This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781446429181
www.randomhouse.co.uk
A PIRATE OF EXQUISITE MIND
A CORGI BOOK : 9780552772105
Originally published in Great Britain by Doubleday a division of Transworld Publishers
PRINTING HISTORY
Doubleday edition published 2004
Corgi edition published 2005
3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4
Copyright © Diana and Michael Preston 2004
The right of Diana and Michael Preston to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Condition of Sale
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Corgi Books are published by Transworld Publishers,
61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA,
A Random House Group Ltd
Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm
Cover
Title
Copyright
About the Author
Also by Diana Preston
Acknowledgements
Prologue
PART I. THE ADVENTURER
I. ‘A Self-Conceited Young Man’
II. ‘A Great Prospect of Getting Money Here’
III. ‘To Seek a Subsistence’
IV. ‘A Door to the South Seas’
PART II. THE BUCCANEER
V. ‘That Sacred Hunger of Gold’
VI. ‘Two Fat Monkeys’
VII. The Bachelor’s Delight
VIII. The Enchanted Islands
IX. ‘We Ran for It’
PART III. THE TRAVELLER
X. ‘You Would Have Poisoned Them’
XI. ‘As White as Milk and as Soft as Cream’
XII. ‘This Mad Crew’
XIII. ‘New-Gotten Liberty’
XIV. ‘Our Little Ark’
XV. Gut Rot and Gunpowder
XVI. The Painted Prince
PART IV. THE CELEBRITY
XVII. The Rover’s Return
XVIII. ‘Good Copy’
XIX. ‘Dampier’s Voyage Takes so Wonderfully’
XX. Kiss My Arse
XXI. Shark’s Bay
XXII. ‘A Flame of Fire’
XXIII. ‘Not a Fit Person’
PART V. THE ANCIENT MARINER
XXIV. ‘Brandy Enough’
XXV. The Manila Galleon at Last
Epilogue
Notes and Sources
Bibliography
Picture Credits
Diana Preston is an Oxford-trained historian, writer and broadcaster who lives in London. She is the author of The Road to Culloden Moor: Bonnie Prince Charlie and the ’45 Rebellion; A First Rate Tragedy: Robert Falcon Scott and the Race to the South Pole; Besieged in Peking: The Story of the 1900 Boxer Rising and Wilful Murder: The Sinking of the Lusitania. Michael Preston, Diana Preston’s husband, read English at Oxford University and is now an historian and traveller.
www.booksattransworld.co.uk
The Road to Culloden Moor: Bonnie Prince Charlie and the ’45 Rebellion
A First Rate Tragedy: Robert Falcon Scott and the Race to the South Pole
Besieged in Peking: The Story of the 1900 Boxer Rising Wilful Murder: The Sinking of the Lusitania
We are indebted to several individuals and organizations in the United Kingdom for their help and expertise: Peter Allmond, Bodleian Library, Oxford, who traced some rare publications; Dr Serena Marner of the Fielding-Druce Herbarium, Oxford University, for showing us the botanical specimens Dampier brought back from New Holland, New Guinea and Brazil; Mike Dorling, Collections Manager, the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, Cambridge, for access to the stone axe and slingshot Dampier brought back from his voyages. Dr James Kelly, Worcester College, Oxford, for his guidance on the story of the buccaneers and, in particular, for sharing his knowledge of Captain Sharp and of the parallels between Dampier’s and Defoe’s writings; Professor Glyndwr Williams for his insight into the early history of Europeans in New Holland; Tim Severin for guidance on visiting the Darien; Patric Dickinson, Richmond Herald, College of Arms, for help with sources; and Richard Timmis for his kindness in allowing us to visit Hymerford House, and Pat Switzer, who gave us a fascinating tour. Our thanks also to the staff and archivists of the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the London Library, the Royal Society, the Public Record Office, the Guild Hall Library, the Bristol Central Library, the Bristol Record Office, the Somerset Record Office, and the Bury St Edmunds branch of the Suffolk Record Office.
In Australia, we greatly appreciated the help of Dr Mike McCarthy, of the Western Australia Maritime Museum, who advised us on our Australian research and travel, as well as sharing his experiences of his discovery of the wreck of the Roebuck off Ascension Island. We are also grateful to the Aboriginal communities of One Arm Point, especially Irene Davey, and of Bidyadanga, especially Edna Hopiga, Lenny Hopiga, Norman Munroe and Gordon Marshall, for allowing us to visit Dampier’s landing sites at Karrakatta and Lagrange Bays. Both communities generously shared their people’s memories with us. We also appreciated the advice and expertise of Alex George and Roberta Cowan about Dampier and the flora and fauna of Western Australia, and the help of Hugh Edwards and Les Moss, who shared their knowledge of the history of Western Australia and Shark Bay in particular. The State Library of New South Wales gave us useful advice on sources. In addition, we thank Daniel Balint and Geoff Parker in Broome, who facilitated our visits to Karrakatta and Legrange Bays; Heath and Travis Francis, who took us in their boat to Dirk Hartog Island; Quoin Sellenger and Lini Ironfield of the Monkey Mia Dolphin Resort; Alex Dent, who led us into the bush; and Qantas, Skywest Airlines, and the Western Australia Tourist Commission, which helped make our visits possible.
