His account of this expedition was published in two stages. A Voyage to New Holland etc. in the Year 1699 (1703) does not follow the journey after leaving Australia; the description of the rest of the voyage, which is mostly about New Guinea, would not come out until 1709. Dampier’s botanical specimens he gave to Thomas Woodward, who in turn handed some on to naturalist John Ray and others to botanist Thomas Plukenet, who together named and described them and published their results. They are now in the Sherardian Herbarium at Oxford.
DAMPIER THEN WENT privateering, a slightly different modus operandi than was buccaneering: privateers carried letters of marque that gave them authority to fit out an armed ship and use it to attack, capture, and plunder enemy merchant ships in time of war. There were two more voyages: on the first, Dampier captained the St George in company with the Cinque Ports under William Pickering and then, after Pickering died off the coast of Brazil, Thomas Stradling, the twenty-one-year-old first lieutenant. In the same re-shuffling of the command structure, a cantankerous twenty-three-year-old sailor from Fife by the name of Alexander Selkirk was appointed quartermaster. The ships were parted on their way round the Horn but reunited at the old buccaneer base of Juan Fernández. Here a mutiny almost broke out among the Cinque Ports’ crew; Dampier, who by his own account had a long history of mediating disputes, says he calmed things down again. They went pirating with mixed success until the two ships, in acrimony, parted again. Back at Juan Fernández Stradling argued with his quartermaster about the state of the Cinque Ports – it was rotten – and Selkirk, with bedding, food, books, gunpowder and shot, at his own request was left ashore. The Cinque Ports later sank.
The St George was in as bad a state; and Dampier too was plagued by mutinies and desertions until he had just twenty-seven men left on his leaky boat. They saw the Manila galleon but could not take her; after they had sacked the town of Puna they did capture a Spanish brigantine, transferred their loot and themselves on to her and sailed for Batavia, where the Dutch first imprisoned them as pirates and later sent them home. Dampier’s captaincy on this voyage seems to have been as poor as it was on the Roebuck. He drank, he was arrogant and autocratic, his courage or his intelligence failed him at crucial moments. The expedition’s backers had nothing to show for their investment and Dampier could not even salvage the material to write a book.
His wife, Judith, died while he was away on the St George. They had been married thirty years but almost nothing is known about her apart from the fact that Dampier trusted her judgement in financial matters and gave her his power of attorney while he was away, as he mostly was. He was now fifty-six years old and yet had the energy for one more tilt at his sacred gold, one more attempt to take a Manila galleon. On his last voyage, on two ships out of Bristol with the investment backing of local merchants and politicians, Dampier sailed as pilot, with responsibility for navigation but not for command. The ships were the Duke and the Duchess, with Woodes Rogers captaining the first and Stephen Courtney the other. Dampier seems to have begun on the Duke but later transferred to the Duchess. He wrote nothing about the voyage, or nothing has survived; what we know about it comes from Woodes Rogers’ account.
They left Bristol in 1708 and went via Grande in the Canaries, Brazil, the Falkland Islands and Cape Horn to Juan Fernández where Alexander Selkirk, more than four years later, still was. He was leery of coming aboard lest a certain officer be there; some have suggested this was Dampier but that seems unlikely – more probably it was Stradling, now safely back in London. It was upon Dampier’s recommendation that Selkirk was appointed second mate on the Duke. He had been, said Dampier, the best man on the Cinque Ports. Selkirk nursed the scurvy-sick men of the two crews back to health before joining them on their plundering voyage; he seems to have made the transition from hermit to pirate remarkably easily. There are glimpses of him taking black slaves from one of their prizes ashore to sell; participating in the sack of Guayaquil; and receiving his share of the loot afterwards: this is not the pious puritan memorialised by Defoe.
