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English Men of Action
WILLIAM DAMPIER
[Illustration: PUBLISHER'S LOGO]
First Edition 1889. Reprinted 1894
[Illustration: WILLIAM DAMPIER]
WILLIAM DAMPIER
by
W. CLARK RUSSELL
London
Macmillan and Co.
And New York
1894
All rights reserved
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
THE BUCCANEERS—NAVIGATION IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY—FEATURES OF
THE VOCATIONAL LIFE OF THE EARLY MARINER 1
CHAPTER II
DAMPIER'S EARLY LIFE—CAMPECHÉ—HE JOINS THE BUCCANEERS, 1652-1681 15
CHAPTER III
DAMPIER'S FIRST VOYAGE ROUND THE WORLD, 1681-1691 44
CHAPTER IV
THE VOYAGE OF THE “ROEBUCK,” 1699-1701 85
CHAPTER V
THE VOYAGE OF THE “ST. GEORGE,” 1702-1706-7 107
CHAPTER VI
THE VOYAGE WITH WOODES ROGERS, 1708-1711 138
CHAPTER VII
CONCLUSION 183
CHAPTER I
THE BUCCANEERS—NAVIGATION IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY—FEATURES OF
THE VOCATIONAL LIFE OF THE EARLY MARINER
In or about the middle of the seventeenth century the island of San
Domingo, or Hispaniola as it was then called, was haunted and overrun
by a singular community of savage, surly, fierce, and filthy men. They
were chiefly composed of French colonists, whose ranks had from time to
time been enlarged by liberal contributions from the slums and alleys
of more than one European city and town. These people went dressed in
shirts and pantaloons 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 to be styled bucaniers, or buccaneers, as
we spell it. They were hunters by trade, and savages in their habits.
They chased and slaughtered horned cattle and trafficked with the
flesh, and their favourite food was raw marrow from the bones of the
beasts which they shot. They ate and slept on the ground, their table
was a stone, their bolster the trunk of a tree, and their roof the hot
and sparkling heavens of the Antilles.
But wild as they were they were at least peaceful. It is not clear
that at this stage, at all events, they were in any way associated
with the freebooters or rovers who were now worrying the Spaniards in
those seas. Their traffic was entirely innocent, and it was assuredly
the policy of the Don to suffer them to continue shooting the wild
cattle without molestation. Unfortunately for themselves, the Spaniards
grew jealous of them. They regarded the West Indies and the continent
of South America as their own, and the presence of the foreigner was
intolerable. They made 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 away with them as much cattle
as sufficed them to trade with. The Spaniards lay in ambush, and shot
the stragglers as they swept past in chase; but this sort of warfare
proving of no avail, it was finally resolved to slaughter the whole
of the cattle throughout the island, that the buccaneers should be
starved into leaving once and for good. No act could have been rasher
and more impolitic. The hunters finding their occupation gone, went
over to the freebooters, and as pirates, as their history shows, in a
short time abundantly avenged their indisputable wrongs.
Novelists and poets have found something fascinating in the story of
the buccaneers. The light of romance colours their exploits, and even
upon the maturest gaze there will linger something of the radiance with
which the ardent imagination of boyhood gilds the actions and persons
of those fierce sea-warriors. It is unhappily true, nevertheless,
that the buccaneers were a race of treacherous, cruel, and profligate
miscreants. Their name was at a later date given to, or appropriated
by, such men as Clipperton, Cowley, Dampier, Woodes Rogers, and
Shelvocke, whose behaviour as enemies, whose skill and heroism as
seamen, and whose discoveries 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 wonderful,
their fortitude worthy of noble causes, their capacity of endurance
unrivalled in sea story. No skilfuller body of seamen were ever
afloat. But their history is loathsome for the cruelties it relates.
Olonois or Lolonois, Braziliano, Morgan, Bat, Le Grand, and others
famous as pirates, were monsters whose like is nowhere to be matched.
The relation of their sailings and landings and marchings, their
assaults, pillagings, defeats, and triumphs, is a sickening narrative
of barbarities; but it must be admitted, coupled with extraordinary
examples of courage in some instances absolutely sublime, and of
unconquerable resolution.
It was inevitable that the successes of these pirates should prove a
temptation to English seafaring men. Small vessels were fitted out in
British ports or the Colonies, and sailed for the West Indian Seas
to pillage the Spaniard wherever he might be found on land or water.