In the United States, we are grateful in particular to Dr Joel Baer of Macalester College, who generously shared some of his own research with us and pointed us to other potential sources of information; Dr Susan Solomon for advice about the history of meteorology; and Lily Bardi-Ullmann, who once again tirelessly tracked down rare publications. We would also like to thank Jean Merritt Mihalyka for her advice about the Accomack County Records and the staffs of the Virginia Record Office, the Mariners’ Museum, Newport News, the Jamestown Museum, the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, and the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, for their helpful responses to our requests for information.
In Panama, our thanks go to Marco Gandasegui of Ancon Expeditions, who arranged for us to see as much of the Darien associated with Dampier as was possible, given armed activity in some places, and to our guide, naturalist Alvaro Perez, who not only saved us from snakes but opened our eyes to the beauty of the rainforest. In Jamaica, Colin MacDonald’s insights, as he took us around Spanish Town and to the site of Bybrook, were invaluable. In Hong Kong, we appreciated the advice of the Hong Kong Geographical Society, in particular Jacs Taylor-Smith, Catherine Hui, and Ron Clibborn-Dyer, about St. John’s Island. For our trip to the Galapagos, we are grateful to David Howells of Galapagos Adventure Tours, to our guide, Juan Talapia, and to the crew of the sailing yacht Sulidae. In Southeast Asia, we are grateful to Robert Scoble for his advice on the history of the region and for helping us arrange our travel. Our grateful thanks also to the crew of the brigantine Soren Larsen for sharing their knowledge of the sea and sailing ships and for tolerating our landlubberly attempts at rope hauling, steering and sail-setting with kindness and good humour.
The advice of our agents, Bill Hamilton in London and Michael Carlisle in New York, has, as usual, been invaluable. So has the support and encouragement of George Gibson and his excellent team at Walker & Company in the United States and of Marianne Velmans at Transworld/Doubleday in the United Kingdom. Family and friends have as ever been generous with their support and encouragement. We especially want to thank St John Brown, Clinton Leeks, Kim and Sharon Lewison and Neil Munro for their insightful comments on the draft, Lydia Lewison for help with Spanish translation, and Donald and Ingrid Wallace for their medical advice, in particular on reasons why livers go black and dry.
One day, in September 1683 in the Cape Verde Islands off the west coast of Africa, William Dampier lay ‘obscured’ among the scrubby vegetation to do some bird-watching. He was excited. He had just caught his first sight of flamingos. The detail and delicacy of his descriptions would gladden any modern ornithologist. The flamingos were ‘much like a heron in shape’, though ‘bigger and of a reddish colour’, and in such numbers that from a distance they appeared like ‘a brick wall, their feathers being of the colour of new red brick’. They nested in shallow ponds ‘where there is much mud which they scrape together making little hillocks like small islands . . . where they leave a small, hollow pit to lay their eggs . . . They never lay more than two eggs . . . The young ones are at first of a light grey.’
Then, as a practical and hungry seventeenth-century sailor, and to the probable revulsion of an ornithologist, Dampier noted the birds’ culinary qualities: ‘The flesh is lean and black yet very good meat’ . . . their tongues have ‘a large knob of fat at the root which is an excellent bit, a dish of flamingoes’ tongues being fit for a prince’s table’.
Dampier also observed the movements of the tides, currents and winds around the islands, meticulously recording them in his journal. He would later use such data to draw far-reaching conclusions about their behaviour and the relationships between them. However, he would fail to mention that while he was deep in these worthy scientific observations, his companions were otherwise engaged in plotting to seize a better ship for the piratical voyage to the South Seas on which they and Dampier were bound.
These scenes highlight the contradictions in the career and character of William Dampier. His portrait in London’s National Portrait Gallery shows a lean, strong-featured man with a thoughtful expression, brown shoulder-length hair and a plain coat, holding a book in his hand. He is styled ‘Pirate and Hydrographer’, but even that tells only part of his story. He was a pioneering navigator, naturalist, travel writer and explorer as well as hydrographer who was, indeed, quite happy to seek his fortune as a pirate.
In his early years Dampier was an adventurer, fighting with the buccaneers preying on Spanish ships and the towns and villages of the Spanish Main. He marched with a buccaneer army through dense, humid, snake- and spider-infested jungles and over the Isthmus of Panama in search of Spanish gold. He might well have been hanged at London’s Execution Dock and his tarred corpse exhibited as a warning like that of Captain Kidd. Instead he became the first man to voyage three times around the world, recording nature with passion, even obsession. The books he wrote based on his observations brought him from obscurity to celebrity, changed scientific perceptions and altered the literary landscape.
Dampier’s best-selling, rollicking accounts of his voyages (A New Voyage Round the World in 1697, Voyages and Descriptions in 1699, and A Voyage to New Holland published in two parts in 1703 and 1709) aroused an enthusiasm for travel writing which made it the most popular form of secular literature for the next quarter of a century and beyond. His books fuelled the imaginations of Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe.
