suffered water damage on several occasions, and he once had to stuff them into bamboo tubes for safekeeping. But the effort paid off.2 A New Voyage Round the World finally appeared in 1697 and was a smash hit, with some of the liveliest passages on natural history and anthropology ever written.
After his stint in Sumatra, Dampier gave the first account in English of “ganga,” or marijuana: “Some it keeps sleepy, some merry, some putting them into a laughing fit, and others it makes mad.” He described a mass circumcision of twelve-year-olds in the Philippines, and how “they went straddling for a fortnight after.” He also covered tattooing in Polynesia and foot-binding in China (which he denounced as a mere “stratagem” of the men to hobble women and keep them indoors). Upon hearing a local legend in the West Indies, he ate a dozen pickle pears at once and delighted to see that they really did turn his urine red. Nearly a thousand citations in the Oxford English Dictionary trace back to his writings, and he introduced dozens of words into English, including banana, posse, smugglers, tortilla, avocado, cashews, and chopsticks.
There was plenty of science, too. Even today Dampier remains unsurpassed as a pure observer of nature. Compared to his, other accounts of flora and fauna seem lifeless—like a glass-eyed taxidermy lion compared to the real, leaping, roaring beast. Part of the vividness sprang from Dampier’s use of all five senses, including taste. The man never met an animal he didn’t eat. Flamingo tongues, he reported, have “a large knob of fat at the root, which is an excellent bit; a Dish of Flamingos Tongues being fit for a Prince’s Table.” He cooked up manatee veal and iguana soup and turtle-oil dumplings, along with dozens of other outré recipes. And if all that got your mouth watering, well, Dampier could snatch your appetite away just as quickly. In one revolting section he popped a worm cyst on his leg and drew out the slimy sucker inch by agonizing inch. He also detailed—my apologies in advance—one of the most epic bouts of diarrhea ever recorded in the annals of English literature. His attack started after seeking treatment for a fever, when he was persuaded to take a local “physic” to purge his bowels. Bad idea. He had the trots off and on for a year, and sometimes endured thirty bowel movements in a single sitting, till he was more or less dry-heaving out his arse. No one ever said field work was glamorous.
The quintessential Dampier tale involved an alligator attack. He opened the story with a passage noting the differences between alligators and crocodiles. In an era when most scholars still lumped whales with fishes, the ability to make such fine distinctions was impressive, and wouldn’t look out of place in a herpetology text today. Then things swerved. Without any transition, Dampier launched into the tale of a nighttime hunting expedition back in Campeche. On it, an Irishman named Daniel tripped over an alligator, which whipped around and clamped down on his leg. He screamed for help. But his companions, Dampier noted, “supposing that he was fallen into the clutches of some Spaniards,” abandoned him, leaving him alone in the dark with a gator gnawing on him.
Amazingly, Daniel kept his cool and came up with a plan. Unlike mammals, reptiles lack lips and can’t chew. They gulp food down in big bites instead and have to open their mouths to pull prey farther inside. So when his tormentor opened its jaw again, Daniel shot forward and jammed his rifle inside in place of his leg. Fooled, the gator pulled the gun away to devour it, and while he did so, Daniel scrambled back.
Surging on adrenaline, he dragged himself up a tree and renewed his cries for help. His comrades, realizing there were no Spaniards afoot, returned with firebrands to drive the gator off. Afterward, Dampier reported, Daniel “was in a deplorable condition, and not able to stand on his Feet, his Knee was so torn with the Alligator[’]s Teeth. His Gun was found the next day… with two large Holes made in the But[t]-end of it, one on each side, near an Inch deep.” All in all, the tale was classic Dampier—learned, meticulous, and hair-raising all at once.
Some historians credit A New Voyage with launching the entire genre of travel writing, and after its publication, Dampier received an invitation to lecture at the prestigious Royal Society in London, the world’s premier scientific club. Not bad for a buccaneer. He also dined with several eminent statesmen, including the diarist Samuel Pepys. The bigwigs wanted to talk natural history, of course, but some of them no doubt felt a frisson of pleasure in knowing they had a real-life pirate at their table.
With the public clamoring for more, Dampier published a sequel to A New Voyage in 1699. It included his famous essay “Discourse on Winds,” which later captains like James Cook and Horatio Nelson considered the best practical guide to sailing they’d ever read. The essay also greatly advanced the scientific study of winds and currents. Two of Dampier’s contemporaries, Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley (of comet fame), had recently published treatises on the origins of tides and rainstorms, respectively. Dampier�
��s essay then nailed down where winds and currents come from. In one sweep, then, these three scientists solved several age-old mysteries about the sea and the cyclical movement of water around the globe. We normally wouldn’t include a pirate in the same company as Halley or Sir Isaac, but Dampier was every bit their equal in this field.
Oddly, though, Dampier wasn’t in England to see his second book published. He’d actually made very little money from the first one, in part because copyright laws didn’t exist then and most of the book’s profits had been scooped up, ironically enough, by literary pirates. Dampier still needed to earn a living somehow. Moreover, he desperately wanted to leave piracy behind and reinvent himself as a respectable scientist. So the president of the Royal Society introduced Dampier to the First Lord of the Admiralty, who offered him the chance to captain his own ship, the Roebuck, and lead an expedition to New Holland (modern Australia). Despite any reservations he might have had about rejoining the navy, Dampier accepted. Part of his mission was to scout out commercial opportunities down under. But the main goal was scientific; this was the first explicitly scientific voyage in history. It was the most noble idea anyone had ever heard of. And with Dampier in charge, it was a disaster from the get-go.
Dampier had an air of Thoreau about him: a curmudgeon who delighted in nature but grumbled about his fellow human beings. He also had an arrogant streak. The pirate ships Dampier cut his teeth on often had a surprisingly democratic ethos. Some even had rudimentary health insurance, with a sliding compensation scale for lost eyes and limbs.3 Dampier, though, was eager to distance himself from his past, and abandoned all such camaraderie aboard the Roebuck. He decided that he was smarter than everyone else in all matters, scientific and otherwise, and he lacked the charm and political skills to quell the unrest that resulted.