THE VOYAGE OF THE ROEBUCK

Dampier tells us nothing of his private and home-going life after he carries us to sea with him in the Loyal Merchant, and so little is known of that side of his career that there is no means of supplying his omissions except by conjecture.

It is pretty certain that he was very needy when he returned from his first voyage round the world. The value of his Dorsetshire estate cannot be guessed, but even if he still retained it, his views and endeavours are at this time those of a poor man.

In the first volume of his Travels, as we have seen, he treats of New Holland as a privateersman would,—glances, to use his own metaphor, at the fringe of the carpet without desire to examine the texture or the body of it, and quickly shares the disgust of his shipmates, whose dreams are wholly of plunder. But on coming home and reflecting, whilst setting about the writing of his Travels, on the land he had sighted in the distant southern ocean, it is conceivable that ambitious thoughts should begin slowly to fill his mind.

The world at large at that time [Pg 86]barely credited the existence of a continent south of the East Indies. The draughts of Tasman, the relations of De Quiros, Le Maire, and others, were regarded for the most part as travellers’ tales. Dampier might justly hope in an age when the colonising instincts of the English were never keener, that money and honour must be the reward of the man who should be the first to open out a country fabulous yet in the judgment of mankind, and, by the light of discovery, resolve what was still visionary and dark into a magnificent reality.

His next step, at all events, was to seek ministerial and official help for a voyage of discovery to New Holland. He lived in the days of Dryden and of the patron, and his dedications exhibit him as possessed in a high degree of the art of literary congeeing. This undesirable but profitable capacity of cringing serviceably supplemented the reputation he had made for himself as a traveller.

He found patrons in Charles Montague, afterwards Earl of Halifax, President of the Royal Society, and one of the Lord Commissioners of the Treasury; in Edward, Earl of Oxford, one of the principal Lords of the Admiralty; and in Thomas Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, who filled the office of Lord High Admiral. His representations were successful, probably beyond his own expectations, and in the beginning of the year 1699 he was appointed to the command of His Majesty’s ship Roebuck of 12 guns, manned by a crew of fifty men and boys, and victualled for a twenty months’ cruise. Confidence, such as this trust implies, in the character and qualifications of a man whose rating even as a privateersman was but that of an able seaman, handsomely testifies to the very high opinion in which Dampier was held.

The nature of the soil, climate, and the general character of Terra Australis, Dampier could only conjecture. The ideas he had formed of this unknown continent were, that it was a vast tract of land situated in the richest climates in the world, having in it especially all the advantage of the torrid zone, so that in coasting it the navigator might be sure of meeting with broad areas productive of the rich fruits, the drugs and spices, and perhaps the minerals discoverable in other parts in, as he concluded, the same parallels of latitude.

His scheme was to narrowly survey all islands, shores, capes, bays, creeks, and harbours, fit for shelter as well as defence, to take careful soundings as he went, to note tides, currents, and wind, and the character of the weather, with a special view to the settling of the best districts. He also proposed to closely observe the disposition and commodities of the natives, though he candidly admits that after his experience of their neighbours “he expected no great matters from them.”

The course he originally designed to take was to the westward by way of the Straits of Magellan, so as to strike the eastern coast of Australia; and there is very little doubt that had he pursued his first intention he would have anticipated nearly every discovery of importance in those waters subsequently made by his celebrated successor James Cook. Unhappily his judgment erred in one essential direction. He was of opinion that the lands lying nearest the equator would best repay the explorer.

Nor perhaps could he guess how far he would have to penetrate the high latitudes if he stood south; and having passed the greater portion of his seafaring life in Mexican, Pacific, and Indian seas, his love of the sun, fortified by [Pg 88]recollection of the cold of the Horn and of the one bitter voyage he took to Newfoundland, might suffice to determine him on pinning his faith as an explorer and on limiting his curiosity as a sailor to the summer regions of the globe.

Yet his great knowledge of the equatorial climates should certainly have warned him against a Northern Australian and New Guinea quest. Further, there were the experiences of Tasman to help him, whose relations are as finger-posts in the extracts of Dirk Rembrantz. Had he steered westwards, the sighting of the New Zealand coast to the south, or of the shining islands of the Paumotu and other groups to the north, would have borne in the truth upon his ready and sagacious mind, corrected his fears of cold weather, given him clear views as to the southernmost extension of the Terra Incognita, and perhaps have antedated the civilisation of Australia by half a century.

In an evil moment, intimidated by thoughts of the ice of Tierra del Fuego, and worried by the murmurs and half-heartedness of a crew, the majority of whom were quite young seamen, “only two in the ship ever having passed the Line, and those two none of the oldest,” he determined to prosecute his voyage to New Holland by way of the Cape of Good Hope.

He sailed from the Downs on January 14, 1699.

