William Dampier - A New Voyage Round the World

WILLIAM DAMPIER (c.16511715) was a pirate and adventurer who was (albeit for chaotic and unintended reasons) the first man to have circumnavigated the globe three times. A New Voyage Round the World (1697), written from notes kept during his first long voyage, was a literary sensation (inspiring Gullivers Travels) and the model for all the great British naturalists and explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His many wanderings took him from the Arctic to the South Pacific. He rescued Alexander Selkirk from his four years in the Juan Fernandez Islands (inspiring Robinson Crusoe). He died back in England, having had one final triumph in successfully piloting a small fleet in the Pacific to capture the treasure-filled Manila galleon.

NICHOLAS THOMAS has been Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology since 2006. He first visited the Pacific Islands in 1984 to research his PhD thesis on the Marquesas Islands and later worked in Fiji and New Zealand, as well as in many archives and museum collections in Europe, North America and the Pacific.

His books include Entangled Objects (1991), Oceanic Art (1995), Discoveries: the Voyages of Captain Cook (2003) and Islanders: the Pacific in the Age of Empire (2010), which was awarded the Wolfson History Prize. He was co-curator of Oceania, a major exhibition of Pacific art, at the Royal Academy in London in 2018.

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This edition published in Penguin Classics 2020

Introduction and other editorial matter copyright Nicholas Thomas, 2020

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover collage by Frances Roper
Images courtesy the Smithsonian Libraries; Rijksmuseum

ISBN: 978-0-241-41329-6

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1651 Dampier baptized on 5 September in East Coker, Somerset

1662 Death of Dampiers father

1668 Death of Dampiers mother

1669 Dampier apprenticed to a master mariner; voyages to France and Newfoundland

16712 Voyage to Bantam (Banten), Java, an East India Company base

1673 Naval service during the Third Dutch War, aboard HMS Royal Prince; Dampier becomes ill and returns to Somerset to recuperate

1674 Travels to Jamaica; works initially at the plantation of Sir William Helyar

16748 Engaged in trading voyages and cutting logwood in Campeche Bay; returns to England; marries Judith

1679 Returns to Jamaica; joins buccaneer squadron led by John Coxon, Bartholomew Sharp and Richard Sawkins

168081 Buccaneers cross the Isthmus and raid the Pacific coasts of Spanish America; Dampier parts company with Sharp and returns across the Isthmus, initially with the surgeon Lionel Wafer, who suffers an injury and is left behind; the detailed narrative of the A New Voyage begins at this point

1682 Dampier resident in Virginia

1683 Joins John Cook on a privateering voyage into the Pacific

16845 Following Cooks death, Dampier is under the command of the buccaneer Edward Davis, cruising and raiding Spanish shipping and settlements

16867 Dampier transfers to the Cygnet under Charles Swan and sails with him across the Pacific; following a period at Mindanao and conflict among the crew, the ship departs without Swan

16878 Cruising off Vietnam, the Philippines and Sulawesi; encounters with Aboriginal people in northern Australia; Dampier leaves the Cygnet at Nicobar and makes an open-boat voyage to Sumatra

168990 Dampier participates in trading voyages between India, China and Sulawesi; takes up employment as a gunner at the British fort at Bencouli

1691 Dampier returns to England, completing the voyage described in this book

5 Lionel Wafer publishes A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America, probably an inspiration to Dampier, as was the English translation of Alexandre Exquemelins Bucaniers of America: the second volume of the London edition of 1685 was in effect a new book by Basil Ringrose, narrating the crossing of the Isthmus by those including Dampier under the command of Coxon, Sharp and Sawkins

1697 The London publisher James Knapton brings out Dampiers New Voyage Round the World; Dampier appointed to a post in the Customs Office

1699 Publication of a supplementary volume to the New Voyage: Voyages and Descriptions, including accounts of Tonkin, Aceh, Campeche Bay and a discourse on trade winds; subsequent editions of the New Voyage incorporate this as a second volume

16991701 Dampier given the command of the Roebuck to explore Australian waters; reaches north Australia and New Britain; the unseaworthy vessel founders at Ascension Island on the voyage home

1702 Dampier court-martialled and found guilty on one count; dismissed from the navy

1703 Publication of A Voyage to New Holland; fifth edition of the New Voyage; Dampier becomes captain of the privateer the St George; unsuccessfully undertakes raids on Spanish shipping; sails to the East Indies but is imprisoned at Batavia, returning to England in 1707

1707 Publication of Captain Dampiers Vindication of His Voyage to the South-Seas in the Ship St George, a response to William Funnells critical narrative of the same voyage in his Voyage Round the World (also 1707)

17081711 Joins the successful privateering expedition of Woodes Rogers in the Duke

1709 Publication of A Continuation of a Voyage to New Holland, primarily describing island southeast Asia

1715 Dampier dies in early March, at the age of sixty-three

William Dampiers A New Voyage Round the World, first published in 1697, belonged to a very old genre, but was a breathtakingly new book. Travel literature, and narratives of sea voyages in particular, had been around for centuries. Pre-eminent among anthologies was Richard Hakluyts