Dampier'S First Voyage Around the World

On April 17, 1681 around 10 AM, at 12 leagues N.-W. from the Island Plata, we left Captain Sharp and those who were willing to go with him in the Ship.

We embarked into our Launch and Canoas, designing for the River of Santa Maria in the Gulf of St. Michael, which is about 200 leagues from the Isle of Plata.

Their provisions consisted of flour mixed with 20-30 pounds of powdered chocolate.

That no man should venture the crossing of the Isthmus on foot who, by health or feebleness of will, might prove unequal to the march,

They agreed that anyone who faltered on the journey overland would be shot to death.

Dampier says “we knew that the Spaniards would soon be after us. If one of us falls into their hands, he might ruin us all by giving an account of our strength and condition. Yet this would not deter ’em from going with us.”

When abreast of Cape Passao they captured a small vessel.

They sailed to Cape St. Lorenzo, where they disembarked after removing their provisions and clothes and scuttling their little ship.

It was now May 1, 1681.

This march across the Isthmus of Panama is a feat that ranks amongst the most memorable of the traditions of travel and adventure.

The qualities of the climate of that part of the world have found emphasis in our time in published accounts of the mortality among the people employed out there on the great French engineer’s scheme of a canal.

The land is watered by numbers of rivers filled with alligators.

• It is darkened and often rendered impenetrable by dense tropical vegetation crowded with snakes.
• In many places, it is blocked by hills and mountains belted with miasmatic vapours.

Our little company of buccaneers crossed the Isthmus in 23 days travelling 110 miles.

Their adventures were few, but the hardships constant and severe.

For the most part they slept all night in the open. They repeatedly woke up in the morning from their beds of mire with clothes saturated by rain.

Their surgeon, Lionel Wafer, was badly hurt in the knee by an explosion of a parcel of gunpowder. It gave his companions much anxiety since they only had him to look after them.

On several occasions many of them were nearly drowned whilst fording rivers swollen with rains.

The difficulties in the road of their progress may be gathered from a single incident.

They had arrived at the banks of a river which they were obliged to cross.

The water was deep and the current ran swiftly. It was proposed that those who could swim should assist those who were helpless in this way to the opposite bank; but then, how were they to transport the guns, provisions, and other articles that they carried?

They decided to send a man over with a line, who, by means of it, would be able to haul the goods across, and then drag those ashore who could not swim.

A fellow named Gayny secured the end of the line around his neck and plunged into the river, but the current kinked and entangled the rope in some way and threw the swimmer on his back.

He had slung a bag containing 300 dollars over his shoulder. This weight, helped by the drag of the line, drew him under to be seen no more.

They finally succeeded in crossing by felling a tall tree, which happily spanned the river and served as a bridge.

Their food consisted of fish and such animals as they could contrive to shoot, particularly monkeys, whose flesh they ate with relish.

It was not until May 23 that they saw the Atlantic, which they called the North Sea.

The next day, they went on board a French privateer commanded by a Captain Tristian. Some of their comrades had died by the way, and some had been left behind.

Amongst the latter was Wafer, the surgeon, who a few weeks afterwards was met by Dampier while cruising in the neighbourhood of La Sound’s Key.

Some Indians came aboard, and brought with them the surgeon and survivors of the others who had been left on the Isthmus.

“Mr. Wafer,” says Dampier, “wore a clout about him, and was painted like an Indian; and he was some time aboard before I knew him.”

Captain Tristian, with Dampier and his comrades in the ship, set sail. They arrived in 2 days at Springer’s Quay, where they found 8 privateers lying at anchor.

• 4 of them were English; two of ten guns each, and both carrying 100 men. A third of 4 guns and 40 men.

The others were less formidable.

The Dutch vessel mounted 4 guns and 60 men. It was commanded by a Captain Yanky.

The Frenchmen were respectively of 8 guns and 40 men, and 6 guns and 70 men.

Here, by guessing at the crews of the smaller ships, we arrive at a body of pirates numbering between 500-600 fearless, determined, ferocious ruffians!

It is conceivable that the Spaniards in those waters should have lived in a state of terror.

The wonder is that the swarms of miscreants who preyed upon them should have left them a house to dwell in or a ducat to conceal.

After many debates it was agreed amongst the masters and crews of these vessels to attack a town the name of which Dampier says he has forgotten.

The vessel into which our hero found himself drafted was a French craft of 8 guns and 40 men, commanded by a man named Archemboe.

The fleet weighed, but during the night they were scattered by a hard gale.

When day broke Archemboe’s ship was alone. Dampier, with others of his comrades who were with Archemboe, speedily learnt to hate their French associates.

