Zone of the Marvellous

by Martin Edmond

  In the interval between these two expeditions Dampier spent a year at Jamestown in Virginia, North America, where the fledgling colony had grown wings upon the cultivation and sale of tobacco. The first slaves were being imported there, as they were to the sugar plantations further south; but since Dampier chose not to write about his time at Jamestown, and there is scant other evidence of his activities (apart from a record that he boarded with a lady), nothing more can be said about it. He left there on a ship called the Revenge, captain John Cook, which was blown in a fearful storm across the Atlantic. On the Cape Verde Islands he remarked upon the delicious taste of flamingo tongues, which have a small bulb of fat at the root.

  Off the West African coast they took a Danish slave ship, renamed it the Bachelor’s Delight (Bachelor was a Bristol merchant) sailed round Cape Horn and resumed a life of pillaging ships and sacking towns along the Pacific coast of South and Central America. It was during these voyages that Dampier first visited the Galápagos Islands, known to the Spanish as Las Islas Encantadas or the Enchanted Isles – not because they were magical but for their delusive mists and shifting islands that beguiled sailors. He was fascinated by the wildlife there and took copious notes of his observations; these would, in turn, be closely studied by Charles Darwin slightly less than two centuries later.

  In 1685 Dampier transferred from the Bachelor’s Delight to the Cygnet, skippered by one Charles Swan, and when Swan decided to sail west across the Pacific to Guam, Dampier went too. He was addicted to rambling and, in his own words, believed no proposal for seeing any part of the world which I had never seen before could possibly come amiss. It was, he said in another place, more to indulge my curiosity than to get wealth that he had returned to the South Seas; although the sacred hunger for gold (the phrase is from Virgil, via Dante) must also have formed a part of his motivation. Swan was ostensibly going raiding in the East Indies but, after they had crossed successfully to Guam and were making their way south into the great archipelago of the Philippines, confessed to Dampier he was only looking for a way to get back home to England without arousing too much suspicion about his activities in the eastern Pacific. It was on Guam that Dampier described the breadfruit tree and sampled its fruit, thereby initiating, via James Cook, William Bligh’s doomed first voyage to take the tree from the Pacific to the West Indies.

  On Mindanao, as he had at Santa María in Panama, Dampier considered the possibility of abandoning the loose roving way of life and founding a colony. Instead he and others seem to have colluded in the sacking of their captain, Swan, who had become autocratic and addicted to the pleasures of power and indulgence, and sailed away north under a new master, John Read. After learning that the next galleon from Acapulco was several months away they decided to trawl through the South China Sea before returning to try to take it. China was visited and described, and the Mekong Delta and several groups of islands, but bad weather forced them to abandon their plan to take the Acapulco ship. The Cygnet was to return home via India; but first sailed south through the Philippines, stopped at Celebes and then went to Timor, from which she headed south and east intending to touch at New Holland to see what that country might afford them.

  The Cygnet spent two months ashore at the head of King Sound in the Kimberley, north of Broome. It was here that Dampier wrote his famous description of the local Aborigines, probably the Bardi people: The Inhabitants of this Country are the miserablest People in the world. The Hodmadods of Monomatapa, though a nasty People, yet for wealth are Gentlemen to these; who have no Houses and skin Garments, Sheep, Poultry and Fruits of the Earth, Ostrich Eggs, etc. as the Hodmadods have: and setting aside their Humane shape, they differ but little from Brutes. And yet, as a recent biographer of Dampier points out, his earlier, unpublished description of the Bardi is more objective and less condemnatory, making no mention of Brutes; the published version may have been sauced up by one of Dampier’s unknown collaborators for the benefit of the public. The celebrated description nevertheless became one pole of an axis whose opposite term was the noble savage, a phrase first used by poet John Dryden in The Conquest of Granada in 1672: I am as free as nature first made man, / Ere the base laws of servitude began / When wild in woods the noble savage ran.

  Even before the sojourn in Australia Dampier was weary of what he called this mad crew and wanted out. He eventually managed to get himself voluntarily marooned on one of the Nicobar Islands; the Cygnet went on to founder off Madagascar. After spending three days drying out his papers, which had become drenched during complications attending his landing, Dampier sailed from the Nicobars in an open boat to Aceh in Sumatra. Further adventures in Tonkin, Sumatra and the Bay of Bengal ensued, and when he finally returned to England in 1691, after twelve years away, he brought with him an illustrated man.

  Giolo (the name was probably a corruption of Gilolo, or Halmahera) was from the tiny Indonesian island of Miangas, between the Moluccas and the Philippines. Dampier had first met him as a slave on Mindanao; when he re-encountered him in Madras, he bought a share in him (and his mother) from a Mr Moody. Giolo’s mother died at the English fort at Bencoolen in western Sumatra before the voyage to England; despite Dampier’s care of and affection for him, the painted prince’s own health was probably also compromised during the voyage. In London Dampier, under financial pressure, was persuaded to sell his shares in Giolo by stages to promoters and impresarios – or, as he called them, rooks – until he had no more interest in or control of him.

