An experienced pilot and navigator of the South Sea, it was proof of his cunning that the Spaniards feared his name. He was a strategic thief, an able chronicler of what he saw, and a store of information. He interrogated prisoners: how many families were in their town, what guns, lookouts, small arms and sentinels did they have, were they ‘Copper-colour’d as Malattoes, Musteseos or Indians’, were they rich, what did their riches consist of, what were the chief manufactures of the region, where was the best landing, was there a river or creek nearby, could the area be attacked without notice…
He always took the Pilot-books of ships he captured. ‘These we found by Experience to be very good Guides’ and he charted the ‘Trade Winds, Breezes, Storms, Seasons of the Year, Tides and Currents’.
In all my Cruisings among the Privateers, I took notice of the risings of the Tides; because by knowing it, I always knew where we might best haul ashore and clean our ships.
He kept journals of his Cruisings and in 1697 an edited version of these, A New Voyage Round the World, went into four editions. Its title-page lured with the scope of his travels:
the Isthmus of America, several Coasts and islands in the West Indies, the Isles of Cape Verd, the Passage by Terra del Fuego, the South Sea Coasts of Chile and other Philippine and East-India Islands near Cambodia, China, Formosa, Luconia, Celebes, &c. New Holland, Sumatra, Nicobar Isles; the Cape of Good Hope, and Santa Helena.
Here were undreamed-of places, journeys of wonder and terror, beyond the reach of most. Safe in their Armed chairs, Dampier’s readers might brave a tornado in a canoe ‘ready to be swallowed by very foaming Billow’, survive storms that ‘drenched us all like so many drowned Rats’, hear how undrowned rats aboard ship ate the stores of maize, how men died of scurvy and ‘malignant fever’, got eaten by sharks, attacked by snakes and murdered by the Spaniards ‘stripped and so cut and mangled that You scarce knew one Man’.
Dampier offered his readers quotidian detail, casual cruelty and wild adventure. Plunder was the goal, but he was a keen observer. He interspersed his accounts of pillage and arson with lessons in ethnography, anthropology, hydrography and natural history. He described the anatomy and behaviour of a shark and drew its picture, before advising how to eat it: boiled, squeezed dry, then stewed with vinegar and pepper. The guanos of the Galapagos Islands were ‘so tame that a Man may knock down twenty in an Hour’s Time with a Club’. Giant tortoises were fat and sweet to eat and stayed semi-alive and edible for days if turned on their backs. Turtle doves were so trusting ‘that a Man may kill 5 or 6 dozen in a Forenoon with a Stick’.
Dampier had eaten monkeys, penguins, locusts and anything that moved. Flamingoes, he wrote, made
very good Meat, tasting neither fishy nor in any way unsavoury. Their tongues are large, having a large Knob of Fat at the Root, which is an excellent Bit, a Dish of Flamingoes Tongues being fit for a Prince’s Table.
His readers might learn the practicalities of careening a ship, or of mending sails, the logistics of finding a harbour or of ransacking a town. He told them of the symptoms of scurvy, the supposed influence of the moon on tides and how in a storm to furl the mainsail and ballast the mizzen. He wrote of sago trees, of vanilla pods drying in the sun, of antidotes for the stings of scorpions, of the Natives of Guam ‘ingenious beyond any other People in making Boats or Proas’ so swift and streamlined they could travel at twenty-four miles an hour, of war dances and pageants that celebrated the circumcision of eleven-year-old boys on the island of Mindanao: ‘The Mahometan Priest takes hold of the Fore-skin with two Sticks and with a pair of Scissors snips it off.’
Dampier was circumspect about sex. For the more refined of his crew it was barter. They had their Delilahs or Black Misses, hired for a trinket or a silver wrist band. More often it was rape, unwanted offspring and abandonment. Tawny-coloured children of uncertain English paternity, were born on board ship to black slaves. At Mindanao, where ‘the Natives are very expert at Poisoning’ two sailors were murdered when they ‘gave Offence through their general Rogueries and by dallying too familiarly with Women’. The ship’s surgeon dissected their corpses and revealed livers as black as cork.
For all their scandal and revelation, Dampier’s journals were selective. In England he courted acceptance in respectable circles. Piracy was punished on the gallows. He did not want it broadcast that he had assisted in mutiny, kept company with rogues, connived at the rape of women and the abuse of prisoners. In the Chancery Courts in London, down the years, testimony accrued against him for being indecisive, capricious, heedless of consultation and cruel.
A ‘vexatious’ voyage under his captaincy, in 1698, in the Roebuck to ‘ye remoter part of the East India Islands and the neighbouring Coast of Terra Australis’ concluded with the mutiny of his crew, the sinking of the ship, a court martial on his return to England and the verdict of the Court that ‘the said Captain Dampier is not a Fitt person to be Employ’d as commander of any of her Majesty’s ships.’†
In particular he was found guilty of ‘very Hard and cruell usage’ towards his first lieutenant George Fisher. He had belaboured him with a stick, confined him in irons ‘for a considerable time’, imprisoned him on shore ‘in a strange Countrey’, then sent him home. By way of justification, Dampier claimed that Fisher railed at him for hours, ‘shaked his Fist att me, Grind in my Face, and told me that he cared not – for me… called me Old Dog, Old Villain, and told my men, Gents take care of that Old Pyrateing Dog for he designs to Run away
