The Buccaneer’s Wake

The Malacca Strait was the thoroughfare to riches for many a buccaneer, including William Dampier. Credit: Kevin Green

This feature article originally appeared in AFLOAT Magazine and forms part of our latest edition of boating features exploring maritime history, sailing adventures and legendary ocean voyagers.

It’s the early days of our arrival in Australia, 1999, and I’m bouncing through the Kimberley bush tracks in a 4WD with Bardi man Nippy. We are heading north to visit members of his clan. Just like the clans of my Scottish homeland I realise they go a long way back. “But probably not 60,000 years, laughs Nippy!”. Western Australia was the first part of our lap of the continent, so there had been plenty of comments from my wife and son and as we gazed from our campervan at this wild, desert-like region. Surprisingly, the 200-year-old names of colonial Australia seemed to predominate, despite the aforementioned “60,000 years”. One name in particular followed us up that wild Western Australia coast and into the Kimberley – Dampier. A name I encountered again when Nippy and I pulled up at the Beagle Bay Mission to collect some boxes of fruit for the Broome market and where we met Father John, who told me more about William Dampier. He is thought to be the first Englishman to have landed on the shores of Australia, aboard the buccaneer ship Cygnet in January 1688. Later that night we drove north on red dirt tracks snaking their way through the Kimberley bush and camped near King Sound, where Dampier’s crew had stayed for two months. It’s a wide bay of big tides and myriad islands where Nippy and I went mudcrabbing and netted creeks for fish, while dodging the big salties that lay in wait for the unwary. Dampier was unimpressed with the scrubby, arid land and with Nippy’s ancestors who he described as “the miserablest people of the world”. Nevertheless, Dampier would return to these coasts in August 1699 as captain of the HMS Roebuck on what was the first ever dedicated scientific mission commissioned by the English government.

The more I read about Dampier, the more fascinated I became because he was a most remarkable man. It turned out we’d crossed wakes in various places across the world; albeit 500 years apart. Places like the coasts of Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, Latin America and the English west country where we both lived for periods of time. Reading his journals is enthralling, as are the three books drawn from his circumnavigations – making him the first man to achieve such a feat. A true polymath: oceanographer, cartographer, scientist, sailor, botanist and early travel writer, Dampier was ahead of his time. The latter was perhaps why he is largely forgotten in England, as his biographer Diana Preston suggests. Whereas many parts of Western Australia are attributed to him and his ships, such as Roebuck Bay at Broome and the various archipelagos. Of course, his day job of buccaneer and pirate was frowned upon by parts of the English establishment; at least by those who didn’t profit from those enterprises.

West countryman

Born just south of Bristol, where I lived for seven years in the 80s. I would often pass Dampier’s village of thatched cottages at East Croker while driving south to windsurf off Weymouth. This bustling port on the English Channel boasts one of the largest harbours in England. As I skimmed over the waves near the tide race at Portland Bill, 500 years earlier, Dampier was departing these same waters as a 17-year-old junior merchantman.

Our next encounter would be off the bulge of Africa when the 95-foot schooner I was engineer on limped in to the arid Cape Verde Islands in November 1989 during a rough transatlantic voyage. Dampier had arrived in September 1683 during his first buccaneering circumnavigation; a voyage that required leaving his newlywed wife Judith to fend for herself for 12 years. Salt drew his crew to these Portuguese islands, notorious for their part in the transatlantic slave trade. Yet, Dampier the naturalist recorded the beauty of the flamingos and even the delicacy of their flesh. His overriding motive was a thirst for knowledge, as his journal recorded: “to more indulge my curiosity than to get wealth”.

After crossing the Atlantic, we’d both chance our hands in the Caribbean. By the time I arrived there (delivering yachts) Dampier’s pirate stronghold of Port Royal, Jamaica – once dubbed “the wickedest city on earth” – had been destroyed by an earthquake. The lure of the region lay in attacking ships along the Spanish Main and plundering the gold-rich cities of Latin America.

One of the richest was Granada, in present-day Nicaragua – a country I later called home for a year. Here, I encounter Dampier’s ghost again, alongside indigenous Miskito paddling canoes up the Río San Juan through dense jungle – the country has one of the largest wildernesses outside the Amazon Basin. I was on a solo expedition paddling down river in my corrugated tin canoe, made from an old roof sheet. I like to imagine we’d have met for a rest halfway because both of us portaged at the rapids below El Castillo; the Spanish castle built to repel the very pirate raids that Dampier featured in. Perhaps we exchange a few words as the tall, long-haired Dampier in his broad Somerset accent grills me for information about Granada. Dampier and the pirate crew were in a hurry because they had a long paddle ahead, across one of the largest lakes in South America – Lake Nicaragua – to sack Granada; which they did in April 1685. Today, it remains a beautiful city of cobbled streets and grand spires, set against a backdrop of smouldering volcanoes.

