PIRATE AND PIONEER

Evening Star, Issue 20255, 16 August 1929, Page 3

PIRATE AND PIONEER

ENGLAND'S FIRST AUSTRALIAN EXPLORER “ 1 dined with Mr Pepys,” wrote John Evelyn on May 0, 1698. “ where was Captain Dampier, who had been a famous buccaneer, bad brought hither the painted prince Job. and printed a relation of his very strange adventures.- ’ . As Mr Cennell Wilkinson shows in ‘ William Dampier,’ romantic indeed was the life of this dour Somerset mariner, who fought in Charles il. s Navy, singed the Spanish King’s beard ashore and afloat as a buccaneer, thrice circumnavigated the globe, and rescued Alexander Selkirk from his lonely exile on Juan Fernandez Yet as an explorer Dampier failed, for, though m the Roebuck he examined the western coasts of Australia, surveyed Southern. New 1 * Guinea, and discovered New Britain. he missed a golden opportunity of putting the Southern Continent on the map a century before Cook, MAKING FRIENDS WITH BUCCANEERS. As a boy Dampier made three trading voyages, then fought as a volunteer in the Navy, and at twenty-two was sent to Jamaica to manage a plantation., from which he soon escaped back to the sea. Among the logwood-cutters of Campoachy he made friends with the buccaneers, who, at this period, were regarded as pursuing an almost respectable calling, many of them piously observing Sundays. Two years of beetle adventure as a buccaneer enabled Dampier to settle in Virginia, a prosperous man', but his money was soon dissipated. and he joined a buccaneering expedition which sailed in 1633 and took him round tho world. When in 1691 he returned to England he was penniless. “All his boyhood’s dreams of buccaneers loaded with booty, the spoils of fair cities in West and East, had vanished into thin air. He owned nothing but the clothes he stood up in. He had not brought back so much as a parrot—only the faded, sea-stained, scarcely legible sheets of his journal, tucked away m an inner pocket; and a half-share in this wretched, shivering blackamoor.’ - The blackamoor was a native chief captured in the East Indies—the “painted prince” of Evelyn’s Diary. Dampier sold his half-share in ‘this .unhappy’ exhibit for. sorely-needed cash. The publication of the journal which he had so laboriously kept brought him both fame and fortune, and in 1698 the Government despatched him in the Roebuck to explore New Holland. UPS AND DOWNS. Throughout his career Dampier had eschewed wine and women, devoting his time to studying seamanship, lie was therefore an expert navigator, but had not acquired the art of command, is. only idea of keeping his crew in order being to swear at them. His men were mutinous, the expedition proved unsuccessful, and on the return voyage the ship sank off Ascension. Court-martialled on reaching England in 1701, Dampier was declared “ unfit to command one of the King's ships ” : yet, a year later, he was given another command, and made three privateering royages before death . came in 171.T.His picture in tile National Portrait Gallery bears the inscription ; “Pirate and Hydrographer.”