by Derek Wilson
William Dampier was one of those colourful, enterprising characters who defy any attempt to put them into neat pigeonholes: a naval officer who was also a buccaneer; a scientific observer with more than a hint of the charlatan about him; a man of action whose deeds fell far short of the heroic; a fine navigator but a poor captain; a companion of rogues, who enjoyed the patronage of courtiers and philosophers; and an enthralling raconteur whose writing we read with absorbed fascination, while at the same time wondering just how much we should believe. Dampier was certainly the first man to sail round the world three times and, in so doing, to undergo a variety of amazingly bizarre adventures. One of those voyages he recorded in what has become one of the classics of maritime writing and one which inspired men as diverse as Defoe, Anson, Cook and R. L. Stevenson. For all these reasons William Dampier emerges as one of the most endearing characters in the history of circumnavigation.
‘I had very early inclinations to see the world.’ So Dampier wrote in one of his books, which are the only, sketchy, sources of information about his early life. He was born near Yeovil in Somerset in 1652 of farming stock. By the time he was sixteen he had lost both parents, and his guardians, with the boy’s willing consent, apprenticed him to a Weymouth shipowner. He was obviously a restless young man, for he soon gave up his apprenticeship and signed on aboard an East-Indiaman and, when she returned to port, he transferred to a naval man-of-war. Within the space of five years he had travelled to the chill waters of Newfoundland, the steamy heat of Java, and taken part in two naval engagements against the Dutch. Such sudden changes of direction were to mark the whole course of his life.
As abruptly as he had taken up a maritime vocation he left it. His next job was that of an assistant plantation manager in Jamaica. That was abandoned in favour of life aboard a Caribbean coastal trader and from this he graduated to being a lumberjack at Campeche on the coast of Yucatan. This rough-and- ready way of life appealed to a strong young man and was also very lucrative. So much so that, after three years, he was able to return to England with sufficient capital to set himself up as a merchant trading to the West Indies. It is easy to imagine William, fashionably dressed and bewigged, his purse well-lined, swaggering his way into London society and turning the heads of the young ladies with exciting stories of his adventures. At any rate, he seems to have impressed a certain Judith, kinswoman of the Duchess of Grafton, for they were soon married. A runaway romance? A shotgun wedding? We do not know, for Judith remains a shadowy figure, one of the many instant patterns which came and went in the kaleidoscope that made up Dampier’s life. It is probably very significant that within six months he was on his way back to Campeche.
He never got there. Disembarking in Jamaica, he devoted several months to trading and then joined a party of buccaneers. The decision is not as odd as it might, at first, seem. On Jamaica the buccaneers lived like lords – at least, they did so until unscrupulous publicans and bordello-keepers had extracted from them the profits of their latest voyage. In Port Royal, the ‘sin city’ of the Caribbean, there was more money per head of population than in London. Dampier saw for himself the excitement that seized the town when the cannon at Fort Charles announced the entry of a pirate ship to the harbour, the seamen spending gold as if from bottomless purses, the self-styled heroes telling tales of brave exploits to an audience of admiring catchpennies, the eccentric captains sitting on the harbour wall with barrels of rum from which draughts were offered gratis to passers-by. He saw for himself that living legend, Sir Henry Morgan, the pirate king who but eight years before had marched an army of desperadoes across the Isthmus of Darien, looted and burned Panama, been clapped in irons and sent to London, only to return with the king’s commission as Lieutenant-Governor of Jamaica. Under a lenient administration, piracy, directed largely against the Spanish colonies, thrived. For, whatever the official policies in London and Madrid, it was generally accepted that there was ‘no peace beyond the line’ (i.e. the treaty of Tordesillas demarcation line). To a twenty-seven-year-old, eager for new experiences, the buccaneering life seemed to offer freedom, travel, excitement and wealth. Dampier tells us that he only joined a band of these seaborne brigands after the crew of a ship he was travelling in defected en bloc. That may or may not be true. What is clear is that he scarcely gave a thought to his wife, his domestic responsibilities or the small Dorset estate he was in the process of buying. All were abandoned for the opportunity of seeing new lands and being a member of the ‘brotherhood’.