The sailors were utterly worthless in bad, and lazy, lounging loafers in fine, weather: “The saddest creatures that I was ever among,” writes Dampier, “but though we had bad weather that required many hands aloft, yet the biggest part of them never stirred out of their hammocks but to eat.” Later on they fell in with Captain Wright, who belonged to the fleet, and Dampier’s English shipmates induced this man to fit out a prize of his for them;

Dampier himself joining Wright, whose vessel, a barco longo, mounted four guns and carried fifty men. Shortly after this Wright, in company with the Dutchman, Captain Yanky, started on a cruise along the coast of Cartagena.

Dampier’s narrative here is a very close, curious, and interesting description of the islands of this part of the sea and of the shores of the mainland. He also prints pages of notes about the birds common to those parts, the pearl-fishery, and other matters of a like kind. The charm of a sailor-like simplicity is in everything he says.

“I have not been curious,” he writes in his preface to a New Voyage Round the World, “as to the spelling of the Names of Places, Plants, Fruits, Animals, etc., which in many of the remoter parts are given at the pleasure of Travellers, and vary according to their different Humours: Neither have I confined myself to such names as are given by Learned Authors, or so much as enquired after them.

I write for my Countrymen, and have therefore for the most part used such names as are familiar to our English Seamen and those of our Colonies abroad, yet without neglecting others that occur’d.”

Let Dampier’s literary defects be what they may, assuredly unintelligibility is not one of them.

The cruise, in a buccaneering sense, was not a profitable one. They captured a few small vessels, but their prizes yielded them little more than some tons of sugar, marmalade, cocoa, hides, and earthenware. They then resolved to separate, and after dividing the plunder they parted company, having enough vessels in the shape of prizes to carry them wherever they might choose to go. Twenty of them, amongst whom was Dampier, putting their share of the booty into a small bark, set sail for Virginia and arrived there after an uneventful passage in July, 1682. In this country Dampier lived for thirteen months, but of his life he tells nothing, merely hinting that a great many troubles befell him.

Amongst the crew of the vessel commanded by the Dutchman, Captain Yanky—one of the piratical commanders with whom Dampier was associated after crossing the Isthmus—there had been a quartermaster named John Cooke, a Creole. On Yanky capturing a Spanish prize, Cooke, by virtue of his position according to the practice of the buccaneers, claimed and obtained command of her. But the privateersmen were of mixed nationalities, and the French, growing jealous of the Englishmen, plundered and stripped the men who had been their shipmates and companions-in-arms, and turned them naked ashore.

Captain Tristian, however, whose ship, it will be remembered, Dampier and his comrades boarded on the Darien coast, took pity upon the English, and carried ten of them, one of whom was Cooke, to the Island of Tortuga. Whilst they lay there at anchor the English rose, seized Tristian’s vessel, and sailing away with her made two captures of importance, one of which they navigated to Virginia, where they arrived in April, 1683. Having sold the cargo of this prize they fitted her out as a privateer, mounting her, Captain Cowley says in his Voyage, with eight guns, though Dampier makes the number eighteen. They called her the Revenge. Dampier with many others volunteered to sign articles for her, and when she set sail her crew, according to Cowley, consisted of fifty-two, but according to Dampier of seventy men.

The voyage of the Revenge was written by Cowley as well as by Dampier—that is to say, a large portion of this voyage is included in Dampier’s first volume of his Travels. Cowley’s account is very full, wanting indeed the flavour of Dampier’s style, and the vitality and archness of his descriptive powers; but in one sense Cowley is more interesting than the other—I mean, that as a freebooter he writes with far more candour than Dampier, whose narratives everywhere repeat by implication the direct apology he makes in the preface to his first volume:

“As for the Actions of the Company, among whom I made the greatest part of this voyage, a Thread of which I have carried on thro’ it, ’tis not to divert the [Pg 51]Reader with them that I mention them, much less that I take any pleasure in relating them: but for method’s sake and for the Reader’s satisfaction; who could not so well acquiesce in my Description of Places, etc., without knowing the particular Traverses I made among them: nor in these, without an Account of the Concomitant Circumstances. Besides that, I would not prejudice the truth and sincerity of my Relation, tho’ by omissions only.

And as for the Traverses themselves, they make for the Reader’s advantage; however little for mine, since thereby I have been the better inabled to gratify his Curiosity; as one who rambles about a Country can give usually a better account of it, than a Carrier who jogs on to his Inn, without ever going out of his Road.”

Cowley had not Dampier’s sensitiveness; indeed, he might not have considered his conscience as a buccaneer unduly burdened. It is manifest that as he wrote he was still smarting under the trick that had been put upon him, and to gratify his resentment he related baldly all the truth he could recollect.