Dampier’s understanding and mapping of winds and currents were pioneering. James Cook and Horatio Nelson studied his methods and used his maps. He, not Cook, was the first Englishman to lead an expedition to Australia and to document its wildlife. His work as a naturalist influenced Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin, who used his acute observations and detailed descriptions as building blocks for their theories. Humboldt admired ‘the remarkable English buccaneer’ to whose works he thought ‘the subsequent studies of great European scholars, naturalists and travellers had added little’. Although born nearly a century after Dampier’s death, Darwin found his work ‘a mine’ of information and felt so familiar with him that he referred affectionately to ‘old Dampier’ in his diary.
Dampier lived at a time of physical and intellectual curiosity, when enquiry was fashionable and ingenuity admired. The seventeenth century saw a revolution in the approach to natural philosophy, as science was then usually known. In Britain, Francis Bacon, who died in 1626, was the pioneer. He saw clear parallels between geographic and the expansion of scientific knowledge. He advocated setting aside reliance on ancient texts and artificial divisions imposed by ancient philosophers in favour of experiments: ‘Whether or no anything can be known can be settled not by arguing but by trying.’ Bacon thought that science was a single body of knowledge capable of continuous and unlimited development by the ingenious and curious based on data they had collected from around the world. It was not an end in itself but a means of improving the human condition. Bacon thought ‘there is much ground for hoping that there are still laid up in the womb of nature many secrets of excellent use’.
The Royal Society, given its royal charter by Charles II in 1662, put Bacon’s philosophy into practice. In this ‘learned and inquisitive age’ its goal was ‘to overcome the mysteries of all the works of nature . . . for the benefit of human life’ and to undertake ‘an universal constant and impartial survey of the whole of creation’. In its work the society emphasized building up a large body of observations, not only of unusual phenomena but also of the normal and commonplace, which it rightly considered the more helpful to understanding.
Fellows included scientists, writers such as John Evelyn and John Dryden, aristocrats and men-about-town. Sometimes their discussions were erudite and highly significant, as when they debated the work of the chemist Robert Boyle, the astronomer Edmund Halley and the physicist Isaac Newton. This emphasized the mechanical nature of the world, in which identified cause produced observed effect and study brought understanding of the order and symmetry governing Creation. Sometimes the discussions were more speculative – for example, when they considered ‘the scheme of a cart with legs instead of wheels’ or whether two pigs with ‘human faces’ had been engendered by a man copulating with a sow. At other times, casual conversations have an uncanny prescience. They talked of spectacles for seeing in the dark (or night-vision goggles). The minutes recorded the following exchange: ‘Mr Boyle mentioned, that he had been informed, that the much drinking of coffee did breed the palsy. The Bishop of Exeter seconded him and said that himself had found it to dispose to paralytical effects . . . Dr Whistler suggested that it might be enquired whether the same persons did take much tobacco.’
Guided by a desire to study subjects with practical applications, the society instigated research into marine topics to improve knowledge of the sea and hence the reliability of sea travel. To aid them, they drew up and regularly updated Directions for Seamen Bound for Far Voyages. These directions asked seamen to ‘study nature rather than books and from the observations made to compose such a history of her, as may, hereinafter, serve to build a solid and useful philosophy upon’. Dampier was the only ‘far voyager’ to respond. He went further than providing new, accurate and comprehensible observations by advancing theories about how his data should be interpreted. The society summarized his work in its Transactions as soon as it was published and invited him to address its fellows – both rare accolades.
Dampier’s ‘A Discourse of Trade-Winds, Breezes, Storms, Seasons of the Year, Tides, and Currents’, included in his second book, established his reputation as a hydrographer beyond challenge. A classic of its era, it has been quoted ever since by scientists and meteorologists. The ‘Discourse’ differentiated between the various types of winds, such as the steady trade winds and the seasonal monsoons. Dampier distinguished for the first time between tidal streams, which flowed near the shore and regularly reversed their directions, and ocean currents, which flowed farther out, usually in the same direction. He established that the region of equatorial currents coincided with that of the trade winds and was the first to deduce correctly from these observations that the winds were the cause of the currents.
At this time Edmund Halley was also investigating wind patterns. Both Dampier and Halley produced maps that became landmarks in the early history of scientific knowledge of prevailing winds, but Dampier’s were the more accurate and complete. Dampier alone and for the first time created a wind map of the Pacific, a region of which Halley was ignorant, and Dampier’s maps, not Halley’s, became the prototype for the many maps and globes picturing the trade winds that appeared throughout the eighteenth century.
Dampier’s lack of prejudice and inextinguishable curiosity made him an instinctive, intuitive naturalist. He pioneered what is today known as descriptive botany and zoology, later developed by Joseph Banks, the naturalist who sailed with Captain James Cook – the careful, detailed, and objective recording of the world’s living things. New sights, sounds and smells consumed Dampier. He was one of the first Englishmen to document the effects of marijuana, recording: ‘Some it keeps sleepy, some merry, some putting them into a laughing fit, and others it makes mad.’
The first naturalist to visit all five continents and to travel widely in areas largely unknown to Europeans, Dampier was able to compare and contrast animals, birds, reptiles and plants across the globe. He was among the first party of Britons to visit the Galapagos Islands. Here, his scientific observations of marine green turtles led him to write that they were ‘bastard’ green turtles compared with those in the Caribbean, thus suggesting location-dependent differences within species and prefiguring Darwin. Dampier’s continuing deep interest in such relationships later led him, in a study of Brazilian waterfowl, to introduce sub-species, both as a word and as a concept. Darwin later regularly referred to Dampier’s works during the voyage of the Beagle. The famous red notebook in which Darwin first formulated his theory of natural selection quotes observations from Dampier.