Years later, when he was writing the account of his wanderings, he offered no justification for a decision many would regard as reckless and immature, beyond that simple statement that he had ‘inclinations to see the world’. Doubtless, that inner compulsion was, for him, its own justification. He was an obsessive voyager and a fascinated observer, and life aboard a pirate ship offered the only opportunity for relative freedom to travel to unknown shores. Such an overriding compulsion is far from unique, even to-day:
I travelled in much the same way that other people stayed still – it was the way of life that suited me. As for purpose and goals in life, I didn’t have any. Purpose sounded too single-minded for me, too restricted by fixed ideas. I preferred to be flexible. Also I rejected the concept of goals and ambitions; they implied success or failure. I wasn’t interested in measuring myself against others or competing with them.4
Three years of the unruly democracy of the brotherhood took him, under various leaders, on marauding raids along the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards of Central and South America. By the summer of 1683 he had fetched up in Virginia. Here he learned that a Creole captain by the name of Cook was projecting a privateering voyage to the South Sea and hastened to sign on with him. Cook recruited seventy men and, Dampier assures us, they all swore to keep ‘some particular rules, especially of temperance and sobriety, by reason of the length of our intended voyage’.5
The first stop was the Cape Verde Islands, where the ship was beached for scrubbing down. The leisurely stay gave Dampier time to explore – and to write an account of what he saw. It was his keen eye and vivid powers of description that set the young traveller apart from all circumnavigators before him. He was passionately interested in what he saw and he kept a record, not just for the benefit of other mariners, but for all those who loved to hear stories of distant lands. Perhaps he resolved from the first to publish his journal as soon as he reached home again. Certainly he guarded it as his most treasured possession and when, later, he lost everything else through being wrecked or cast adrift, he always kept his precious pages with him, tightly wrapped in sailcloth. Everything of interest went into his narrative – geographical features, observations about wind and current, anthropological details and curiosities of natural history – such as the strange wading birds of the island of Sal, which congregate so closely that from a distance they look like a red brick wall:
I saw a few flamingo which is a sort of large fowl, much like a heron in shape, but bigger, and of a reddish colour. They delight to keep together in great companies, and feed in mud or ponds, or in such places where there is not much water . . . They build their nests in shallow ponds, where there is much mud, which they scrape together, making little hillocks, like small islands, appearing out of the water a foot and half high from the bottom. They make the foundation of these hillocks broad, bringing them up tapering to the top, where they leave a small hollow pit to lay their eggs in; and when they either lay their eggs or hatch them, they stand all the while, not on the hillock, but close by it with their legs on the ground and in the water, resting themselves against the hillock, and covering the hollow nests upon it with their rumps: for their legs are very long; and building thus, as they do, upon the ground, they could neither draw their legs conveniently into their nests, nor sit down upon them otherwise than by resting their whole bodies there, to the prejudice of their eggs or their young, were it not for this admirable contrivance, which they have by natural instinct. They never lay more t
han two eggs, and seldom fewer. The young ones cannot fly till they are almost full grown; but will run prodigiously fast; yet we have taken many of them. The flesh of both young and old is lean and black, yet very good meat, tasting neither fishy, nor any way unsavoury. Their tongues are large, having a large knob of fat at the root, which is an excellent bit: A dish of Flamingo’s tongues being fit for a Prince’s table.6