He had been prevailed upon by Cooke to sail as master in the privateer, which was professedly bound to San Domingo, that her commander might at that island obtain a commission to legalise his acts at sea; but in reality Cooke’s first, real, and only design was wholly one of piracy, and nothing was said to Cowley about it until the ship was well clear of the land, when, of course, he was forced to fall in with the scheme. [10]

This was in the year 1683. Dampier was now thirty-one years of age, and fairly, but unconsciously, started on the first of those voyages which were to make him in his day and to succeeding times one of the most distinguished of the circumnavigators of the globe.

The Revenge sailed from Achamack on August 23rd in the year just named. Nothing for many weeks broke the monotony of the passage save the incident of a heavy gale of wind which the vessel encountered off the Cape Verd Islands. Cowley dwells lightly upon this storm as if he would make little or nothing of it, but Dampier insists upon its being the most violent he had ever experienced in any part of the world.

He has preserved an account of it in those chapters in the second volume of his Voyages, which he entitles, “A Discourse of Winds, Breezes, Storms, Tides, and Currents.” The nautical reader will, I hope, thank me for transcribing a passage that is more curiously illustrative of the seamanship and sea-technicalities of the period of history to which this narrative belongs than any like account by other hands that I can call to mind.

“If after the Mizan is hall’d up and furled, if then the ship will not wear, we must do it with some Headsail, which yet sometimes puts us to our shifts. As I was once in a very violent storm sailing from Virginia, mentioned in my Voyage Round the World, we scudded before the Wind and Sea some time, with only our bare Poles; and the ship, by the mistake of him that con’d, broched too, and lay in the Trough of the Sea; which then went so high that every Wave threatn’d to over-whelm us.

If any one of them had broke in on our Deck it might have foundered us. The master, [11] whose fault this was, rav’d like a Mad Man and [Pg 53]called for an Axe to cut the Mizan Shrouds, and turn the Mizan mast overboard: which indeed might have been an expedient to bring her to her course: The Captain was also of his Mind.

Now our Main-yard and Fore-yard were lowered upon a Port-last, as we call it, that is down pretty nigh the Deck, and the Wind blew so fierce that we did not dare to shew any Head-Sail, for they must have blown away if we had, neither could all the men in the ship have furled them again; therefore we had no hopes of doing it that way. I was at this time on the Deck with some others of our Men; and among the rest one Mr. John Smallbone, who was the Main instrument at that time of saving us.

Come! said he to me, let us go a little way up the Fore-shrouds, it may be that that may make the Ship wear: for I have been doing it before now. He never tarried for an Answer, but run forward presently, and I followed him. We went up the Shrouds Half-mast up, and there we spread abroad the Flaps of our Coats, and presently the Ship wore.

I think we did not stay there above 3 Minutes before we gain’d our Point and came down again; but in this time the Wind was got into our Mainsail, and had blown it loose; and tho’ the Main-yard was down a Port-last and our Men were got on deck as many as could lye one by another, besides the deck full of Men, and all striving to furl that Sail, yet could we not do it, but were forced to cut it all along by the Head-rope, and so let it fall down on the Deck.”

A noticeable thing of their outward run is that they took above five months to sail from the coast of Virginia to abreast of Cape Horn. They got no sights after making Staten Island until they had entered the South Sea, and were obliged to grope their way in their square-built, round-bowed, and clumsy old craft past the stormiest headland in the world, through weather blind with snow and black with cloud, and over seas running in mountains to the pressure of 500 leagues of gale. When to the westward of the Cape they encountered one Captain Eaton in a privateer that had been equipped and despatched from London to plunder the Western American coast, and proceeded with him to Juan Fernandez, where they arrived eight months after leaving Achamack.

Their first act was to send a canoe ashore to obtain news of the Mosquito Indian who had been left on the island three years before by Captain Watling. This Indian, who proved to be alive, is a figure in the history of romantic adventure scarce less conspicuous in his way than Alexander Selkirk or Peter Serrano.

He was in the woods hunting for goats when Captain Watling and his men, alarmed by the apparition of three Spanish ships, slipped their cable and sailed away, and all that he had with him at the time consisted of a gun and a knife, a small horn of powder, and a handful of shot. Afterwards, by notching his knife to the condition of a saw, he contrived to cut the barrel of his gun into pieces, out of which he manufactured harpoons, lances, hooks, and a long knife.

He was thus enabled to provide himself with food, such as flesh of goats, fish, etc. He built himself a hut a short distance from the sea, and lined it with goat-skins. His apparel consisted of a skin wrapped about his waist.