And then, after a spell on the Galápagos to recuperate, the pirate fleet sailed north to wait off San Lucar, California, for the Manila galleon. Here, for only the second time in more than a hundred years, a treasure ship was taken. It was the Nuestra Señora de la Encarnación Disengaño, a 400-ton frigate with 193 men aboard and a value, Dampier estimated and Woodes Rogers later agreed, of one million pounds. The treasure was gold dust, gold plate and coins, spices, musk, beeswax, textiles. There were silks, calicos, chintzes and cotton stockings, books and paintings, sweets and snuff boxes, a china service, monks’ vestments and much else besides. The privateers took the Nuestra Señora after a three-hour sea battle during which about twenty Spaniards were killed and Woodes Rogers had part of his jaw blown off.
A greater prize came into view a few days later, an even larger ship, the Nuestra Señora de Begoña; unusually, two galleons had sailed from Manila that year. But the Begoña was too big and too well-armed for the small flotilla of English ships with their exhausted men to take and, after a futile engagement during which the unlucky Rogers also had one of his heels blown off, they had to let the brave lofty new ship sail on more or less undamaged. Woodes Rogers wrote of the frigate they did take: This Prize is very Rich but that nor anything else comes near the Unknown Risques and many Inconveniences we have and must Endure. They renamed her the Bachelor, made Alexander Selkirk her master, and sailed across the Pacific for Batavia and home.
Threading the many islands of the archipelagos south of Guam it became clear to Rogers that Dampier’s powers were failing. He did not always remember places he had been before and could not always find the way to places that he did remember. Perhaps, too, his sight was poor: most old mariners in those days had at least one eye badly damaged from constantly sighting the sun. It was his third and final circumnavigation and when he did at last return to London in 1711 Dampier, as he had been after every voyage, was immediately plunged into complex litigation – this time over who owned what, how much anyone was owed and where blame should be apportioned for the many things that had gone wrong.
The estimate of a million pounds was too great by a factor of five or six; Dampier, although he received some kind of advance payment, had to wrangle for the rest of his life for the balance of his share. It was not paid until after his death and by then was good only to settle his debts. He lived out his few remaining years in Coleman Street, London, in the company of his dear cousin Grace Mercer; and died, at the Old Jewry, in 1715. There is no record of burial and no known tomb; his books are his memorial.
WILLIAM DAMPIER SEEMS a definitively modern figure; with him, the old dream of a fabulous Great South Land, the antipodes imagined and invented over two millennia, is subsumed into a world that, however marvellous, is incontrovertibly real. He did not seek fabled lands but actual places where he might sate his hunger for gold or whatever else it was he was looking for. His writings are full of accurate description of foods and drinks, illnesses and perils, of peoples, places, animals, plants, tides, currents and the rest. He was not a theorist as such but he was intensely curious about the world. The best description of him is Oskar Spate’s, which concludes with a quote from John Masefield:
… he had indeed been ‘given to rambling’ in very mixed company, never seeking prominence, always rather detached: the sort of man who is called ‘the Prof’. His Voyages are really memoirs in which the more outrageous episodes and personalities are passed over with a smooth reticence or even complete silence, and in the midst of blood and rapine he seems less concerned with his proper business as a buccaneer than with the curious observation of the world: winds, clouds, the multitudinous forms of life. He can be perceptive about the human condition, and above all he ‘surveys the lesser kingdoms with a calm, equable, untroubled and delighted vision’.
His voyage on the Roebuck, though it made hardly any new discoveries, is a template – though not the only one – for all later expeditions of scie
nce and discovery, including those of James Cook. Naturalists von Humboldt and Darwin studied him and were impressed by his accuracy; as was Joseph Banks at Botany Bay. It is not too much to say that in William Dampier the imaginative and the practical aspects of exploration and discovery are curiously entwined and then recombined to give us our contemporary equivalents, the literary and the scientific. For his literary legacy was as enduring. After Dampier those stiff and unconvincing utopias of More and Bacon come suddenly alive with detail we can believe. Daniel Defoe used Dampier’s observations to give several of his own fictional voyages an aura of believability; his Robinson Crusoe is as inconceivable without the Voyages as it would have been impossible had not Alexander Selkirk, and William the Mosquito before him, been marooned and then rescued.