Dampier was the only major British maritime explorer between Francis Drake and his fellow adventurers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and James Cook and his fellow naval expeditioners in the mid- to late eighteenth century. He uniquely bridged those two eras, fusing the piratical plundering and derring-do of the former with the scientific inquiry and meticulous chart and record keeping of the latter.
An inspired navigator, Dampier during his three circumnavigations pioneered sea passages for those who came after him, measuring distances more precisely than his predecessors. He pinpointed the location of islands, while giving practical tips on the best approaches through reefs, tidal races and shoals. He did not have the sophisticated navigational instruments that would appear during the eighteenth century. But even with them, the British navy still used Dampier’s ‘Discourse’ – well into the twentieth century in fact – because of its accuracy and attention to detail.
Dampier was among the first recorded party of Britons to set foot on Australia, eighty years or so before Cook. He returned there in command of the English Admiralty’s Roebuck expedition, the first specifically planned voyage of scientific and geographic exploration and hence the forerunner of the expeditions of Cook and Darwin. The artist he took with him drew the earliest known images of Australian flora and fauna. Despite shipwreck, Dampier brought home the first collection of botanical specimens from that unknown land. Cook took Dampier’s books on all his voyages, and his journals and those of his officers often refer to them as sources of ‘accurate’ and authoritative information.
But perhaps Dampier’s greatest gift was to convey in words to his fellow countrymen the frontiers opening up around them. His were the first modern travel books. The Works of the Learned, the first literary magazine in English, recommended his books to the ‘sedentary’ traveller for the ‘variety of descriptions and surprisingness of the incidents’. Like a modern backpacker, he travelled out of curiosity for its own sake, not merely in hope of commercial and political gain. As well as being a sound recorder of facts, he was sufficiently skilled to infuse and enthuse his readers with the excitement he felt. More than a century later Alexander von Humboldt still called him ‘the finest of all travel writers’, and the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge advised contemporary travel writers ‘to read and imitate him’.
Dampier’s writings inspired a ‘rational wonder’ at what he had seen, and his simple English and homely similes connected the lives of his readers to a new and broader world. A hummingbird was ‘a pretty little feathered creature, no bigger than a great, over-grown wasp’. An armadillo had ‘a small head’ with ‘a nose like a pig’. A poison blow-dart was ‘like a knitting needle’, and St Elmo’s Fire like a glowworm. Dampier was the first to compare the vast expanse of the flat ocean to the surface of the millpond so familiar to English country dwellers. His occasional whimsical asides are reminiscent of Tristram Shandy, for example, when he gave personality to clouds gathering before a storm, describing them as ‘pressing forwards as if all strove for precedency’.
Dampier can claim more than 1,000 entries in the Oxford English Dictionary. To take only the first three letters of the alphabet, he gave to the English language such words as avocado, barbecue, breadfruit, cashew and chopsticks. He was the first to write in English about Southeast Asia, describing the taste and manufacture of soy sauce and of what we now know as Thai fish sauce. He described government structures and the social practices of peoples and rulers he encountered. Anyone researching the places Dampier visited (such as the Chinese coast, the Pacific islands, and the logwood settlements on the Caribbean coast of Mexico) often finds him cited as the earliest and frequently the only authority for his period.
The literary world embraced him. The diarist John Evelyn wrote, ‘I dined with Mr Pepys, where was Captain Dampier, who had been a famous buccaneer.’ Dampier opened other writers’ eyes to new possibilities in human experience and primed their imaginations. Without Dampier there might have been no Yahoos, no Robinson Crusoe, no Man Friday. Daniel Defoe studied Dampier’s voyages, including his accounts of his shipwreck on the uninhabited Ascension Island, of his tattooed companion, the painted prince, and of a Moskito Indian named William, marooned for three years on the Pacific island of Juan Fernandez – as well as the testimony of Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk, abandoned on that same island on one of the voyages on which Dampier sailed and rescued on another. Dampier’s adventures also strongly influenced Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, published in 1726, eleven years after Dampier’s death. Gulliver actually refers in the opening passages to ‘my cousin Dampier’. A leading biographer of Swift wrote that Dampier’s books began the process of replacing fantasy with fact. Swift’s fantasies were given a framework of verisimilitude by laconic passages of practical seamanship, coolly lifted from those books.
Like the age in which he lived, Dampier was full of contradiction, contrast and moral ambiguity. He was an opportunist but also a patriot. He wanted desperately to make his fortune but was seduced by the quest for knowledge. He lived a large part of his life with pirates yet managed to preserve what Coleridge called his ‘exquisite mind’. He believed that cruelty was the hallmark of the coward, yet while briefly a naval officer was court-martialled for putting one of his officers in irons and assaulting him. Although he often acted as a peacemaker and an adviser among the pirates who respected him, he was a poor leader. He was a loner who found it difficult to commit himself fully to either people or projects. Neither responsibility nor relationships came easily. He married yet immediately left his wife for twelve years, never wrote of her, and, unlike many of his time, seldom discussed sex in his narratives. His sensuality was expressed through his feelings for nature. He wrote not of carnal delights but of lying on shore, waiting ‘to receive the pleasure’ of softly wafting sea-breezes.
