William Dampier

VENTEENTH CENTURY—FEATURES OF THE V

antaloons of coarse linen cloth, which they steeped in the blood of the animals they slaughtered. They wore round caps, boots of hogskin drawn over their naked feet, and belts of raw hide, in which they stuck their sabres and knives. They also armed themselves with firelocks which threw a couple of balls, each weighing two ounces. The places where they dried and salted their meat were called boucans, and from this term they came

war against the buccaneers, vowing expulsion or extermination. Both sides fought fiercely. The Spaniard had discipline and training; on the other hand, the buccaneer had the art of levelling as deadly a piece as the Transvaal Boer of to-day. The struggle was long and cruel; the Spaniards eventually conquered, and the hunters, quitting San Domingo, sought refuge in the adjacent islands. In spite of their defeat, troops of the buccaneers contrived from time to time to pass over into San Domingo from their head-quarters in Tortuga, where they hunted as before, and brought

as navigators, greatly lightened the blackness of the old traditions. But the buccaneers of the Spanish Main,—the men who are the principal figures in the annals of the freebooters, the people whose lives are contained in such narratives as those of Joseph Exquemeling, De Lussan, De Montauban, Captain Charles Johnson, in Von Archenholtz's brief but excellent history, and in other works,—were rogues and ruffians without parallel in the history of villainy. They owned indeed many extraordinary qualities, which, exerted in honest fields of action, might have been deemed virtues of a high kind. Their courage was great, their achievements wo

were absolute masters.” [1] To this order belongs that race of English buccaneers of whom Dampier may be advanced as the most conspicuous example. They possessed all the high-spirited qualities, the daring, the courage, the endurance of the Morgans and Bats and Brazilianos, but they were seldom or never wantonly cruel; they burned, they sacked, as freely as the others; they pillaged churches with as little compunction; poverty and sickness pleaded to them in vain when, with firelocks in one hand and firebrands in the other, they thundered through th

and admirers in plenty. Happily Dampier's chief claims upon the attention of posterity are based upon adventures of a very different

the difficulties of the old sailors and honour their triumphs justly. In the first place, their ships were so unwieldy that it was scarcely possible to get them to beat against the wind, or, to use the old-fashioned term, to “ply.” An example of this will be found in Anson's Voyage. [Pg 6] It is there recorded that the Centurion's consort, the Gloucester, was descried on June 21st from the island of Juan Fernandez some eight or ten miles to leeward, beating or reaching into the bay. The

ove their topsails, though the topgallant-sail had long been introduced, as we know by a passage in Sir Walter Raleigh's Remains. [2] Their sterns were high and pink-shaped—that is, broad at the water-line and narrowing at the taffrail. They were built with deck upon deck in the after-part, the topmost being called the “topgallant-deck” by the English, and the

Hugh Willoughby to be protected with thin sheets of lead to guard against the worm “which many times pearceth and eateth through the strongest oake”; [3] but I cannot discover that this example was continued, and it is at least certain that the vessels commanded by Dampier and his buccaneering companions breasted the surge with no other coating on their bottoms than pitch and tallow. Hence in all long voyages there was frequent occasion to careen, practicable only by tedious deviation [Pg 8] in search of a convenient place, and by wearisome detention, that the hull might be listed over and the accumulation of shells and weed removed. Another formidable difficulty lay in the scurvy. This is a distemper still with us, but in those days it was incredibly fa

as it was to be ascertained at regular intervals by “heaving the log,” and by allowing for leeway and difference of courses. In Captain Thomas James's Strange and Dangerous Voyage in the years 1631-32 [4] there is included a list of the instruments provided by him for his undertaking to discover the north-west passage into the South Sea. A few of the items will furnish the reader with a tolerable idea of the primitive character of the nautical implements with which the mariner in the days of James, and later yet in the days of Dampier, embarked on his voyages into the remotest parts of the world in quest of new lands or in search of short cuts. James begins the list with “a quadrant of old-seasoned pear-tree wood, artificially made and with all care possible divided with diagonals, even to minutes. It was a four-foot at least (semi-diameter).” Next: “An equilateral triangle of light wood, whose radius was five-foot at least, and divided out of Petiscus's table of tangents.” “A quadrant of two-foot semi-diameter of light wood and with like care projected.” Then: “Four staves for [Pg 10] taking altitudes and distances in the heavens.” The captain also took with him “a sta

in those days as Waggoner. [5] Sir Thomas Browne, writing in 1664 to his son Thomas, a naval officer, says, “Waggoner you will not be without, which will teach the particular coasts, depths of roades, and how the land riseth upon the several points of the compass.” It will not be supposed that Waggoner's instructions were very trustworthy. The art of surveying was scarcely understood; charts even in Dampier's time were absurdly ill-digested, and portions of the world are barely recognisable in the grotesque tracings. Therefore it happened that the early mariner was

more closely those points which have long since slided into the dull prosaics of the deep. No one can follow them without wonder and admiration. We find them in crafts of forty, twenty, even ten tons—boats half-decked and undecked—exploring the frozen silence of the North Pole, beating to the westward against the fierce surge of the Horn, seeking [Pg 13] land amidst the vast desolation of the southern ocean, and making new history for their country upon the coast of North America and in the waters of the Mozambique. Their lion-hearts carry them all over the world, and they have nothing to help them but the lead-line over the side and a quadrant big enough to serve as a gallows. Nor was the ocean quite as it is now. In Dampier's time it was still gloomy with mysteries, and there lingered many a dark and terrifying superstition, whose origin was to be traced to those early Portuguese and Spanish sailors who chanted a litany when they saw St. Elmo's Fire glittering at the masthead, and exorcised the demon of the waterspout by elevating their swords in the form of crosses. The mermaid still rose in the tranquil blue waters alongside, and with impassioned eyes and white and wooing arms courted the startled seaman to share her coral pavilion at the bottom of the sea. The enchanted island, steeped in the purple splendour of a radiance that owed nothing of its glory to the heavens, was yet to be discovered by seeking. The darkness of the storm was thronged with gigantic shadowy shapes of fleeting spirits. Amid the

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