His intention was to proceed to Pernambuco, and thence directly to the coast of New Guinea; but scarcely had a month elapsed when the crew began to give trouble, to mutter their dislike of the proposed voyage, and even to talk of obliging him to return to England. At Pernambuco, owing to the distance of the anchorage from the town, the men would have found it easy to slip the vessel’s cables and run away with her; and not choosing to venture any risk of this kind, Dampier steered for Bahia de Todos los Santos.

This was a considerable trading-port in his time, formed of about two thousand houses. He found upwards of thirty large ships lying in the bay, and speaks of a busy traffic in linen and woollen goods, in hats and silk stockings, in biscuit, wheat, flour, and port wine.

His closeness of observation is once again exhibited in all that he has to say about this place. Nothing escapes him. He gives you a long catalogue of all the vegetables and fruits of the district, of the birds, beasts of prey, dogs, monkeys, hogs, and the like, and then comes to the sea, from which he produces a list of twenty-three different kinds of fish.

He sailed on April 3rd, and made a fair course for the coast of New Holland. The quality of the reckoning of even an expert mariner in those days may be gathered from his telling us that, seeing a large black bird flying near the ship, he suspected that he was much nearer the Cape of Good Hope than he had imagined, since it was well understood that this sort of bird is never to be met with farther than 90 miles from land.

By his own account, he was two hundred and seventy miles from the Cape; but next day, meeting a vessel named the Antelope, bound to the East Indies from Table Bay, he found that L’Agulhas bore only twenty-five leagues distant.

The inaccuracy of the computations of those times must needs excite the wonder of our own age of exact science. In Matthew Norwood’s System of Navigation, “teaching the whole Art in a way more familiar, easie and practical than hath been hitherto done,” published in 1692, though from internal evidence I gather it to have been compiled in 1683-84, there is a catalogue of the longitudes and latitudes “of the most principal places in the world, beginning from the meridian of the Lizard of England.”

The latitude, as a rule, is tolerably approximate, but the longitude is very much otherwise. For instance, the Cape of Good Hope is said to be in 34° 24´ S. latitude, and in 25° 33´ E. longitude.

Cape Frio is put down as in 22° 55´ S. latitude, and 33° 59´ W. longitude. Cape Blanco is entered as 47° 30´ S. latitude, 62° 52´ W. longitude! [15] These are representative of the whole of this singular table of calculations. Yet Norwood was greatly esteemed as a navigator, and his book was to be found in most ships’ cabins.

It is amazing that the early mariners were not perpetually blundering ashore. By what secret instincts they were advised I know not; yet it is certain they made as little of being a hundred miles out of their course without knowing it, as we should in these days of an error of the length of a ship’s cable.

Dampier continued to sail to the eastwards, and on July 25th signs unmistakable of the neighbourhood of land were witnessed in the form of quantities of floating seaweed and moss; but it was apparently not until August 2nd that the coast hove into view, on which date Dampier says, “We stood in towards the land to look for an harbour to refresh ourselves, after a voyage of 114 degrees from Brazil.” They coasted for a few days in vain search of a secure anchorage, and then observing an opening of the land they made for it, and [Pg 91]brought up in two fathoms and a half of water.

This opening Dampier called Shark’s Bay, a name it has ever since retained. [16] He makes this bay to lie in 25° S. latitude and 87° longitude E. from the Cape of Good Hope, “which is less,” he says, “by a hundred and ninety-five leagues than is laid down in the common draughts.”

He paints a pretty picture of his first view of this place, telling us of sweet-scented trees, of shrubs gay as the rainbow with blossoms and berries, of a many-coloured vegetation, red, white, yellow, and blue, the last preponderating, and all the air round about very fragrant and delicious with the perfumes of the soil. The men caught sharks and devoured them with relish,—a hint not only of very bad stores, but of provisions growing scarce; for disgusting as the salt-beef of the sea becomes after a long course of it, he must have a singular stomach and a stranger appetite who will choose shark in preference. One of the fish they captured was eleven feet long, and inside of it they found the head and bones of a hippopotamus, the hairy lips of which were still sound “and not putrefied.”

The jaw was full of teeth, two of them eight inches long and as big as a man’s thumb; “The flesh of it was divided among my Men, and they took care that no Waste should be made of it, but thought it as things stood, good Entertainment.”

They remained in Shark’s Bay till the 10th, fruitlessly searching for fresh water; then coasting north-east, they fell in with a number of small rocky isles called Dampier’s Archipelago, in latitude south about 20° 30´, and about 116° 30´ E. longitude. Here Dampier was so much struck with the character of the tides that he concluded there must be a passage to the south of New Holland and New Guinea to the eastward into the Great South Sea. His meaning is not clear, but then he is in the situation of a man who fires at a mark in the night; he misses, but the ball speeds in the right direction.