William Dampier has been largely forgotten.1 We knew nothing of him when we found his portrait in a book on pirates. The juxtaposition of pirate and hydrographer in the picture title intrigued us. The portrait is not normally on view in London’s National Portrait Gallery, but when a helpful curator brought it up for us from the basement, what struck us most was Dampier’s sardonic expression, his knowing, watchful eyes. By the time this portrait was painted, we learned, Dampier had confounded the expectations of those who despised him for his background and his buccaneer associations. He had seen much of the world, and his rational brain had analysed what he had observed. His first book had brought his findings to an avid and appreciative public.
We also learned that almost everything known about Dampier comes from his published books. What authors choose, or their publishers think it prudent to allow them to reveal in print, is often far from the whole story. We therefore made determined efforts to trace other documents or artefacts relating to him. None of his original journals have survived. Neither have the drafts of his books except for an early version of his first book, A New Voyage Round the World, written by a copyist but annotated in Dampier’s spiky hand. Reading this manuscript in the British Library and comparing it with the published version, we tried to recapture Dampier’s thought processes as he crossed out, amended and crossed out yet again such tricky passages as the abandoning of his captain on a Philippine island, or debated how best to present his credentials as an author. We pondered why he had added so much natural history material at a later stage than this manuscript draft.
In the Public Record Office we found a mixed bunch of papers referring to Dampier – many documenting legal disputes. Some are neat, official Court of Admiralty records. The copperplate writing looks too prim for the rambunctious events it records, like the argument aboard the royal naval vessel Roebuck, when Dampier’s second-in-command shrieked that he could ‘kiss his arse’. Some still retain the sand used to blot them; some, like the log of HMS Roebuck, on which Dampier was shipwrecked off Ascension Island, are water-stained. Yet others are large, yellowing, cracked sheets, folded many times as writers crammed in as much information as possible, because the newly introduced penny-post charged by the sheet. Compared with Dampier’s own style, some documents are in stilted lawyers’ English; others are ungrammatical, with frequent crossings out; some sailors’ depositions are in a clerk’s hand, simply signed with a cross as the sailor’s mark. Many, including Dampier’s own writings, are not easy to read. As we struggled, we were struck by the unchanging nature of bureaucracy and of legal jargon.
Papers in the local record office in Somerset – the county where Dampier was born – are more revealing of Dampier, the man. Letters, including one in Dampier’s own hand, lay bare his thoughts and aspirations as a young man working in Jamaica on a sugar plantation. They show his anger at how he had been ‘nipped in [his] bud’ and his high hopes disappointed. Yet, after more than 300 years, such personal records are tantalizingly sparse. To flesh Dampier out, to get closer to him and understand him better, we decided to track his path across the world.
We began in the village of East Coker, Dampier’s birthplace and where his passionate interest in nature first flared. It looks surprisingly unchanged. Thatched stone cottages hemmed by water meadows exude a mellow glow in the afternoon light. Dampier’s childhood home still stands – a large, weathered, barn of a building with high Gothic arches and stone tracery. A carved coat of arms gives it a baronial feel. The arms are not the Dampier family’s, but his origins were clearly less humble than sometimes suggested. His determination ‘not to slave it’, but to see the world on his own terms was perhaps rooted in this substantial, prosperous dwelling.
A network of paths encircles the village. It led us across fields, through woods and along age-old byways edged with oak trees. The grass was a rich, glossy green from recent rain. Here and there the path had dissolved into mud, and the loudest sound was the squelching of our feet and birdsong. We came unexpectedly upon a medieval priory with high-Gothic façade and towering chimneys and were face to face with the past – sharing sights entirely familiar to Dampier in his boyhood. The hedge and field patterns are just as they would have been in the seventeenth century. So are the village ponds with their bulrushes and placidly swimming ducks. The rich, slightly acrid scent of wood smoke was rising from ancient chimneys – the very essence of home but, as events proved, not world enough for Dampier.
We walked over the gentle swell of a hill to medieval St Michael’s Church. The afternoon light was ebbing as we entered the dark interior to search for Dampier’s memorial brass. The proposal to erect it caused a great ruckus in 1907. A local worthy objected, calling Dampier ‘a pirate ruffian that ought to have been hung’. There was just enough light to read the inscription, which begins:
TO THE MEMORY OF
WILLIAM DAMPIER
BUCCANEER EXPLORER HYDROGRAPHER
and sometime Captain of the Ship Roebuck
in the Royal Navy of King William the Third.
Thrice he circumnavigated the Globe
and first of all Englishmen
explored and described the coast of Australia.
An exact observer
of all things in Earth, Sea and Air
he recorded the knowledge won by years of
danger and hardship in Books of Voyages
and a Discourse of Winds, Tides and Currents
which Nelson bade his midshipmen to study
and Humboldt praised for Scientific worth.