Lexicographer

Dampier’s later adventures included crossing the Panama isthmus and South America, before rounding Cape Horn, where he explored parts of the east Pacific, including the Galapagos Islands. His flora and fauna observations prompted the coining of the phrase ‘sub species’, adopted by Darwin 100 years later. He also contributes around 1,000 words to the Oxford English Dictionary – a tally surpassed only by Shakespeare. The lure of exploration brought Dampier to join another ship off Mexico, the Cygnet, for a crossing of the Pacific. The aim was to raid the Spanish Philippines and the Portuguese spice galleons. This voyage required Dampier’s excellent navigation skills using his Backstaff for latitude calculations, allowing the ship to run down her westing with dead reckoning used mainly for longitude; a Pacific route that gave him a clear shot at reaching the popular destination of Guam Island, as a precursor to the Philippines.

At sea, Dampier did extensive studies of winds and currents. This knowledge would eventually be recorded in his publication, A Discourse of Trade Winds, Breezes, Storms, Tides and Currents, that would be used by Von Humboldt, Nelson, Cook and many others. In it, he rightly described how trade winds affected currents, and he even created wind maps of the oceans with arrows (like modern day GRIBs). He also noted the existence of major currents, such as the Gulf Stream. Dampier did this by actually being there, experiencing conditions and recording with impressive clarity. Also among his various scientific studies, was magnetic variation; Dampier showing that it did not follow the meridians as previously believed. Both commercial ventures and the British Admiralty would later use Dampier’s information extensively.

Asia would prove to be a fascinating and dangerous place for Dampier and his crew, with mutiny, disease and skirmishes. The Cygnet, which operated under a privateer’s licence from the English government, turned to piracy. Dampier was swept along, unwillingly, until being marooned in the Indian Ocean Nicobar Islands in May 1688. Here, we would cross wakes yet again during an intrepid small craft voyage. Dampier and some Sumatran crew made a storm-ridden 120-mile crossing of the Andaman Sea in the Monsoon Season, using only a canoe he fashioned with outriggers and palm mat sail. In a far less daring parallel, I was crewing across this sea on an 80-foot carbon maxi yacht during the Raja Muda Race. In this region we’d have encountered one another in various islands, mostly along the Malacca Strait. On one voyage the owner put our crew up in the fabulous Eastern & Orient Hotel in Penang, an old British East India Company base. The company had earlier employed Dampier at the south end of the Strait where he was gunnery officer at Benkulu, formerly Fort York. Dampier’s myriad skills included practical knowledge of nutrition and medicine; treating himself for ‘dropsy’ (vitamin B1 deficiency) several times and recognising the causes of scurvy, the scourge of long sea voyages.

Journals

After his return to England in 1691, Dampier edited his journals and sought a publisher, which led to A New Voyage Round the World (1697). Biographer Diana Preston considers his journals to be fairly well self-censored, the Englishman treading a fine line between incriminating himself in piracy while also giving detailed accounts of actions and places visited. A New Voyage is his most famous work, which describes travels across the Isthmus of Panama, the West Indies and his first visit to Australia (then New Holland). The book is believed to be an inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. The comprehensive information and clear writing style won him many fans, including First Lord of the Admiralty and famous diarist Samuel Pepys, who Dampier dined with. The Admiralty gave him captaincy of the aforementioned HMS Roebuck to revisit New Holland. He would have charted Australia’s east coast long before Captain Cook, except for the Roebuck rotting-out, prompting Dampier to head for home. On the way, Roebuck limped into Ascension Island, mid-Atlantic where she sunk. Centuries later, Dampier’s Australian legacy prompts the Western Australian Maritime Museum to sponsor excavation work on the wreck in 2001, retrieving several items including the ship’s bell.

Pieces of Eight

Dampier was known to be enigmatic, fastidious and quick tempered, yet he had a great instinct for survival. The dangers of the 16th century seafarer are unimaginable but he survived to the ripe old age of 63. Dampier’s last circumnavigation was to be his most lucrative with gold and silver, yet he didn’t live to enjoy the rewards. Historians debate if this actually was his fourth complete circumnavigation but it seems so by many accounts. It was a privateering voyage sponsored by Bristol merchants. Bristol was then a prominent city, second only to London in the 17th century, with the slave trade a significant part of its wealth. Echoes of this legacy confronted me in the early 1980s when I experienced race riots involving Bristol’s West Indian community, descendants of plantation slave labourers.

Sailing down the Avon Gorge and into the boisterous Bristol Channel on an outgoing tide is a dramatic departure, as Dampier would have found when sailing master of the 30-gun Duke in August 1708. This ship was accompanied by the 26-gun Duchess. After piloting his charges round Cape Horn, and various trials and mutinies, Dampier eventually hit the jackpot. His fleet captured the famous ‘Manila Galleon’, the Spanish treasure ship Nuestra Señora de la Encarnación y Desengaño, off the coast of Mexico. The prize was immense, containing jewels, silver, and valuable spices like cinnamon and cloves; estimated at over £150,000 at the time. Yet, after returning home, financial bickering ensued between investors denying Dampier his share of the fortune. Thus, this brilliant buccaneer, whom Samuel Taylor Coleridge described as a “rough sailor but a man of exquisite mind”, died impoverished in an unknown grave around 1715; but what a remarkable life.

This feature article originally appeared in AFLOAT Magazine. To explore more stories like this, browse the AFLOAT Magazine archive or view the latest edition of AFLOAT Magazine.