Their pressing want was fresh water. Gangs of men were repeatedly sent ashore to seek it, but to no purpose. Their first sight of the natives was on August 31st. All sorts of signs of peace and friendship were made, but their gesticulations were probably too violent, and might even have grown alarming as contortions, and the wild men fled, menacing Dampier and his people as they ran. The only sort of intercourse they succeeded in establishing was a conflict. One of the barbarians was shot dead and an English sailor wounded.

Dampier says, speaking of these natives, that they had the most unpleasant looks and the worst features of any people he ever saw, “though,” says he, “I have seen a great variety of Savages.” He judges that these New Hollanders were of the same race as the people he had previously met with in his first voyage round the globe, “for,” he exclaims, “the Place I then touched at was not above forty or fifty Leagues to the N.E. of this, and these were much the same blinking Creatures; here being also abundance of the same kind of Flesh-flies teasing them, and with the same black Skins and Hair frizzled, tall, thin, etc., as these were; but we had not the Opportunity to see whether these, as the former, wanted two of their fore Teeth.” It seems to me that he blackened his portraits of these uncomely people for the same reason that we find him later on describing the country sourly as though there had been little or nothing to admire.

I mean with the wish to render the failure of his voyage less disappointing to his patrons at home. In short, he writes as if he would have people suppose that New Holland is a savage and worthless land, inhabited by loathsome monsters. One of the native princes he describes as painted with a circle of white pigment about his eyes, and a white streak down his nose, from the forehead to the tip of it.

The breast and a portion of the arms were also whitened with the same paint. If Dampier do not exaggerate, then these embellishments which he portrays, supplementing the natural hideousness of the savages, might well cause the youthful Jack Tars who filled his forecastle to imagine themselves upon one of those enchanted, demon-haunted lands, from which the ancient mariner of the legends was wont to sail away with trembling despatch, his hair on end and his eyes half out of his head.

“If it were not,” writes Dampier, “for that sort of pleasure which results from the Discovery even of the barrenest spot upon the Globe, this coast of New Holland would not have charmed me much.” There is little of the enthusiasm of the explorer in this avowal; all through his career, in fact, Dampier exhibits himself as a man of caprices easily diverted from his first intentions, quickly sickened by failure, though never discomfited by the harshest sufferings or by the most formidable difficulties, so long as he can keep himself in spirits by the assurance of some approach to good fortune attending the issue of his adventure.

Probably he was now willing to believe of New Holland, despite the wise conjectures with which he vitalised his early scheme, that all that remained to [Pg 94]be seen was no better than what he was now viewing. Or, the length of time his voyage had already occupied had provided him with plenty of leisure for the contemplation of his prospects, and he was beginning to think that he had been misled by his original impulse, and that there was neither dignity nor profit to be got out of a toilsome survey of an obscure, remote, inhospitable coast. One sometimes likes to think of the return amongst us of such a man as this.

If one could summon the dead from their sleep of centuries that they might behold the issue of the labours of the generations whose processions filled the time between their Then and our Now, it would be such old navigators as Dampier whom one would best like to arouse. Think of Cabot and Cartier going a tour through the United States, of Columbus taking ship by an ocean mail-steamer to the West Indies, of Bartholomew Diaz listening to the eloquence of South African legislators in the House of Assembly at Cape Town, of Mark de Niza at San Francisco, of Tasman at Hobart Town! As we watch Dampier digging for water amid the sand-hills of the Western Australian seaboard, the reality of the living present becomes a wonder even to us who are familiar with it.

The shining cities, the flourishing towns, the radiant congregation of ships flying the flags of twenty different nationalities, every fruitful, every busy condition of commerce, manufacture, science, art, literature, entering into and stimulating the life of the highest form of human civilisation, are as miracles and as dreams to us standing in imagination by the side of the lean figure of this buccaneer, quaintly apparelled in the boots, belt, and broad hat of his old calling, and gazing with him on a land whose silence is broken only by the cries of unfamiliar creatures, by the murmur of the wind among the leaves of a nameless vegetation, and by the solemn wash of the ocean surge arching in thunder upon a shore that, to the minds of hundreds and thousands away in far-off Europe, is as unreal and illusive as the islands of Plato and More. What heart would have come to our stout navigator with but the briefest of all possible prophetic glimpses into the future of that great continent on whose western sands he searches for water, reluctant, dubious, half-dismayed!

There was much, however, it must be admitted, to dishearten him. The behaviour of his crew was causing him anxiety; and about this time the scurvy broke out amongst the men. Moreover, though his people hunted diligently for fresh water, their labours were unrewarded. So Dampier determined to shape a course for Timor, if, to use his own language, he “met with no refreshment elsewhere.” He had spent altogether about five weeks in cruising off the coast, covering in all, as he calculates, a range of 900 miles, but without making any sort of discovery that was in the least degree satisfactory to himself. He started afresh with the intention to steer north-east, keeping the land aboard, as sailors say. His chief and perhaps only desire at that time was to fill his casks with fresh water.