Preface

Dampier’s New Voyage on its publication won immediate success.

• It has since maintained its place in the front rank among the most notable records of maritime adventure.
• It stands midway between the epic tales of Hakluyt and the official narratives of the world voyages of Anson and Cook.

As a record of buccaneering, it comes between the applauded filibustering of Hawkins and Drake and the condemned piracy of the eighteenth century.

The stories of the buccaneers are on the verge of romance. On an episode in the life of one of them Defoe founded one of the great romances of all time–“a most circumstantial and elaborate lie,” as Leslie Stephen calls it, “for which we are all grateful.”

No buccaneer’s story has had anything like the popularity of Robinson Crusoe: but it may be noted that when Defoe essayed to tell lying tales of pirates such as Captain Avery, founded on Dampier and other writers of fact, the subsequent popularity has been with the true story.

In his Preface, Dampier describes his book as “composed of a mixed relation of places and actions,” a modest and inadequate indication which would hardly be approved by the advertising experts of the present day. The relation of places was, in fact, an extensive contribution to the geographical and ethnographical knowledge of his time.

Nor does the description take count of the frequent excursions in the realm of natural history which diversify the main story with detailed accounts of tropical animals and plants, not highly scientific indeed, but accurate for the most part and novel to his readers.

Another more general description is that of the title page, “A voyage round the world.” A reader must presume from such a title some intention of circumnavigation at the start, and some continuous prosecution of the aim. Dampier, however, left England without any purpose of rounding the globe, and apparently had no mind to do so until, after many years of devotion to other pursuits, he found himself already halfway home. His was no single voyage, rather the haphazard resultant of episodical voyages, some only of which were in the line of circumnavigation; in the course of these voyages he must have sailed in a dozen ships, apart from canoes and other boats. He accomplished the grand tour, however, a feat which in his time could with luck have been achieved in two years–it took him twelve and a half.

Many men who recount adventures in which they have borne a part describe fully their own actions and conduct; some with a particularity trying to the reader’s patience. Dampier is not one of these. In the New Voyage, which began when he was 27, he says nothing of his previous life and throughout shows a too strict reserve in regard to his share in the events related. To enable readers of the present volume to form some estimate of the man a sketch of his life, however inadequate, has to be provided. The details of his subsequent career, which includes a second circumnavigation and two other notable voyages, would be hardly appropriate here. They will not be touched further than seems necessary for an appraisement of Dampier’s conduct and character.

LIFE BEFORE THE NEW VOYAGE

All that is known of Dampier’s early life is told by himself in the first chapter of his Voyages to the Bay of Campeachy.

He was born in the earlier half of 1652, the son of a farmer at East Coker, near Yeovil. His father died in 1662, and his mother in 1668. His parents had designed him for commercial life; he was sent to school, probably at Yeovil, and attended the Latin class. On the death of his mother his guardians “took other measures” and “removed me from the Latin school to learn writing and arithmetic,” in other words, transferred him to the Modern Side. A year or so later, having had “very early inclinations to see the world,” he was apprenticed to the master of a Weymouth ship and with him made a voyage to France and then to Newfoundland. He was “pinched with the rigour of that cold climate” and set his heart on a long voyage in summer seas. Soon after his return to London his chance came and, now 19 years of age, he embarked on a voyage to Bantam, serving before the mast. Returning home early in 1672, he spent the rest of the year with his brother in Somersetshire.

He soon tired of home life and the Second Dutch War was now afoot. Dampier enlisted and fought under Sir Edward Spragge in his first two engagements. A day or two before the third, in which Sir Edward was killed, he fell sick and after a long illness went home to his brother. There a neighbouring gentleman, Colonel Hillier, made him an offer of employment in the management of his plantation in Jamaica under a Mr. Whalley, and he set forth in the Content of London, working his passage as a seaman, under agreement for his discharge on arrival. This he deemed necessary lest he should be “trepanned and sold as a servant after my arrival in Jamaica.” For six months he worked with Mr. Whalley on the plantation “16-Mile walk,” i.e. from Spanish Town: then took service under Captain Heming on his plantation at St. Ann’s, in the north of the island. He soon left an employment in which, as he says, he was clearly out of his element, and spent some months in trading cruises round the island, during which he “came acquainted with all the ports and bays about Jamaica and with their manufactures, as also with the benefit of the land and sea-winds.” He thus early began his habits of close observation of men and nature. Now also began his practice of keeping a journal, which he had omitted in his voyage to Bantam.

Between 1675 and 1678 Dampier spent about two years in cutting and loading log-wood on the Bay of Campeachy, an occupation which he seemed to have enjoyed. The resistance of Spain to foreign intrusion was becoming feeble, and Dampier reckons there were 270 Englishmen engaged in the log-wood trade. “It is not my business,” he adds, “to determine how far we might have a right of cutting wood there.” He did not, however, get rich on it, and at length in straightened circumstances was constrained to take a turn with some privateers along the gulf as far as Vera Cruz. For a short time he resumed work at Campeachy, thence returning to Jamaica and back to London (August 1678). He gave himself only a six months’ leave, during which he married Judith* —-, from the household of the Duke of Grafton (see below). It does not appear that they had any children, and nothing more is known of the wife till some 25 years later. He had to work for his living and now projected another expedition to Campeachy–“but it proved to be a voyage round the world.”

(Footnote. Her Christian name appears in a codicil to a revoked will of 1703.) HIS FIRST CIRCUMNAVIGATION.

(*Footnote. The following writers were comrades of Dampier in parts of the voyage. The extent to which they are more or less synoptical is shown by reference to the chapters of this book. (1) Basil Ringrose, Part 4 of the History of the Buccaneers, Sloane Manuscripts 3820 (Dampier, Introduction and Chapters 1 to 3); (2) Lionel Wafer, New Voyage and Description, etc., 1699 (Dampier, Introduction and Chapters 1 to 3); (3) William Ambrosia Cowley, Voyage round the World, 1699 (Dampier Chapters 4 to 5); (4) Bartholomew Sharp, Voyages and Adventures, in the Dampier Voyages, 1727, Sloane Manuscripts 45, 46B (Dampier, Introduction and Chapters 1 to 3); (5) John Cox, An account of our Proceedings, etc., Sloane Manuscripts 49 (Dampier, Chapters 1 to 3).) As has been noted the circumnavigation was a haphazard tour interrupted by digressions as accidental and whimsical as some in the Autobiography of Tristram Shandy. For the convenience of the reader I have divided the whole into eight stages, each of which is a more or less separate cruise, defined by change of direction, ship or captain.