As we were taking notes, another visitor slipped inside. He was seeking the memorial of T. S. Eliot. The poet’s ancestor, Andrew Eliot, emigrated to America from East Coker in 1660, when Dampier was nine years old. They must have known each other.2
From East Coker we, like Dampier, went to sea. Our short experience of life aboard a sailing ship added to our admiration for him. Like Dampier, we preferred ‘a warm voyage’ and signed on as ‘voyage crew’ on the brigantine Soren Larsen in the Pacific. We learned at first hand how sailors’ clothes never get dry. The salt attracts moisture, and shirts and trousers turn stiff as cardboard. The winds rose and the ocean became much rougher than we had expected. As Dampier often did, our captain abandoned our island anchorage for the greater safety of the open sea. We stood legs braced, hauling on the ropes as waves broke over the rocking, rolling decks and foaming water poured through the scuppers. We thought of Dampier leaping squirrel-like into the bow rigging at the height of a storm to spread his coat to catch the wind and angle the ship around.
We also thought of him at 4 a.m. in the moonless rainforests of Darien on the Isthmus of Panama and wondered whether we had been entirely wise to follow in his footsteps. Dampier had put his faith in the Kuna Indians; we were trusting in the eyes, ears and snakecraft of our Panamanian guide, Alvaro. ‘Shine your torches well ahead of you, not by your feet. Snakes attack the circle of light,’ he muttered. Soon he halted abruptly at the sound of rustling. He flicked his torch over tangled leaves, creepers and tree roots. A poisonous four-foot-long brown snake – a ‘monstrous adder’ just as the buccaneers described – was advancing, spitting. Alvaro grabbed a length of tough, tagua palm we had cut as a walking stick. Sweeping it to and fro in front of his body like a blind man with his cane, he held the snake at bay, shouting to us to run by. We stumbled shakily past, sweating more than either the humidity or lack of fitness justified.
But as the pale dawn light penetrated the canopy, we saw the wild, dappled beauty that had captivated Dampier. Oversized versions of every houseplant we had ever owned, from rubber plants to monsteras, abounded. Monkey ladder vines, up to a mile in length when unravelled, looped crazily across our path. Broad leaves from branches 100 feet above spiralled slowly to the ground. The fine webs of golden spiders – reputedly of greater tensile strength than spun steel – shone in the patchy sunlight. The pervasive sweet almond smell of the rotting fruit of the dipterix tree lingered in our nostrils. Flocks of acid-green parrots flew screeching overhead as we finally emerged into the cleared savannah.
The reason for our dash through the darkness was to reach El Real de Santa Maria de Darien – known in Dampier’s day simply as Santa Maria – in time to catch the tide and a canoe downriver. The rivers and their huge tidal rises and falls still govern travel in the roadless western Darien. Our skin prickled as we tramped into the town so often attacked by the buccaneers and the focus of Dampier’s ‘golden dreams’. Today, nothing remains of the wooden fort, which the Spanish fought futilely to defend. Ironically, though, the town was full of soldiers – weary, wary, combat-hardened Panamanian troops returning from counterguerrilla operations on the nearby Colombian border. Only their commander looked spruce in spotless green fatigues with a black T-shirt hugging his peerless pecs, gleaming jungle boots, designer shades, and drenched in cologne – the epitome of Dampier’s chauvinistic vision of the decadent, perfumed don.
The steep riverbanks scaled by the attacking buccaneers and their Kuna allies remain. We slithered clumsily down them through glossy brown mud just in time to meet our canoe. We did not have to paddle like Dampier. Instead an outboard motor powered us through the liver-coloured waters of the Pirre River. The canoe bucked slightly as we shot out into the wider, fast-flowing Tuira River, leading down to the Gulf of San Miguel on the Pacific coast. Black mangroves with tangled roots crowded the water’s edge. Creeks large enough to hide a buccaneer party opened and disappeared within an instant. We asked for the motor to be switched off and, like the buccaneers 300 years before us, bobbed with the ebbing tide out into the clear, blue waters of the gulf. We shared the buccaneers’ delight at the sight and tang of the sea after the oppressive humidity of the jungle.
We also felt their vulnerability, as we tossed on the lengthening swells. We landed on a nearby island where the remains of a Spanish fortress, built to keep watch for the enemy, poke through the dense vegetation. We clawed up a steep, gritty slope through spiny bushes and dry leaves, cursing as we snagged our hands and clothes and slipping back two feet for every three we climbed. How, we wondered, could marauders ever have crept unawares on the defenders? Our descent became an involuntary slide on our backsides. As we gingerly picked grit, thorns and crushed insects from our skin and doused our grazes in stinging antiseptic, we realized Dampier’s strength of will and his courage.
Our days in Darien had been not unlike his. We had followed Indian guides through the rainforest, watching them make poultices from the leaves of monsteras to treat cuts, just as they had done in the seventeenth century. We had almost collapsed with heat exhaustion. We had waded chest-high across fast-flowing rivers and learned at first hand the difficulties of protecting our notes. Our notebooks were torn and spattered with mud, blood and mosquito repellent. Though our time in the jungle was limited and precious, we had sometimes felt too tired to take notes. We were all the more impressed that, while dodging Spanish patrols, Dampier had found time and energy to mix ink, scratch entries in his journal and painstakingly preserve his papers from water in a stoppered, hollow bamboo tube.