  Giolo was exhibited at the Blue Boar’s Head in Fleet Street and at sideshows along with other freaks: dwarfs and giants, hermaphrodites, Siamese twins, dancing bears, a living skeleton, a fairy child only eighteen inches high. On his back, his exhibiters claimed, was a Lively representation of one quarter part of the World, while the Arctick and Tropick Circles centre on the North Pole at his neck – a map of the heterotopia he embodied. But Dampier, who knew him much better and for much longer, said his patterns were abstract: I cannot liken the drawings to any figure of animals, or the like, but they were very curious … full of great variety of lines, flourishes, chequered work … keeping a very graceful proportion. There was a narrative of his adventures – an improbable romance with a princess – written and published; and he was alluded to in Congreve’s Love for Love. Giolo’s tattoos supposedly gave him immunity from the bites of venomous creatures but not, apparently, to smallpox, of which he died in Oxford. One account suggests that in the agony of the disease he scratched himself to death, thereby ruining his tattoos along with this life.

  DAMPIER WROTE THAT he arrived back in England with nothing but his journal and his painted prince; while neither made him much money, the book based on the journal was a bestseller that brought him lasting fame. It appeared in 1697 as A New Voyage Around the World and went quickly through three printings in a year – it has been reckoned it was as successful as, if not more than, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe would be twenty-five years later. Dampier’s book was of course a source for Defoe, who was never shy of taking what he needed where he found it; but what of Dampier’s own sources?

  A comparison between the published A New Voyage and a much shorter and earlier extant draft gives some insight into how Dampier worked it up for publication. He himself acknowledged that it was revised and corrected by friends, some of whom were old shipmates; but others appear to have been members of, or connected to, the Royal Society. It is these latter who probably encouraged Dampier to include in his work as many detailed descriptions as possible of the remote countries and peoples he had visited on his travels. The Royal Society had recently published its Directions for Seaman Bound for Long Voyages and, in 1696, while Dampier was working on A New Voyage, produced its Brief Instructions for Making Observations and Collecting in All Parts of the World in Order to Promote Natural History. It’s likely that Dampier used information drawn from the studies and researches of his Royal Society friends to supplement his own observations. Yet, paradoxically, it is his ability viv
idly to describe what purports to be his own experience that makes his book so compelling.

  Nevertheless there is a certain tension in A New Voyage, that between the observation of nature and culture and the swashbuckling tale of piratical events: the latter was perhaps more of a guarantee of public interest than was the former, no matter how much people wanted to know about exotic customs and places. And then there was Dampier’s own need to conceal or at least downplay the part he and his friends played in these often savage and bloody adventures. As the author of his own tale, most of which could not then and cannot now be corroborated by any other source, he must have shaped his narrative and the character of its protagonist with an eye both to reputation and to commercial viability. And as the inaugural author of a first-person narrative in English of a voyage around the world, he stands at the head of a long and continuing tradition of travel writing, with its always equivocal ambiguity about what really happened and what might or should or could have; between what was seen in the world and what read in books in a library or found out in coffee-shop conversations.

  Dampier addressed the Royal Society in 1697. His audience was particularly interested in his account of a two-foot-long worm he had uncoiled with a stick by stages from a wound in his leg. He already knew Robert Hooke and probably met such luminaries as Robert Boyle, John Locke and Edmond Halley. He certainly dined, in 1698, with Samuel Pepys. It was with the encouragement of such people that his second book, Voyages and Descriptions, appeared in 1699. It is in three parts: the first gives more detail of his time in Tonquin (Vietnam) and the East Indies; the second is an account of his log-wooding days on the Yucatan; the third, and perhaps most significant, is a technical work: A Discourse of Trade-Winds, Breezes, Storms, Seasons of the Year, Tides and Currents of the Torrid Zone throughout the World. This was a major work for the time, with a global perspective and a global significance, including detailed accounts of such mysteries as the disposition of the sea floor, wind patterns of the Pacific, variation of tides and currents, and the nature of antipodean weather. Like his previous book it includes splendid maps drawn from Dampier’s sketches by German born map-maker Herman Moll, who also worked for the Royal Society and was on the way to becoming one of Britain’s leading cartographers.

  DAMPIER SEEMS TO have spent much of the 1690s ashore, mostly in London; towards the end of the century he was asked to put a proposal to the British Admiralty for a voyage of discovery. He chose to go to the East Indies and New Holland: there was no larger tract of land hitherto undiscovered, he wrote, if that vast space surrounding the South Pole, and extending so far into the warmer climate be a continued land. It was the old dream of the Great South Land, which Dampier seems to have thought, after Tasman, to be somewhere to the east of New Holland – itself, he had already deduced from his knowledge of winds and currents, an island continent. Perhaps that western coast of Tasman’s Staten Landt was after all a shore of the Great South Land.