The same can be said of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels whose narrator, Gulliver himself, speaks of my Cousin Dampier. The distant nations of Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa and the country of the Houyhnhnms are all somewhere in the antipodes and all, despite their extravagance, have a fitful reality that later antipodean societies would unfailingly, if sometimes reluctantly, mimic. As for the Yahoos, they seem to have been constructed partly out of Dampier’s description of Aborigines and partly from an account of dung-throwing monkeys he met in Central America. Walter Scott believed that Gulliver was himself a disguised portrait of Dampier, whom Swift may have met, and it is certain that his simple, matter-of-fact, narrative style is that of the old Pyrating Dog.
If it is the case that New Zealanders may, by whatever occult means, sometimes recognise themselves in the lineaments of the dour Dutch discoverer of their land, it could also be said that Australians might see their resemblance in Dampier and not only in his prescient characterisation of the desperate plight of many among Aborigines: insouciant, remote yet passionate, an inveterate larrikin and freedom-monger, he owes nothing to anyone and seems always to have presided over a republic of his own. There are other, stranger echoes: Dampier’s cook on the Duke was a one-legged, eye-patched man by the name of John Silver; he too would come back in fictional guise, courtesy of Robert Louis Stevenson, to haunt the dreams and nightmares of the generations who have read Treasure Island and wondered at the further adventures, and ultimate fate, of Long John Silver.
Edmond Halley thought icebergs he saw in the Southern Ocean were islands and named then accordingly. When Captain Byron rediscovered the Tuamotus in June 1765 (Magellan, Quirós and several Dutchmen had been there before him), he called them the Isles of Disappointment. They were not a paradise, nor were the savages that lived there noble. To paraphrase Gauguin’s questions, where then did the Noble Savage come from? Who was he? Where did he go? Cook and his gentleman scientists, the French at New Cythera, Langsdorff in the Marquesas and Bellingshausen at Port Jackson: all framed their inquiries around two poles, what was actually before them and what they expected to find. This clash between the ideal and real formed the basis of early ethnographies and elaborated a template that is still with us; as is the contradiction that underpins it. Tahiti, as described by Joseph Banks, was bodied forth as pageantry on the London stage and remains the exemplar of a kind of paradise that cannot help becoming anything other than lost.
V
ISLES OF DISAPPOINTMENT
THREE THOUSAND YEARS AGO THE SOUTHERN Cross hung low in the sky south from Athens and was considered by the Greeks to be a part of the constellation Centaurus, the Centaur; by 400 CE Crux Australis had sunk below the horizon. So too had the Coalsack Dark Nebula; but as late as 964 Persian astronomer al-Sufi, in his Book of Fixed Stars, knew the Greater Magellanic Cloud as Al Bakr, the White Ox, and pointed out that while it was no longer visible from Baghdad, it could still be seen from the strait of Bab el Mandeb, the Gate of Grief, towards the head of the Persian Gulf. Soon, because of the precession of the equinoxes, Coalsack, Cloud and Cross all disappeared from northern hemisphere skies and were forgotten in Europe until they came back into view during the great voyages of the sixteenth century.
Amerigo Vespucci mapped the Cross and its two pointers, Alpha and Beta Centauri, on his 1501 voyage under the Portuguese flag down the southeastern coast of South America. Two years earlier he had called the Coalsack il Canopo fosco, the dark Canopus. Twenty years later Magellan on his passage through the strait that bears his name saw two ‘new’ galaxies like clouds in the sky. They have kept their cloudy designations: in Bayer’s Uranometria (1603) they are Nubecula Major and Nubecula Minor and in a 1795 French edition of Flamsteed’s star atlas, Le Grand Nuage and Le Petit Nuage; now we know them as the Magellanic Clouds – dwarf galaxies that were once thought to orbit the Milky Way but are today believed to be independent of, though closely associated with, our own. Indeed, until the 1994 discovery of the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy, they were the closest known galactic objects to our spiral galaxy.
While the existence or not of the Great South Land remained a matter for speculation, there was no doubt that there were unknown stars in the skies over the southern hemisphere and in 1676 English astronomer Edmond Halley, then just twenty-one years old, set out for St Helena in the Atlantic Ocean to map the celestial bodies that could be seen from there. He spent a year on the island and observed 341 stars using sextant, quadrants, micrometers, a pendulum clock and several telescopes, one of which was 24 feet long. He published his results in the first printed volume of telescopically measured star positions, the Catalogus Stellarum Australium, in 1679.
