William Dampier

English scientist and explorer

• Born: August 1, 1651
• Birthplace: East Coker, Somerset, England
• Died: March 1, 1715
• Place of death: London, England

Dampier was the most accomplished of the British sailor-scientists in the era of transition between the great Elizabethan voyages of discovery and the planned scientific expeditions of the mid-eighteenth century.

Early Life

William Dampier (DAMP-yuhr) was a curious mixture of adventurer, navigator, buccaneer, and outstanding author of the prescientific era. He was the son of a tenant farmer, George Dampier, and his wife, Ann, who had both died by the time Dampier went to sea at age sixteen with a Weymouth trader bound for Newfoundland. After discovering his distaste for cold weather, he returned to London and sailed aboard an East Indiaman to Bantam, Java, the first of Dampier’s many voyages to tropical regions. He returned to England in 1672 and, at the outbreak of the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672-1674), Dampier joined the navy. He saw action, though largely from a sickbed, as an able seaman at the Battle of the Texel.

After recovering his health in Somersetshire, Dampier sailed in 1674 for Jamaica, where he had been offered a position by his father’s former landlord as assistant manager of a plantation. He quit that employment after only a few months, however, to work on board coastal traders. In 1675, he joined a logwood vessel called a ketch bound for Campeche, in southeast Mexico. The ketch was, in fact, a buccaneer ship on which life was hard, unfettered, drunken, and dangerous as a result of frequent clashes with Spanish ships. Dampier began here the journal that would form the basis of his later publications. In addition to recording the way of life on board, he carefully noted points on hydrography and pilotage.

For several years, Dampier sailed in the West Indies and Central America with traders and buccaneers. In 1678, he returned to England, where he married a young woman named Judith, of whom virtually nothing else is known. Dampier sailed for Jamaica in 1679. There, he again joined a crew of buccaneers, who captured Spanish ships and plundered settlements in Panama before the band split up on Drake’s Island amid disputes. Dampier and about fifty others remained on the island when their ship departed. They made their way back across the Isthmus of Panama and joined a party of pirates. Dampier sailed with these pirates until July, 1682, when he spent more than a year in Virginia. In August, 1683, he enlisted as the assistant paymaster on the buccaneer ship the Revenge, whose crew traveled to the Pacific Ocean via Cape Horn, capturing a thirty-six-gun Danish ship and plundering the coast of Peru en route to Panama. The expeditions were so successful that at times Dampier’s leaders commanded as many as ten ships and a thousand English and French buccaneers.

One ship, the Cygnet, broke away from the group in 1686. With Dampier aboard as navigating officer, it crossed the Pacific Ocean and traded in the East Indies. The crew then spent three months on the coast of Western Australia at King Sound in 1688 in order to make repairs, the first recorded landing on Australian soil of a British vessel.

Life’s Work

In May, 1688, Dampier and seven companions were left behind in the Nicobar Islands after a quarrel with their mates. Relying on Dampier’s skills as a navigator, they sailed to Sumatra in an improvised outrigger. Dampier recorded that during the perilous voyage, he contemplated his buccaneering life and resolved to correct its shortcomings.

After recovering from an illness brought on by the ordeal, Dampier worked for two years on trading ships, was forced into service as a gunner at the fort at Bencoolen, escaped in January, 1691, aboard an Indiaman, and eventually made his way to back to England. He arrived in his native country in 1691, after an absence of twelve years that had seen him complete a circumnavigation of the globe. He was penniless and was forced to sell his only possession, a slave from Miangas, Indonesia, named Prince Jeoly. Jeoly was exhibited as a curiosity for his tattoos, and he eventually died of smallpox in Oxford.

After several years of anonymity, Dampier won influential friends, such as scientists Sir Hans Sloane and Sir Robert Southwell, by writing a highly popular book about his adventures, A New Voyage Round the World (1697). A second volume, Voyages and Descriptions (1699), appeared two years later and contained “A Supplement for the Voyage Round the World” and “Two Voyages to Campeachy.” The books won for Dampier a reputation as an authority on the South Seas.

His unexpected fame also attracted the attention of the Admiralty. In January, 1699, Dampier was named captain of HMS Roebuck, with orders to explore the east coast of Australia , which had never been visited by Europeans. Dampier captained fifty men and boys but appears to have acquitted his charge poorly. He put his first mate, George Fisher, ashore in Brazil after quarreling with him. He then sailed east across the Indian Ocean, arriving in August, 1699, at Shark’s Bay, Western Australia. Seeking fresh water, he sailed up the coast to Roebuck Bay, near modern Broome. In September, having failed to find water and facing the spread of scurvy, he headed north to Timor, then east round the north coast of New Guinea, and discovered and named New Britain and New Ireland in 1700.

Dampier’s ship needed repairs, so he returned to England rather than fulfill his ambition of sailing south to explore the east coast of Australia, which would remain unvisited by Europeans until Captain James Cook sailed its length in 1770.

In July, Dampier reached Batavia, made repairs, and embarked for England in October, 1700. After rounding Cape Horn, the Roebuck, already in exceedingly poor shape, began to leak badly, and Dampier was forced in February, 1701, to beach it at Ascension Island. He and his crew found ample supplies of fresh water and food and were soon rescued by a fleet of British warships and trading vessels. These brought Dampier to England, where he found he would face a court-martial for, among other charges, cruelty toward his second-in-command, Fisher. In June, 1702, the court declared Dampier unfit for command, finding that he had beaten Fisher with a cane, chained him, and then left him in a jail in Bahia, Brazil.