As we continued our journey through Panama, it was equally humbling to discover how accurate Dampier had been. Everything from his depiction of ants ‘with a sting like a spark of fire’ to the quam – ‘a large bird as big as a turkey’ – was true. And so it continued everywhere, as we pieced his life together. In Jamaica we followed Dampier’s route from Spanish Town through the dramatic limestone gorge of the milky-sage Cobre River to the sugar plantation at Bybrook where he worked. Just as in Dampier’s time, a dense mist cloaks it from midnight until dawn. We took slow boats along lotus-choked rivers to Hanoi (in Dampier’s time known as Cachao), made the buffeting voyage around Cape Horn, and sampled exotic food from barbecued locusts to prickly pear and durian. The sights, tastes and experiences could have come straight from Dampier’s books.
Some of Dampier’s most important observations were of the Galapagos Islands. Like him, we arrived in a sailing ship, cruising past islands still clothed with incense trees. On Santiago, we crunched across Buccaneer Cove – the wide, gently shelving beach where the buccaneers careened their ships and where shards of their broken pots have been found. The islands still evoke Dampier’s startled wonder. Giant land iguanas, with psychedelic skins of orange, ochre and green, browse bushes of yellow flowers. Round-eyed male boobies lift their great blue feet in their solemn but ludicrous mating dance.
As dusk fell, the sunset coloured the sea and sky pink. Beyond the breaking surf small dark heads popped up like tiny periscopes – turtles preparing to come ashore by night and lay their eggs. Sadly, though, the fabled armies of giant tortoises so relished by Dampier are gone, plundered by successive generations of human predators. The sole survivor of one subspecies is confined to a conservation park. Huge and craggy as a chunk of rock, he munches slowly in the shade of tall candelabra cacti. A bleak and emblematic notice reads ‘George, the last of his race’.
Dampier’s books prepared us well for Western Australia. We flew up the northwest coast over improbably clear blue seas laced with white surf. We thought of small wooden ships, sails teased by the wind, of Dampier cautiously probing the reefs and dropping the lead line to check the depth. Our first destination was Karrakatta Bay in King Sound, north of Broome, the point where in January 1688 Dampier and the men of the Cygnet probably landed. Today, the bay belongs to the One Arm Point Aboriginal community, members of the same Bardi people whom Dampier encountered. The red-soiled landscape looks as arid and unforgiving as Dampier described, but our guide, community leader Irene Davey, explained that ‘bush tucker’ was all around if you only knew where to look. She showed us vitamin-rich fig, vinegar plum and crab apple trees and pandanus palms, a sure sign that fresh water is near, all of which Dampier and his shipmates missed.
Irene described the treacherous whirlpools and strong currents at the entrance to King Sound, remarking ‘how skilful – and lucky’ the men of the Cygnet had been to get through. From sandy cliffs crisscrossed with dingo tracks we looked down on scallop-shaped Karrakatta Bay. We imagined sweating men hauling the worm-riddled Cygnet up above the waterline and blows from the carpenters’ hammers cracking and echoing out – the first mechanical, metal sounds in an otherwise quiet natural world. This still remote and lovely stretch of coast was probably where white and Aboriginal people first tried to understand each other’s worlds and each other’s motives. As we wandered, Irene spoke movingly of the impact of Dampier’s arrival on her people. She suggested that the Europeans must have looked to the Bardi like the devils from their ancestral stories of the dream time. Perhaps, she wondered, the guttural words that Dampier heard and recorded were not gurry, gurry but narri, narri, devil, devil.
Next we went south to Shark Bay, where, in 1699, eleven years after his first visit, Dampier arrived commanding a royal naval expedition aboard HMS Roebuck. We chartered a boat from the mainland to Dirk Hartog Island, where Dampier first landed. As we scanned the shimmering, glinting bay, a great gush of fishy-smelling water exploded near us, and a dark, forked tail smacked the sea. We were in the heart of a pod of humpback whales blowing and breaching. It was exhilarating, though we recalled how nervous Dampier’s men had been, off this same coast, hearing the ‘very dismal noise’ of whales ‘blowing and dashing of the sea’ all around them in the darkness of the night.
Once again, Dampier proved an utterly reliable guide. His map, which we had brought, was so accurate that the young skipper of our boat, who had never been there before, used it to pinpoint where we should land. We splashed ashore on the same arc of blindingly white sand as Dampier and scrambled into the high-domed dunes beyond. Today, in a small depression in dunes strewn with white coral and cuttlefish bone, a plaque commemorates Dampier’s visit. All around, thrusting out of the powdery sand, we found the same unique, ‘sweet and beautiful’ plants that Dampier had gathered for the Royal Society, and which we had seen preserved in Oxford University.
Like Dampier and the Roebuck, we finally headed north from Shark Bay to Lagrange Bay – a massive safe, sandy beach. Today, the area belongs to the Aboriginal community of Bidyadanga. Our guide here was an elderly, gentle-voiced lady, Edna Hopiga, who led us down to the beach. The tide was out, and the distant sea was just a thin blue ribbon; the still-wet, rippled sand looked pewter-colored under a heavy sky. A strong, salty wind blew in off the sea as Edna spoke of a story handed down through the generations. It told of a ship that long ago had sailed into Lagrange Bay – the first vessel her people had ever seen.
