A Pirate of Exquisite Mind—Explorer, Naturalist, and Buccaneer: The Life of William Dampier

Natural History, June, 2004 by Laurence A. Marshall

A Pirate of Exquisite Mind--Explorer, Naturalist, and Buccaneer: The Life of William Dampier by Diana and Michael Preston Walker & Company, 2004; $27.00

Piracy--both buccaneering and privateering--was a viable career choice in seventeenth-century England for young men such as William Dampier. With mercantile expansionism at its peak, the ships and colonies of Spain and France could be judged not as honest business enterprises but as legitimate targets in an economic war. To those with adventurous souls but little tolerance for military discipline, shipping out with a crew of marauders was an attractive option. Many crews even practiced a form of participatory democracy, electing their captains and apportioning their sometimes considerable booty by common consent. True, the life of a pirate might be a trifle risky and a bit unsavory, but it appealed to the same sort of entrepreneurial character who, two hundred years later, might have felt at home in the boiler room of a powerhouse brokerage, or the office of a start-up dot-com.

Even so, Dampier was hardly your run-of-the-mill cutthroat, dreaming only of Spanish gold. In two decades of cruising the Caribbean and the Pacific--even during shipwrecks and in the midst of fierce exchanges of cannon fire--he was never without his pen and his journals. Steamy jungles and mangrove swamps, sources of misery to his shipmates, to him were wonderlands of exotic plants and animals. While ashore, he savored unusual foods with the locals and carefully described their methods of building, hunting, and dress. While at sea, he sketched the coastlines, reckoned distances between landmarks, and carefully observed the winds and the tides. He had, if not the training, the mind and the soul of a great naturalist.

Had Dampier remained an errant adventurer all his life, no one might have known of his brilliant powers of observation. But when he returned to England, in 1691, he set to work preparing an account of his exploits. The resulting book, A New Voyage Round the World, handsomely illustrated with maps and drawings, was published in London in 1697, and a sequel appeared two years later.

Written as engaging narratives, Dampier's books were immediate best sellers, combining eloquent descriptions with colorful impressions. "The armadillo," he wrote,

is enclosed in a thick shell, which guards all its back.... The head is small with a nose like a pig, a pretty long neck, and [the animal] can put out its head before its body when it walks; but on any danger she puts it under the shell, and drawing in her feet she lies stock-still like a land-turtle. And though you toss her about she will not move herself.

For the record, he added, "the flesh is very sweet and tastes much like a land-turtle."

Dampier's books, and his later accounts of his travels as a bona fide explorer (he made two more trips around the world after the publication of his first two books), were as scientifically substantial as they were entertaining. He was the first Englishman to explore Australia, and he had the finest knowledge of ocean currents and wind patterns of anyone of his day.

The Oxford English Dictionary cites Dampier as the source of more than a thousand English words, many of them related to food: avocado, barbecue, and cashew begin the Dampier ABCs. Captain James Cook read Dampier during his travels in the late 1700s, as did Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin in the 1800s. Dampier's "exquisite mind," the epithet Samuel Taylor Coleridge recorded in his book of essays The Table Talk and Omniana, provided the title for Diana and Michael Preston's new biography.

These days Cook, Darwin, and Humboldt are all well-known figures, but Dampier's fame, for some reason, seems to have faded. The Prestons, accordingly, have interwoven accounts of contemporary travelers into Dampier's story, to provide the modern reader with a fuller account of his career.

Yet Dampier's driving spirit remains a mystery. He spent so much of his life away from home that virtually all we know of him as a person is what we read in his books. Even though Diana and Michael Preston have not unearthed any remarkable new insights about Dampier the man, their appreciative biography may revive an interest in Dampier the writer. Perhaps then, another generation will read his travel books with renewed amazement and admiration.

LAURENCE A. MARSCHALL, author of The Supernova Story, is the W.K.T. Sahm professor of physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software education in astronomy.