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.