Often it happened, as Harris, the editor of a voluminous collection
of voyages, tells us, that crews were embarked and pilots engaged
without being apprised of the object of the voyage, “and nothing was
said about the true design until they were at sea, where they (the
captains) 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 the deserted street and marked their progress with flaming
houses. But when human life was in their power they respected it; they
fought and behaved as though the king's flag flew over their heads;
there was something of the sentiment of honourable naval warfare in
their lawlessness; and to their credit let this stand, that though they
professed themselves as no more than privateersmen, their behaviour
will certainly bear comparison with the state-sanctioned and instructed
conduct of the officers and crews of the expedition under Commodore
Anson.
But my business is with Captain William Dampier only. Morgan and the
cut-throats who preceded or followed him have found apologists and
admirers in plenty. Happily Dampier's chief claims upon the attention
of posterity are based upon adventures of a very different kind from
those which rendered buccaneering one of the most infamous pursuits
that the wickedness or misery of mankind ever invented.
It is impossible to appreciate the intrepid seamanship of the early
navigators without first taking a view of the art of navigation as it
was in their time, and understanding the shapes, bulk, and rigs of the
vessels in which they cruised in search of plunder or started on long
voyages of discovery. In these days one is so used to the facilities
of science for traversing the deep with swiftness and certainty, that
it is necessary to bend the mind with some severity of thought to
compass 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_. 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 weather thickened and she disappeared. Five days
afterwards she again hove in sight, and for a whole fortnight she was
stretching away first on one, then on the other tack, in vain effort to
reach the island; nor was it until July 23rd that she was able to enter
the bay, and then only because the wind had shifted, and permitted
her to head for her destination with a flowing sheet. Thus for above
a month was this ship striving to get to windward and traverse three
leagues on a taut bowline!
The old vessels were cumbrously rigged. At the head of their lower
masts they carried huge round tops as big as a ballroom. Forward their
bowsprit was encumbered with massive spritsail and sprit-topsail
yards. Their sides were loaded with great channels embellished with
enormous dead-eyes for setting up shrouds as thick as hawsers. They
seldom exposed canvas above 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 “poop-royal”
by the French and Spaniards; with the consequence that they were
dangerously deep-waisted, though with their extraordinary height of
side aft they floated, to the eye, like castles. As if this were not
enough, the structure where it was loftiest was crowned with enormous
poop-lanthorns of a size to hold “wind enough to last a Dutchman a
week!”
Structures thus shaped—the length rarely exceeding three times the
beam—and propelled by low-seated canvas, could do little or nothing
against head-winds and seas; and as a result the old narrators are
repeatedly telling us that they were forced to _hull_, or _try_,—in
other words, to heave their ship to, often in breezes in which a
sailing vessel of to-day would expose a topgallant-sail over a
single-reefed topsail. A succession of favourable gales would indeed
put life into the clumsy waggons and furnish them with some sort of
despatch, but as a rule the passage that is now made in sixty days was
hardly completed by the early navigators in a twelvemonth. Their ships
were unsheathed. It is true that Sebastian Cabot caused the ships under
the command of Sir 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 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 fateful. Few ships from Europe managed to pass the Horn
without the loss of half, and often two-thirds, of their crews from
this dreadful scourge. The “chirurgeons” could do nothing. There was no
remedy but to bring up off some fruitful coast and send the men ashore.
Whenever practicable this was done; but often it happened that the
ship's company were dying in fives and tens every day, with the vessel
herself a thousand miles out upon the ocean. The old navigators overdid
their pickling. The brine they soaked their meat in made it harder
and less nourishing than mahogany before they were out of the English
Channel. Of all the wonders of the early voyages none surprises me so
much as the capacity of the people to subsist upon the victuals shipped
for them.
In Dampier's time navigation as an art had scarcely made a stride since
the days of Columbus and the Portuguese discoverers. The instruments
for measuring the sun's altitude were the astrolabe, the cross or
forestaff, and Davis's backstaff,—engines for mensuration ludicrously
primitive, as will be supposed when viewed side by side with the
sextant of to-day. The mariner made shift with these contrivances to
determine his latitude within a degree or two, but he had no means of
ascertaining his longitude. There were no chronometers, there was no
portable Greenwich time, no aids whatever towards the solution of what
was regarded down to the days of Maskelyne and the Commissioners of
Longitude as the greatest marine problem that ever perplexed the mind.