In such passages – and they are many – Dampier, the companion of cut-throats and roisterers, resembles nothing so much as a kind of globetrotting version of Gilbert White, the self-effacing parson of Selborne. He has both the fascinated involvement and the scientific detachment of the true naturalist. Seventeenth-century professional sailors were not the most reflective of men. They were coarsened by rough conditions and could do little more than live for the moment a life which might be quickly cut short by accident or disease. And buccaneers, we must assume, were among the hardest and least sensitive of all seafarers. What, one wonders, did Cook’s crew make of this young member of the company who spent most of his off-duty hours scribbling, who seldom joined in their drunken sprees ashore (more than once in his journal Dampier expressed stern disapproval of intoxication) and who could become very excited at the sight of a shoal of red lobsters ‘no bigger than the top of man’s little finger’.7
In the Cape Verde Islands the pirates seized a fine Danish, 36-gun ship and in her they put to sea early in the New Year (1684). They were immediately caught in the Doldrums. Occasional thunderstorms would arise but afterwards ‘the wind would shuffle around to the southward again and fall flat calm’.8 At length the humid equatorial spell was broken and Cook set course for Magellan’s Strait. But the violence of the prevailing westerlies prevented him wearing into the channel. He stood to the south with the wind on his starboard beam and quarter carrying him far from the land. For a week the ship was driven on and on into the region of bitter cold. She was in 60°S before a shift in wind direction allowed a long tack to the north-west. Then, on St Valentine’s Day, the full fury of the Horn’s weather fell upon her. Seventeen non-stop days of rain-soaked tempests, veering between SW and WSW, lashed her back towards the land. All this time Cook and his men had no sight of sun, moon or stars and therefore no means of fixing their longitude. Daily they expected to catch a fleeting glimpse through the spray of some too-near craggy foreland or to distinguish the ominous crash of breakers from the cacophony of wind and wave. But when the weather cleared and astronomical calculations were again possible they found that they were in the South Sea. It had been an appalling passage, especially as some of the men were too ill with scurvy to work. The only positive aspect of the experience was that twenty-three barrels of rain water had been collected.
Cook made directly for an island well known to all the buccaneers who preyed on the Pacific seaboard; a place of deep harbours, timbered hillsides and abundant sweet water; a place where they were impervious to Spanish attack because ‘50 men in [the anchorage] may be able to keep off 1000’.9 This was Juan Fernandez, some three hundred miles off the coast. Its first Spanish discoverer, who had conferred his own name upon it, had tried unsuccessfully to colonise the island. All he had achieved was to make Juan Fernandez even more attractive to the enemies of his country by introducing goats, which had multiplied and flourished. Dampier had been before to this pleasant, lonely Eden destined to win itself a place in history and literature. He now expatiated lovingly upon its virtues. Its grass was ‘kindly, thick and flourishing’. Its trees afforded ‘large and good timber for building but none fit for masts’. The cabbage trees had ‘a good head and very sweet’. Meat was to be had in abundance from goats, seals and sea lions and the fish were so plentiful ‘that two men in an hour’s time will take with hook and line as many as will serve 100 men’.10
A fortnight’s rest was enough to make the crew impatient to be away up the coast in search of prizes. They were soon in luck; a convoy of three ill-armed merchant vessels fell into their clutches. But the cargo proved something of a disappointment – flour and quince marmalade! A consignment of 800,000 pieces of eight the ships were to have carried was removed at the last moment when the rumour went around that pirates were in the vicinity. Cook put prize crews aboard the merchantmen and made for the Galapagos Islands. Such uninhabited, secluded places as Galapagos, Cocos and Juan Fernandez were the natural temporary habitats of buccaneers and have become the very stuff of pirate legend. Few of them were ever ‘treasure islands’, where maritime thieves concealed vast fortunes of stolen gold and jewels for no very good reason. But they did serve as invaluable, secure havens where captains ‘on the account’ could stop for watering, revictualling and careening and where they could establish depots of surplus items that might prove useful later. So, at the Galapagos Islands Cook unloaded most of the stolen flour to act as a reserve supply if needed.
What interested Dampier about the Galapagos, as we might imagine, was the giant turtles. He devoted four pages to describing these creatures and comparing them with species he had seen in the West Indies. The great, ponderous beasts fascinated Dampier and he carefully noted many facts about them.
