I.

Introduction

William Dampier (1652-1715), English navigator, explorer, and buccaneer, who, despite his controversial career, has gained a reputation as a brilliant pioneer hydrographer whose logs of his voyages are of lasting importance.

II.

Early Life

Dampier was born in May 1652 in East Coker, Somersetshire, the son of a tenant farmer. A seaman at the age of 16, Dampier was assistant manager of a plantation in Jamaica in the West Indies at the age of 22, then foremast hand on a lumber ketch bound from Jamaica for Campeche in New Spain, and from 1675 to 1678 alternated between lumbering in Central America and buccaneering in the Caribbean Sea. In 1679, after a brief return to England, he crossed the Isthmus of Panama in the course of a piratical expedition along the Pacific coast of South America from present-day Mexico to Chile.

III.

Voyage Around the World

From his next voyage, a circumnavigation of the world, Dampier emerged as an important explorer and hydrographer. Sailing from Virginia to Africa and back to Cape Horn in 1683, he crossed the Atlantic Ocean twice, then crossed the Pacific Ocean to the present-day Philippines and China, sailed south to the Australian coast and Sumatra, and finally, in 1691, reached England. Throughout the voyage he made meticulous surveys, charts, and logs. Published as Voyage Round the World (1697) and Voyages and Descriptions (1699), they excited interest in the seas they described.

IV.

Voyages for the Admiralty

As a result, the English Admiralty office sent Dampier in 1699 on a voyage of exploration to the South Seas. Charting currents and the coastline, Dampier explored Australia and New Guinea. He named New Britain upon discovering that it was an island; he also discovered and named Dampier Archipelago, a group of islands off northwestern Australia, and Dampier Strait, which lies between New Britain and Umboi Island. He described this voyage in Voyage to New Holland (1703-1609).

V.

Last Privateering Voyages

In spite of the fact that a court-martial in 1702 found Dampier guilty of cruelty to his subordinates, he was put in command of a two-vessel privateering expedition to the South Seas in 1703. A member of the crew on this voyage, the Scottish mariner Alexander Selkirk, who had quarreled with a superior officer, asked to be marooned in the Juan Fernández Islands; thus began the adventures that inspired the English novelist Daniel Defoe to write the classic tale of Robinson Crusoe (1719). Dampier's expedition, which lasted four years, was financially unsuccessful; upon their return to England, his crew charged Dampier with cowardice, brutality, and drunkenness. As a result of these charges, he made only one more privateering expedition, this time restricted to serving as a pilot, from 1708 to 1711; in the course of this voyage Selkirk was rescued. Dampier died penniless in March 1715 in London.