  Dampier’s proposal was accepted and early in 1699 he sailed in the Royal Navy ship Roebuck for the South Seas. It was his first command and the first time an official voyage devoted to science and discovery was mounted by the Royal Navy; as such it was also the inception of the model that would be followed by Cook’s voyages of the next century. Like Tasman before him and most who came after, Dampier had an artist aboard, provided by the Admiralty to draw or paint whatever was seen or found; although this man’s drawings survive, his name does not. The Roebuck was built as a fire ship in 1690 and was by 1698 a sixth-rank warship in very poor condition. Dampier had wanted two ships; the one he was given he considered undermanned. It’s a curious fact that those imperial powers who were persuaded to send out exploring expeditions usually gave them poor, even unseaworthy ships, simply because the better ones were reserved for bona fide trading voyages or for the purposes of war. Magellan’s fleet, Quast and Tasman’s ships, the Roebuck too, were barely fit for the great tasks given them. On the other hand most explorers were good mariners and could make their leaky buckets serviceable over long and dangerous voyages. Dampier was no exception.

  The idea that a former, and future, pirate should be given command of a Royal Navy ship is peculiar: there could hardly be a greater contrast between the free democracy of the buccaneers and the severe and violent bureaucracy of the Royal Navy. And, unfortunately, Dampier had as his second-in-command a foul-mouthed Royal Navy lieutenant by the name of George Fisher. Dampier and Fisher fought from the beginning. On Tenerife the latter told the former he did not care a turd for him and that he could kiss my arse. Sailing the Atlantic towards Brazil the two had a violent argument over the ethics of piracy, with Dampier defending the notorious John Avery, aka Long Ben, whom he had probably known in his bloodwooding days. As they crossed the equator, when the men asked for more beer and Fisher gave it to them without consulting his captain, Dampier cracked. He broke the head of the cooper who’d broached the barrel of beer and fell to caning Fisher. Perhaps he suspected a mutinous and murderous plot against him; perhaps he was right. As well as navy men, there were other old pirates aboard. Fisher was placed in irons and, at Bahia, sent ashore under an armed guard and left there in a Portuguese prison. He later returned, via Lisbon, to London and began a vicious public campaign against the man who had caned him. Some of Dampier’s piratical mates also deserted at Bahia and it was a calmer ship that headed south and east around the Cape of Good Hope and into the Indian Ocean.

  Down in the Roaring Forties a violent storm drove the Roebuck 1800 miles in twelve days, running her so hard before wind and sea that she shipped scarcely any water through her leaky timbers. They met the West Australian coast north of Houtman Abrolhos, perhaps at Zuytdorp Cliffs near the mouth of the Murchison River, and sailed further north until they reached the opening of Shark Bay, where Dampier went ashore on Dirk Hartog Island. There were two further landings on the West Australian coast, in the Dampier Archipelago and at La Grange Bay, south of Broome. At each place Dampier collected botanical specimens and described the country and the wildlife, with notes on landscape, soils, vegetation, tides, the sea floor, winds and weather. Among his surviving specimens are twenty-three flowering plants and a seaweed; from his journal a further six species of plants, one phytoplankton, seventeen birds, fourteen fishes, three marine and three terrestrial mammals (including marsupials), one land reptile, three marine reptiles, molluscs, cephalopods and insects can be recognised. The plants he collected are all of species endemic to Australia; Dampier was correct when he wrote that they were for the most part unlike any I had seen anywhere else. It was on this trip that he became, as a recent book has it, Australia’s first natural historian.

  As for the local indigenous people, they were not encountered in person until the landing at La Grange Bay. Dampier recognised they were the same kind of people he had seen more than a decade earlier and repeated his observation: the most unpleasant looks and worst features of any people that I ever saw. But he also noted their communality in the sharing of food. And that they were wary and shy. In a desperate attempt to find a supply of sweet water he tried, by stratagem, to capture an Aborigine who might then lead them to it; but the result was a skirmish in which at least one man on each side was badly wounded. The painted Aborigines afterwards kept their distance, leaping and dancing on the land. Dampier and his men also saw two or three beasts like hungry wolves, lean like so many skeletons, being nothing but skin and bone – dingoes. They could not find a place to careen their ship, nor good water, nor fruits and other refreshments to ease their scurvy. Dampier sailed away for Timor with the laconic and typical remark that he had found some things undiscovered by any before.

  There were encounters with the Dutch and the Portuguese on Timor. In western New Guinea Dampier searched without success for spices as he had looked in vain on New Holland for gold or any other thing of value. The Roebuck cruised the northern coast of the big island and, in the east, learned that New Britain, hitherto thought to be part of the mainland, was in
fact an island. The condition of his ship, the fewness of my men and their desire to hasten home decided him against turning south, where Torres Strait was still a passage unknown to any but the Spanish, who didn’t care, and where the eastern coast of Australia would remain unexplored for another seventy years.

  On the long journey home, off uninhabited Ascension Island, the bottom finally fell out of the Roebuck and she sank; the crew escaped ashore with their belongings. When, a week later, they saw sails, like other castaways they prepared a feast (of turtles) with which to feed their rescuers; but the ships did not stop. Eleven more sails blew by on the trade winds before three Royal Navy ships, bound for Barbados, and an East Indiaman, the Canterbury, rescued them. Dampier went directly to London on the Canterbury where he was arrested, court-martialled, found guilty of very hard and cruel usage of Fisher, fined the whole of his pay for the last three years and declared not a fit person to command a naval vessel.