William Dampier

2-1

IFE—CAMPECHé—HE J

his own career when it comes to a question of dates and adventures. The interest of this sailor's life really begins with his own account of his first voyage round the world; and though he is a very conspicuous f

urn from the Newfoundland voyage, he heard of an outward-bound East Indiaman named the John and Martha, the master of which was one Earning. The idea of what he calls a “warm voyage” suited him. He offered himself as a foremast hand and was accepted. The voyage was to Bantam, and he was away rather longer than a year, during which time he says he kept no journal, though he enlarged his knowledge of navigation. The outbreak of the Dutch war seems to have determined him to stay at home, and he spent the summer of the year 1672 at his brother's house in Somersetshire. He soon grew weary of the shore, and enlisted on board the Royal Prince, commanded by the famous Sir Edward Spragge, [6] under whom he served during a part of the year 1673. He fought in two engagements, and then falling sick a day or two before the action in which Sir Edward los

y all Englishmen, and on the vessel dropping anchor, numbers of them flocked aboard clamorous for liquor. “We were but 6 Men and a Boy in the Ship,” says Dampier, “and all little enough to entertain them: for besides what Rum we sold by the Gallon or Ferkin, we sold it made into Punch, wherewith they grew Frolicksom.” It was customary in those times to shoot off guns when healths were drunk, but in Dampier's craft there was nothing [Pg 18] but small-arms, “and therefore,” he says, “the noise was not very great at a distance, but on Board the Vessels we were loud enough till all our Liquor was spent.” Dampier was well entertained by these fellows ashore. They hospitably received him in their wretched huts, and regaled him with pork and peas and beef and dough-boys. He thought this logwood-cutting business so profitable, and the life so free and pleasant, tha

of the devotion of the booby to its young, of the sharks, sword-fish, and “nurses,” of the seals, and the Spaniard's way of making oil of their fat. In this little voyage Dampier and his mates suffered a very great deal of hardship. They ran short of provisions, and must have starved but for two barrels of beef which had formed a portion of their cargo for purposes of trucking, but which proved so rotten that nobody would buy them. Of this beef they boiled every day two pieces; their peas were consumed and their flour almost gone, and in order to swallow the beef they were forced t

he cabin, and a great bowl of punch [Pg 20] was brewed to regale them as well as their entertainers. Dampier says there might be six quarts in it. Mr. Hooker, being drunk to by Captain Rawlings, lifted the bowl to his lips, and pausing a moment to say that he was under an oath to drink but three draughts of strong liquor a day, he swallowed the

to prison or to a servitude harder than slavery. Logwood was then worth [Pg 22] fourteen or fifteen pounds a ton. The toil must have been great, for some of the trees were upwards of six feet round, and the labourer had to cut them into logs small enough to enable a man to carry a bundle of them. Dampier speaks also of the bloodwood which fetched thirty pounds a ton, but he does not tell us that he dealt with it. He speedily found employment amongst the logwood-cutters. On his arrival he met with six men who had one hundred tons of the wood ready cut, but not yet removed to the creek side. These fellows offered Dampier pay at the rate of a ton of the wood per month to help them to transport what they had cut to the water. The work was laborious. They had not only to transport the heavy timber, but to make a road to enable them to convey it to the place of shipment. They devoted five days a week to this work, and on Saturdays employed themselves in killing cattle for food. During one of these hunting excursions Dampier came very near to perishing through losing his way. He started out alone with a musket on his shoulder, intending to kill a bullock on his own account, and wandered so far into the woods that he lost himself. After much roaming he sat down to wait till the sun should decline, that he might know by the course it took how to direct his steps. The wild pines appeased his craving for drink, otherwise he must have perished of thirst. At sunset he started afresh, but the night, coming down dark, forced him to stop. He lay on the grass at some distance from the woods, in the hope that the breeze of wind that was blowing would keep the mosquitoes from him; “but in vain,” says he, “for in less than an Hour's time I was so persecuted, that though I endeavoured to keep them off by fanning [Pg 23] myself with boughs and shifting my Quarters 3 or 4 times; yet still they haunted me so that I could get no Sleep.” At daybreak he struck onwards, and after walking a considerable distance, to his great joy saw a pole with a hat upon it, and a little farther on another. These were to let him know that his companions understood that he was lost, and that at sunrise they would be out seeking him. So he sat down to wait for them; for though by water the distance to the settlement was only nine miles, the road by land was impracticable by reason of the dense growths coming down to the very side of the creek where Dampier sat waiting. Within half an hour after his arrival at the poles with the hats upon them, “his Consorts came,” he says, “bringing every Man his Bottle of Water, and his Gun, both to hunt for Game and to give me notice by Firing that I might hear them; but I have known several Men lost in the li