As Dampier’s was the first ship to enter the bay, we were tempted to suspend our disbelief and romantically to believe the ship must have been his, ignoring the reality that the story was probably a fusion of events captured in folk memory. But as we sat with Edna on this peaceful shore, we sensed an additional presence, quiet but determined. That rational, meticulous and objective observer William Dampier was warning us not to be so fanciful.
1 Except, we later discovered, in Western Australia.
2 T. S. Eliot himself visited the village only once, but his ashes were buried in 1965 in the church’s northwest corner.
The Adventurer
The Buccaneer
The Traveller
The Celebrity
The Ancient Mariner
On 6 April 1674 the merchant ship Content sailed down the Thames, bound for the fast-growing colony of Jamaica. Onboard was a nervous, thin-faced young man on his way to work on a sugar plantation. Twenty-two-year-old William Dampier had balked at the last moment. He feared being sold as an indentured servant when the ship berthed in Jamaica. As wind filled the sails and the small vessel began to creak and roll, it was too late to change his mind. However, he had sensibly agreed with the ship’s captain, John Kent, that he would work his passage as an able seaman. As such, the law required Kent to discharge him as a free man on his arrival.
Dampier had good reason to be suspicious. The colonies had a ferocious appetite for cheap labour for their burgeoning tobacco and sugar plantations. Agents determinedly roamed London’s streets and taverns searching for people to cajole and bully into signing indentures, thereby selling themselves into periods of servitude. Sometimes they simply befuddled them with drink before bundling them up the gangplank; then they took their commission and hastily departed. Their victims sobered up to find themselves at sea. Seaman Edward Barlow often watched such servants going under the hammer in Jamaica and knew the going rate: ‘for country men and such as have no trades ten, twelve or thirteen pounds … but they that have any trades, they sell for sixteen, twenty, and sometimes for twenty-five pound’.1 On the slightest and most dubious pretexts, employers arbitrarily extended the period of indentures without recompense. It was little better than slavery.
William Dampier’s position was, he realized, somewhat ambiguous. He had accepted ‘a seasonable offer’ to go to Jamaica from Colonel William Helyar, squire of East Coker in Somerset, and his late father’s erstwhile landlord. Helyar was on the lookout for young men willing to work on his sugar plantation, Bybrook. As a boy, Dampier had impressed the squire with his knowledge of the crops grown by Helyar’s tenants. Dampier wrote proudly, ‘[I] came acquainted with them all, and knew what each sort would produce … in all which I had a more than usual knowledge for one so young, taking a particular delight in observing.’
Helyar had provided Dampier with some supplies on the understanding that he would work for a period in return, but there was no formal agreement between them specifying for how long or on what terms. This perplexed Helyar’s London agents, Rex Rock and Thomas Hillyard, particularly when Dampier began to demand further items before the voyage: paper, ink and quills, a pair of shoes and a pound of soap. He also insisted on a grater, a nutmeg and two pounds of sugar – essential ingredients for making punch. The two men complained to Helyar ‘that William Dampier has been very extravagant’.
Dampier rightly suspected that Rock and Hillyard intended to recoup the outlay by indenturing him on their own account, if not that of Squire Helyar, but they had waited too long. They tried to make Dampier sign indentures aboard the Content before she sailed, but he protested angrily. He was supported by fellow passengers also on their way to Bybrook – a doctor, carpenter, mason, and the doctor’s boy, Charles Wentworth. The carpenter and mason in particular became ‘very quarrelsome’, fearing they too would be compelled to sign indentures. Customs officials, alerted by the angry shouting on deck, began to ask awkward questions about kidnapping. Helyar’s exasperated agents gave up, pacifying the vociferous Bybrook group with shoes, pipes, ‘more brandy and a joint of fresh meat’.
The situation degenerated further into farce. An embarrassed Hillyard later confessed to Squire Helyar that ‘the person that went by the name of Charles Wentworth that was supposed to be the doctor’s boy was discovered to be a young woman’. ‘Charles Wentworth’ was, in fact, the doctor’s mistress. She insisted vehemently that she was a boy until an intimate body search in the captain’s cabin ‘found her otherwise’. One of the officials suggested that she might even be a murderess escaping in disguise, and she was taken ashore to explain herself. She claimed that, knowing Squire Helyar opposed sending women to his plantation, she had disguised herself ‘for the love of her husband’. Rex Rock, determined to see the last of the doctor and his paramour, hastily forged a marriage certificate, perfunctorily ageing it by rubbing it on an old shoe. He also dredged up a witness prepared to swear he had seen the couple married. The stratagem worked: ‘The searchers seeing the evidence so plain’ caved in and said ‘“What love is this!… God forbid that we should part man and wife.”’ Yet further expenditure followed. ‘Mrs Wentworth’ needed suitable clothes, and Squire Helyar received a bill for shoes, stockings, blue aprons, and a becoming velvet cap, as well as for yet more brandy.
By 11 April the Content, with her expensive passengers was out into the Atlantic beyond Land’s End. Dampier observed with a practised eye how the favourable winds drove the Content2