Apparently the old practice was to run down the parallels and then make
direct easting or westing for the desired destination. Or they took “a
departure,” as it was called, from any point of land, and calculated
the meridians by the log. Or, as an alternative, the early navigators
employed dead-reckoning, as we still practise it—that is, they found
out a vessel's place on the chart by putting down her rate of sailing
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 taking altitudes
and distances in the heavens.” The captain also took with him “a staff
of seven-feet long, whose transom was four-foot divided into equal
parts by way of diagonals that all the figures in a radius of 10,000
might be taken out actually.” “Another of six-foot near as convenient
and in that manner to be used. Mr. Gunter's cross-staff, three Jacob's
staves projected after a new manner and truly divided after the table
of tangents, two of Mr. Davis's backstaves with like care made and
divided.” These were the captain's instruments for measuring the height
of the sun. Other items comprised “six meridian compasses ingeniously
made; four needles in square boxes; four special needles (which my good
friends Mr. Allen and Mr. Marre gave me) of six inches diameter, and
toucht curiously with the best loadstone in England; a loadstone to
refresh any of these if occasion were, whose poles were marked for fear
of mistaking.” Further, Captain James carried a watch-clock, “a table
every-day calculated, correspondent to the latitude according to Mr.
Gunter's directions in his book, the better to keep our time and our
compass to judge of our course.” A chestful of mathematical books, the
Collections of Purchas and Hackluyt, and “two pair of curious globes.”
Such was the scientific equipment of a man bound on a Polar voyage in
the year 1632. It is not to be supposed that such mariners as Dampier
and his buccaneering associates went half as well furnished. Indeed
their poverty in this direction was so great that one may read here
and there of their employing their leisure on shipboard in making
quadrants to replace those which were lost or worn out. Their Norie,
Raper, and Nautical Almanac in one was the crude _Speculum Nauticum_
of Wagener, made English by Anthony Ashley in 1588, and universally
known by the seamen 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 forced to depend upon his own
judgment and experience to a degree scarce realisable in these days of
exact science and matured inventions. He hardly understood what was
signified by the variation of the compass, and there was very little
outside the Pole Star that was not doubtful. But happily for him there
was no obligation of hurry. There was no managing owner to worry him.
Prompt despatch was no condition of the charter-party. His was the day
of ambling, and he was happy if he could confirm with his lead and
log-line the reckonings he arrived at with his forestaff.
It is proper to remember all these conditions of the sea-vocation in
reviewing the life of William Dampier. The habit of self-reliance
makes the character of the sea-worthies of his age admirable, and it
qualified them for their great undertakings and achievements. They were
helped with nothing from science that can be mentioned with gravity.
The ocean was to them as blank as it looks to the landsman's eye,
and it was their business to find out the roads to the wonders and
mysteries which lay hidden leagues down behind its familiar shining
line. If a sailor nowadays is at fault he can seek and find the hints
and assurances he desires in twenty directions. He has Admiralty charts
of incomparable accuracy. He has a deep-sea lead with which he can
feel the ground whilst his ship moves through the water at fourteen
knots an hour. He has instruments for indicating the angle to which
his vessel rolls, and for showing him instantly her trim as she sits
upon the water. He has a dial that registers on deck, under his eye,
the number of miles his ship has made since any hour he chooses to time
her from. His chronometer may be accepted as among the most perfect
examples of human skill. Dampier and such as he wanted all these
adjuncts to their calling. But it cannot be disputed that they were the
better sailors for the very poverty of their equipment in this way.
It forced upon them faith in nothing but their own observation, so
that there never was a race of sailors who kept their eyes wider open
and examined 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 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 tranquillity of the midnight calm, dim fiery
figures of undeterminable proportions floated in the black profound,
and voices as of human creatures could be heard out of the hush on the
deep syllabling the names of the listening and affrighted crew. It is
true that the Jack of Dampier's time was not so amazingly superstitious
as we find him in the pages of Purchas and Hackluyt. He was not quite
so young-eyed as the ancient mariner of the Elizabethan and preceding
ages. Nevertheless he was still exceedingly credulous, and he never
embarked on a voyage into distant parts without a mind prepared for
marvels of many sorts. Also let us remember the shadowiness of the
globe whose oceans he was to navigate, the vagueness of countries now
as well known to us as our own island home. Australia was rising upon
the gaze of the world like a new moon, the greater part of whose disk
lies in black shadow. Islands which now have their newspapers and
their hotels were uncharted, were less real than the white shoulders
of clouds dipping upon the sea-line. Of countries whose coast had been
sighted, but whose interiors were unknown, wild guesses at the wonders
within resulted in hair-stirring imaginations. These and more than
there is room to name are conditions of the early mariner's vocational
life, which we must take care to bear in mind as we accompany him
in his adventures, or certainly we shall fail to compass the full
significance of his magnificent resolution, his incomparable spirit,
and his admirable intrepidity.