In 1693 he proposed returning on a voyage east to west through the great South Sea to study magnetic variation in the world’s oceans and any other factors that might have a bearing on methods of reckoning longitude at sea. Halley had the support of the Royal Society and the British Admiralty granted his request for a ship, which was purpose-built at the Deptford Yard. The Paramore was a pink, that is, a kind of ship usually used in the Royal Navy for victualling and for carriage of spars; the name is of Dutch origin. There was a long hiatus between the Paramore’s completion and her first trial sailing, which took place with the future Peter the Great of Russia, then travelling in England under an assumed name, at the helm.
Halley was commissioned into the Royal Navy and made commander of the Paramore; but like Dampier on the Roebuck after him he was given as second-in-command a career naval officer, a man called Harrison, who had his own theories of how to measure longitude; which Halley, in his official capacity as a member of the Royal Society, had unfortunately declined to support. Harrison was bitter and would actively conspire against Halley on his 1698 voyage in the Paramore; which, partly as a consequence, was cut short. His second voyage, begun in late 1699, had similar objectives: to survey the east coast of South America, the west coast of Africa and the islands of the Atlantic in the interests of establishing the pattern of magnetic variation; then to search for the unknowne southlands between ye Magellan Streights and ye Cape of good hope between ye latitudes of 50 & 55 South.
The tiny Paramore – only 64 feet long – with a crew of twenty-four sailed far into the south and in dreadful cold and amongst thick fog, somewhere between the Falkland Islands and South Georgia, saw penguins swimming. Then on 1 February 1700 Halley’s men saw land; or at least what they thought was land. There were three islands: Flatt on top and covered with Snow … milk white, with perpendicular cliffs all around them … the great hight of them made us conclude them land, but there was no appearance of any tree or green thing upon them … They reminded the mariners of the white cliffs of Dover and so two of them were called Beachy Head and North Foreland. They were icebergs, immense tabular slabs broken off the Antarctic ice shelf, one of them 5 miles long. Notwithstanding, Halley believed these ice islands were aground, not afloat, and they joined, briefly, the many other delusive islands in the Atlantic Ocean.
Halley accurately mapped patterns of magnetic variation and published his results in his General Chart of the Variation of the Compass (1701). This was the first such chart to be published and the first on which isogonic
, or Halleyan, lines appeared; but his theoretical understanding of why such variation occurred was bizarre. Halley believed that the position of the needle is not governed by the poles of this world, but by other poles, that move around them … that a certain large solid body, contained within and in every way separated from the earth … and being included like a kernel in its shell, revolves circularly from east to west, as the exterior earth revolves the contrary way in diurnal motion.
Halley’s hollow earth was imagined as a shell about 500 miles (800 kilometres) thick, with two inner concentric shells and an innermost core the size of Mercury or Mars. Atmospheres separated these shells and each shell had its own magnetic poles; the spheres rotated at different speeds. He speculated that the atmospheres within were inhabited and luminous and that it was this luminous gas escaping that manifested as the aurora borealis. But he also suggested, in 1716, that a high-precision measurement of the distance between the Earth and the Sun might be made by observing and timing the transit of Venus across the face of the Day Star; which James Cook set out to do half a century later.
IN THAT HALF CENTURY various armchair travellers attempted a synthesis of what was thus far known of voyages to, or in search of, the Great South Land. The most significant was a French compilation, the Histoire des Navigations aux Terre Australes (1756) by Charles de Brosses. Brosses brought together for the first time the many scattered and fragmentary references to a Great South Land, recounting sixty-five different voyages – including those of Tasman and Dampier – and arranging them into three regional groups: Magellanie for the Atlantic; Australie for the southern Indian Ocean; and Polynesie for the Pacific – the word Polynesia (many islands) was his invention. This tripartite geographical arrangement was accompanied by analysis of the advantages and problems of discovery and colonisation.
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