er than a Cat: Its Head is much like a Foxes; with short Ears and a long Nose. It has pretty short Legs and sharp Claws; by which it will run up trees like a Cat. The skin is covered with short, fine Yellowish Hair. The flesh is good, sweet, wholesome Meat. We commonly skin and

bout the thing he describes than from a dozen pages of modern writing on the subject supplemented even by illustrations. It was wonderland to him, as it had been to other plain and sagacious sailors before h

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was already seasoned to hardships of even a severer kind than was promised by a life of piracy. For, as we have seen, he had out-weathered the bitter cold of Newfoundland, he had worked as a common sailor before the mast, he had served against the Dutch, he had knocked about in Mexican waters in a vessel as commodious and seaworthy as a Thames barge, and he was now fresh from the severe discipline of the logwood trade. His associates consisted of sixty men, who were divided between two vessels. Their first step was to attack the fort of Alvarado, in which enterprise they lost ten or eleven of their company. The inhabitants, who had [Pg 27] plenty of boats and canoes, carried away their money and effects before the fort yielded, and as it was too dark to pursue them, the buccaneers were satisfied to rest quietly during the night. Next morning they were surprised by the sight of seven ships which had been sent from Vera Cruz. They got under-weigh and cleared for action. But they had no heart to fight; which is intellig

of. He was then, it now being about Christmas, 1679, about to sail again for England, when a Mr. Hobby persuaded him to venture on a short trading voyage to what was then termed the country of the Mosquitoes, a little nation which he describes as composed of not more than a hundred men inhabiting the mainland between Honduras and Nicaragua. Dampier consented; he and Mr. Hobby set out, and presently dropped anchor in a bay at the west end of Jamaica, where they found a number of privateersmen, including Captains Coxon, Sawkins, and Sharp. These men were maturing the scheme of an expedition of so tempting a character that the whole of Mr. Hobby's men quitted him and went over to the pirates. Dampier stayed with his companion for three or four days, and then j

as Ringrose candidly admits, to pillage and plunder in those parts. But they do not appear to have arrived off the coast until April 1680, this being the date given by Ringrose, who says that there they landed three hundred and thirty-one men, leaving a party of sailors behind them to guard their ships. They marched in companies; Captain Bartholomew Sharp's (in whose troop, I take it, [Pg 30] was Dampier) carried a red flag, with a bunch of white and green ribands; Captain Richard Sawkins's company exhibited a red flag striped with yellow; the third and fourth, commanded by Captain Peter Harris, bore two cream-coloured flags; the fifth and sixth a red flag each; and the seventh a red colour with yellow stripes, and a hand and sword thereo

rt of New Jerusalem to the imaginations of these men, who thought of it as half-formed of storehouses filled to their roofs with plate, jewels, and gold. They stayed two days at Santa Maria, and then on April 17th, 1680, embarked in thirty-five canoes and a periagua, and rowed down the river in quest of the South Sea, upon which, as Ringrose puts it, Panama is seated. Their adventures were many; their hardships and distresses such as rendered their energy and fortitude phenomenal even amongst a community who were incomparably gifted with these qualities. Ringrose, whose narrative I follow, was wrecked in the river by the oversetting

the others by the commanders of the expedition, cannot be ascertained. When Ringrose wrote, Dampier was still a mere privateersman, a foremast hand, a man without individuality enough to arrest the attention of the sturdy, plain, and honest historian of the voyage in which they both took part. Indeed, there is no reason to suppose that Dampier at this time was regarded by his fellows

ien Indians is a story of some interest. About fifteen years before Dampier crossed the Isthmus a certain Captain Wright, who was cruising in those waters, met with a young Indian lad paddling about in a canoe. He took him aboard his ship, clothed him, and, with the idea of making an Englishman of him, gave him the name of John Gret. Some Mosquito Indians, however, begged the boy from Captain Wright, who gave him to them. They carried him into their own country, and by and by he married a wife from among them. Through the agency of this John Gret, who always preserved an affection for the English, a friendship was established between the buccaneers and the Indians. Presents were made on each side, and a certain secret signal was concerted whereby the Indians might recognise their English friends. It happened that there was a Frenchman among one of the buccaneering captain's crew. He was artful enough to commit this signal, whatever it was, to memory, and on his arrival at Petit Guavres he communicated what he knew to his countrymen there, and represented the facility with which the South Seas might be entered now that he had the secret of winning over the Indians to help him. On this one hundred and twenty Frenchmen formed themselves into a troop, with the buccaneer, whom Dampier calls Mr. la Sound, as their [Pg 34]

