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

Diana; Preston Michael Preston

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385607067 ISBN 13: 9780385607063

Publisher: Doubleday, 2004

Synopsis

Seventeenth-century pirate genius William Dampier sailed around the world three times when crossing the Pacific was a major feat, was the first explorer to visit all five continents, and reached Australia eighty years before Captain Cook. His exploits created a sensation in Europe. Swift and Defoe used his experiences in writing Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe. Darwin incorporated his concept of "sub-species" into the theory of evolution. Dampier's description of breadfruit was the impetus for Captain Bligh's voyage on the Bounty. He was so influential that today he has more than one thousand entries in the Oxford English Dictionary, including such words as chopsticks, barbecue, and kumquat. Anthropologists still use his work.

About this title

About the Author:

Diana Preston is an Oxford-trained historian, writer, and broadcaster who lives in London, England. She is the author of The Road to Culloden Moor: Bonnie Prince Charlie and the ’45 Rebellion and A First Rate Tragedy: Robert Falcon Scott and the Race to the South Pole.

From The Washington Post:

William Dampier is important today for many of the same reasons that made him fascinating to his 17th- century contemporaries. He was a representative man of his time: master navigator and peerless recorder of winds, currents, coastlines, seasonal weather and even magnetic fluctuation in England's great age of exploration. As another biographer of Dampier, W. Clark Russell, remarked, "No skillfuller body of seamen were ever afloat." Although more mariners of his time than might be expected left journals, maps and other writings, Dampier was but one example of the breed, and hundreds of other men lived out similar stories.

The men who became sailors were younger brothers like Dampier -- or poor, reckless characters greedy for wealth, experience and adventure. Dampier knew some Latin. Perhaps his parents did what they could to prepare him for the clergy or the law, but, orphaned at 16, he was instead apprenticed to a shipmaster. His first trips, which this biography by Diana and Michael Preston omits, along with almost all of his early life, were standard experiences: commercial voyages and then a stint in the navy in the Third Dutch War. Dampier's rambling, opportunistic travels, which had him jumping from ship to ship, experiencing sudden destination changes and enduring deprivation, were all common. After serving in the merchant marine and the navy, he became by turns coastal trader, privateer and outright pirate, and he rose to the leadership of two financed expeditions, one by Bristol speculators.

In his sealed bamboo carriers, Dampier preserved botanical and zoological notes, as was expected of a man in his position. As early as the 1660s, the Royal Society asked mariners to do exactly what Dampier did. Books before his, such as Robert Knox's An Historical Relation of Ceylon (1681), organized their chapters according to the Society's categories of knowledge. In contributing to the evolution of lists of what was to be collected, Dampier helped shape his own, Edmund Halley's and others' scientific expeditions.

There are two problems with this biography. First, it is not well written. Dampier's sea life can be divided neatly by his major voyages, but A Pirate of Exquisite Mind is imbalanced toward his first. The prose is often turgid and far too dependent on A New Voyage Around the World, Dampier's first and least impressive book. His slogs on foot through Central America seem endless and pointless. We are not told that buccaneers were usually trying to establish dependable trading contacts and routes or even settlements in parts of the world beyond the laws of any nation. Dampier's ambitions largely conformed to this economic model, as we see, for example, in his attempts to set up as a logwood trader. He and other privateers were also patriots, disrupting the shipping lines of England's enemies, attempting to intercept shipments of gold that paid for war.

The authors are better at narrating his expedition to Australia and make telling points about the contrasts between the culture of buccaneers, with the rules that had evolved to govern independent men on long voyages in close quarters, and that of the Royal Navy. It is not until the authors introduce another privateer, Woodes Rogers, into the narrative and compare him in some detail to Dampier that they establish a smooth, authoritative voice. Even so, they squash this voyage into 14 pages, although it was Dampier's third around the world and took three years.

The second problem is the portrait of Dampier. The Prestons desperately want him to be first and singular. They repeat "first to . . . ," sometimes correctly, but more often not. For example, they want Dampier to be the first European to reach Australia, but their muddled prose suggests that they are straining to obscure the Dutch explorer Janszoon Tasmen. Almost all of their claims about Dampier as a writer are inaccurate. Voyage literature was enormously popular before he wrote -- he joined the second great outpouring. Books such as Knox's, a reprint of Drake's voyages and Alexander Exquemelin's fascinating Buccaneers of America, which Dampier mentions, may have inspired his accounts, as he surely encountered them all when he arrived in London in 1691. Dampier's dedication to A New Voyage claimed he had "a hearty Zeal for the promotion of useful knowledge" (the motto of the Royal Society). As a privateer, he devoted that zeal to his "Country's advantage."

In the Prestons' hands, however, Dampier emerges as irascible and driven by a hunger for gold. In reality, he was a premier example of his time's embrace of empirical methods and desire to explore the entire globe. He explained one of his changes of ships by noting, "It was not from any dislike to my old Captain but to get some knowledge of the Northern Parts of this Continent of Mexico." The authors also leave out other major aspects of his personality, which are apparent in his four autobiographical books. His religion, for instance, is gone, as is the fascination with forms of government that he shared with his contemporaries (including Knox and Exquemelin) in the time when Englishmen remembered a civil war and a republic, and then saw a hereditary monarch displaced by a foreigner. The authors lose sight of his lively sense of humor, the detail that his interest in zoology seems to have been largely culinary and his ability to make himself unnoticeable when that was appropriate. Yet he could not have survived to age 63 had he not been a master of managing intricate situations and avoiding confrontations. The authors' inattention is especially frustrating since, in nearly every respect, Dampier is that best of biographical subjects -- the representative but exceptional person, one who reveals the indomitable spirit and amazing knowledge of the hundreds of men who lived out the same stories but did not find a publisher.

Reviewed by Paula R. Backscheider

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0385607067
• ISBN 13: 9780385607063
• Binding: Paperback