It is reported of these creatures that they are nine days engendering, and in the water, the male on the female’s back. It is observable, that the males, while engendering, do not easily forsake their female. For I have gone and taken hold of the male, when engendering, and a very bad striker may strike them then, for the male is not shy at all. But the female, seeing a boat when they rise to blow, would make her escape, but that the male grasps her with his two fore fins and holds her fast. When they are thus coupled, it is best to strike the female first, then you are sure of the male also.11
It has to be said that many of Dampier’s observations about turtles are concerned with culinary practicalities. These animals and their eggs were great delicacies for mariners. It is, therefore, not at all surprising that several species have become extinct since Dampier’s day.
The pirates continued northwards looking for victims. In July, off the coast of Mexico, Captain Cook died. He had been ill some time, presumably of ship’s fever, although Dampier gives no details. His body was carried ashore for burial and his place was taken by the quartermaster, Edward Davis, ‘by consent of all the company, for it was his place by succession’. The buccaneer bands had no rules but they did have their own constitutional practices, which usually amounted to a combination of tyranny and democracy. A captain held sway by the force of his personality and by sheer brutality. If he died or failed to command majority support, his crew often split into factions, and either a successor was elected or they divided into two bands. The pirate companies were in a constant state of fragmentation and coalescence which, not infrequently, degenerated into open warfare. In this case Edward Davis had general approval but it was not long before he and his followers joined forces with another group led by Captain Swan of the Cygnet, out of London.
Swan seems to have been the more intelligent and resourceful of the two leaders, even though he was a reluctant pirate. He was a merchant captain who had been forced by a mutinous crew to go ‘on the account’ and was, so Dampier assures us, eager to find an opportunity of abandoning the criminal life. After ten months of mixed fortunes, Davis and Swan parted company again. The former remained on the South American coast, but the stocky captain of the Cygnet wanted to cross the Pacific. To his men he held out the lure of rich pickings from the Spanish Manila trade. It seems, however, that his real concern was to escape from pirate-infested waters, get rid of his troublemakers, resume legitimate trade and return to England as soon as possible. Dampier decided to transfer his allegiance not, he assures us, ‘from any dislike to my old captain’, but from a desire to see new lands. From the Cygnet’s quarterdeck he watched his old companions sail out of the harbour while Swan fired a fifteen-gun salute in their honour.
The crew of the Cygnet were far from unanimous in their desire to set course across the empty Pacific, and the captain had resort to trickery
to gain their agreement. He had two sets of charts: Spanish ones which showed the distance from Acapulco to Guam as between 2,300 and 2,400 leagues; and English ones which computed the same distance as less than 2,000 leagues. In fact, even the Spanish charts underestimated the distance by more than 200 leagues (about 6oo miles). Swan assured his men that the English calculations were the true ones. Drake, he told them, had made the crossing in fifty days (in fact, Drake took sixty-six days) and that was over a century before, in a much inferior ship. There was, therefore, no doubt that the Cygnet and her consort, a tiny barque commanded by Captain Teat, could complete the voyage in forty days or less. Swan won his followers over but it was not without some misgivings that they agreed to go on short rations and set sail on 31 March 1686.
They had good winds and weather and most days were able to make well over a hundred miles (their best daily run was 216 miles, their worst 64). To the nervous Captain Swan this excellent progress was a two-edged sword: it kept the men’s spirits up but it also made them discontented with their daily ration of eight spoonfuls of boiled maize. Since the crossing would soon be complete, they insisted, there was no need for such economy. On the twentieth day Swan reluctantly agreed to increase the dole to ten spoonfuls. After a month at sea, the sailors began to scour the horizon with growing anxiety. After thirty-nine days they had, by the rough computation of log and line, reached the latitude of the Ladrones (the Marianas), according to the English charts, but there was no sign of land. Food was running short and they had not been able to catch any fish to supplement their miserable maize diet. A few days more and the crew were plotting mutiny and cannibalism. When their victuals ran out they resolved to kill and eat those who had been in favour of this hazardous course, starting with Swan. The captain later jokingly pointed out to Dampier that though he, too, had been on the crew’s menu, he would probably have been quite safe: he was so thin that he ‘would have made them but a poor meal’.