ontribution of eleven hundred militiamen. Such was the Panama of which our handful of audacious buccaneers were coolly proposing the sacking, and doubtless the burning. It seems, however, that when they arrived most of the soldiers were absent, and Ringrose tells us that had they attempted the town at once instead of attacking the ships in the bay, they must have made an easy conquest. The desperate energy, the hot and furious courage, of an earlier race of pirates were wanting in them. They lingered long enough to enable the city to render its capture impracticable, and then, feigning a sentimental interest in the condition of the Indians, they despatched word to the Governor that if he would suffer the natives to enjoy their own “power and liberty,” and send to the buccaneers five hundred pieces of eight for each man, and one thousand pieces of eight for each commander, t

that he would guarantee that every man who stayed with him should be worth a thousand pounds by the time he arrived in England. This scheme of cruising in the South Sea against the Spaniards had been Sawkins's fixed project, and he was so great a favourite that had he lived it is probable the whole of the crew would have accompanied him; but Sharp did not enjoy the general confidence of his people, and a number of the men sullenly and obstinately refused to linger any longer in these waters. Ringrose was amongst those who were weary of the hazardou

, and rolled great stones down upon them, but no man was hurt; whilst to the explosion of a single musket every visible Spanish head was instantly ducked out of sight. Much that strikes one as marvellous in the achievements of the buccaneers in the South Sea vanishes when one thinks of the abject cowardice of the American Spaniards. Had their troops been composed of priests and old women, they could not have fled with livelier hysterical nimbleness from the sight of the English colours. The picture is humiliating, though it is not wanting in the ridiculous. [Pg 38] All through the buccaneering annals, as in Anson's and the voyages of others, one is i

e which he took in the Armada of this sea, distributing it to each Man of his Company by whole Bowls full. The Spaniards affirm to this Day that he took at that Time twelvescore Tons of Plate, and sixteen bowls of coined Money a Man; his number bei

cious King (or rather his father) who now reigneth, to supply him in his exile and distress, but that this great and rich ship was lost by keeping along the shore in the Bay of Manta above mentioned or thereabouts. The truth whereof is much to be questioned.” Be his stories true or false, however, it is pleasant to sail in the company of an old seaman who has an anecdote to fit every bay or headland of the coast along which he jogs. Unhappily Ringrose, who begins very wel

se in the town [Pg 40] to the end that the whole place might be reduced to ashes. Before the ship sailed she was very nearly burnt by a curious Spanish stratagem. A horse's hide was blown out with wind to the condition of a bladder. A man got upon it and silently paddled himself under the stern of the privateer, between whose rudder and sternpost he crammed a mass of oakum, brimstone, and other combustible matter. This done, he softly fired it with a match and sneaked awa

p being deposed. A number of the crew wanted to go home at once; others were for remaining in those seas until they had got more money. A man [Pg 41] named John Watling, an old privateer and a seaman of experience, was chosen in the room of Sharp. It was shortly after this that the buccaneers were alarmed by the unexpected apparition of three men-of-war. They instantly slipped their cables and stood out to sea, leaving behind them in their hurry that famous Mosquito Indian, of whom it is uncertain whether it was to his or to Selkirk's adventures that Defoe owed the idea of Robinson Crusoe.

buccaneers were off that town, and ninety-two men going ashore attacked the place with incredible fury. We read of them filling every street in the city with dead bodies. In a short time Captain Watling was shot through the heart, whilst there were slain besides two quartermasters and so many of the men that further efforts were rendered hopeless. The survivors appealed to Captain Sharp to lead them out of their difficulties and get them back to the ship. The enemy surrounded them, they were in great disorder, and there was no one to command them. Sharp, bitterly resenting their behaviour to him, which had led to his being supplanted by Watling, hesitated. “But,” says Ringrose, “at our earnest request and petition he took up the command-in-chief again, and began to distribute his orders for our safety.” They succeeded in fighting their way to the b