Despite the verdict, Dampier was introduced to Queen Anne by the lord high admiral the following April, after being given another commission as captain of the privateer St. George. He was directed to wage battle against French and Spanish ships in the South Seas, aided by another warship, the Cinque Ports. The expedition, which began in April, 1703, was disastrous because of Dampier’s lack of control over his men and the poor condition of his ships. A series of defeats led to the breakup of the expedition. After a series of misadventures, Dampier returned to England in 1707, again impoverished and with his reputation further damaged by an account of the voyage written by one of those aboard, Funnell, who accused Dampier of such wrongs as quarreling with his officers, drunkenness, and cowardice. Dampier tried to answer these charges in his brief, poorly written Captain Dampier’s Vindication of His Voyage to the South Seas in the Ship St. George (1707).

Dampier was now about fifty-seven and was not to lead another expedition, but from 1708 to 1711 he completed another circumnavigation of the globe as the pilot of the ships Duke and Duchess, captained by Woodes Rogers. It was during these voyages that Alexander Selkirk, the master of the Cinque Ports who had been marooned after the breakup of the 1703 expedition, was rescued from Juan Fernandez Island. Selkirk’s solitary confinement served as the model for Daniel Defoe’s novel The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner, Written by Himself (1719; commonly known as Robinson Crusoe ). Rogers was a far more capable leader than Dampier had proven. His skills as a buccaneer would have greatly enriched Dampier had the expedition’s dividends been paid before Dampier’s death in March, 1715. Dampier appears, however, to have lived comfortably in London on advances and credits. He stated in his will that he would go to his grave “diseased and weak of body, but of sound and perfect mind.”

Significance

Dampier’s thoroughly observed, unaffected descriptions of natural phenomena exemplified the surge of scientific enlightenment in the late seventeenth century. His chronicles are all the more extraordinary in that he had had little schooling and compiled his writings while traveling in rough company hardly conducive to contemplation.

All of Dampier’s works laid the groundwork for the great planned scientific explorations pioneered by Captain James Cook in 1770. Particularly influential and useful was his 1699 study of winds and currents, which is still praised as the most skillfully written treatise on those subjects of its time. That work typifies Dampier’s extraordinary curiosity and the attention to detail it produced. Also a hallmark of his writing is its modesty and clarity. Its literary merit recommended it to a whole generation of writers. Dampier’s highly successful books were, for example, influential in the history of travel literature and the novel; his descriptions of foreign lands strongly influenced such works as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726; originally entitled Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts, by Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and Then a Captain of Several Ships) and are thought to have provided background information for Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798).

In viewing Dampier’s life as a whole, many commentators have cautioned readers to bear in mind that the navigator was, for several years, tantamount to a pirate. They note, for example, that Dampier commonly glossed over the nature of privateering voyages, presenting them as voyages of discovery. It is also noted, however, that Dampier stated that he joined bands of buccaneers “more to indulge my curiosity than to get wealth.” For most of his life, Dampier was a writer posing as a buccaneer. He first commanded a ship at age forty-seven as a result of his growing fame as an observer, not as a sailor, and that undoubtedly provides a clue to his failure as a leader; on both the expeditions he led, Dampier returned to England without his ship. His works of observation as a seaman and scientist, however, remain unimpugned.

Bibliography

Bonner, Willard Hallam. Captain William Dampier: Buccaneer-Author. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1934. Describes the influence that Dampier’s travels and writing had on the burgeoning travel literature of his day.

Dampier, William. A New Voyage ’Round the World. London: James Knapton, 1697. Rev. ed. New York: Dover, 1968. Highly successful in its time, this and Dampier’s other works are the best resources for his life and mind. Offers a detailed account of the places and natural phenomena he encountered during his first, long circumnavigation. A companion volume, Voyages and Descriptions (1699), includes “A Supplement to the Voyage Round the World,” “Two Voyages to Campeachy,” and “A Discourse of Trade-Winds, Breezes, Storms, Seasons of the Year, Tides, and Currents of the Torrid Zone Throughout the World.”

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. A Voyage to New Holland: The English Voyage of Discovery to the South Seas in 1699. 2 vols. London: James Knapton, 1703-1709. Rev. ed. Gloucester, Gloucestershire, England: Alan Sutton, 1981. A two-part account of the author’s command of the Roebuck, including the earliest English portrayals of Australia’s flora and fauna, as well as its aboriginal inhabitants. Dampier’s description of the latter as wretched is seen variously as an accurate description and as a classic statement of bigotry.

George, Alex S. William Dampier in New Holland: Australia’s First Natural Historian. Hawthorn, Vic.: Bloomings Books, 1999. Describes the observations of flora and fauna that Dampier recorded during his expedition to Australia.

Gill, Anton. The Devil’s Mariner: A Life of William Dampier, Pirate and Explorer, 1615-1715. Salisbury, Wiltshire, England: Michael Joseph, 1997. A useful biography of Dampier.

Lloyd, Christopher. William Dampier. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1966. Places Dampier in the context of the mid-seventeenth century Age of Observation, and describes how his inexhaustible curiosity made him more adventurous than more famous men of science such as Sir Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and Robert Hooke.

Preston, Diana, and Michael Preston. A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: The Life of William Dampier. New York: Walker, 2004. The Prestons drew on Dampier’s writings to provide this exhaustively detailed biography.

Russell, W. Clarke. William Dampier. London: Macmillan, 1894. An often compelling but rather melodramatic account of Dampier’s adventures and stature.

Shipman, Joseph C. William Dampier: Seaman-Scientist. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1962. Describes the reception and assesses the significance of Dampier’s writings and observation of a variety of natural phenomena.

Wilkinson, Clennel. William Dampier. London: Argonaut Press, 1922. Generally considered the best biography of Dampier. A thorough account of his life and influence, with relatively little attention to his scientific contributions.