william dampier a new voyage around the world

William Dampier, Pirate Scientist

An oft-overlooked explorer who traversed the globe, driven by his thirst for scientific discovery—and a love of piracy.

“ It might seem odd to speak in the same breath of piracy and science ; of the violent tales of buccaneer adventures and of the growth of enlightenment modes of knowledge,” writes historian Anna Neil. But perhaps this is not so bizarre, she argues: “Since at least [Francis] Drake’s time, buccaneers had been identified as circumnavigators, colonialists and explorers as much as swashbucklers and murderers.”

That’s because buccaneers (a term used for pirates primarily restricted to the Caribbean region) often published journals of their adventures, in which “the writers move back and forth between dramatic stories of attack and plunder, and natural-historical accounts of the climate, plants, animals, and peoples of the various places they visit,” writes Neil. And no pirate kept a better journal than 17th century adventurer, William Dampier.

Throughout his adventures, William Dampier jotted down meticulous observations of the natural world  while his shipmates pillaged, plundered, and raided just a few miles away. Caribbean scholar John Ramsaran quotes one scholar, who imagines Dampier “writing up his journal, describing a bunch of flowers, or a rare fish, in the intervals between looting a wine-shop or sacking a village.”

Dampier was fastidious about his journal, and diligent about upkeep. During one harrowing trek across the Isthmus of Darien in Panama, accompanied by more than 40 mutinying pirates, Dampier kept his journal dry by shoving it into a tube of bamboo and stopping it with wax at both ends.

In the pages of his notebook, Dampier expressed a great curiosity about the world—and a great keenness for eating basically any animal he came across. This included shark (which his men ate “very savorily”), wallaby (a “very good Meat,” similar to raccoon), flamingo, and many, many sea turtles.

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Dampier’s first book, A New Voyage Around the World , was published in 1697, after almost two decades of buccaneering across the West Indies. The volume made him famous practically overnight. In it, Neil argues that Dampier purposefully downplayed his piratical actions, while emphasizing his novel scientific discoveries. “Dampier’s journals…attempt to cleanse the criminal pasts of their author by downplaying his acts of violence and presenting him instead as an explorer and scientific journalist,” writes Neil. “Dampier himself insisted that his journey was motivated more by a disinterested intention ‘to indulge my curiosity [rather] than to get wealth.'”

Dampier’s rebranding was ultimately successful, as Neil writes:

The scientific community was convinced: while other members of the buccaneer party were defending themselves against charges of piracy, Charles Montague, president of the Royal Society, had introduced Dampier to the First Lord of the Admiralty, who then commissioned him to explore the coast of New Holland.

Dampier would go on to lead the first government-sponsored expedition of scientific discovery. He’d become the first person to circumnavigate the globe three times. He would also make significant contributions to the field of hydrography with precise observations about ocean movement. Dampier was a man who wanted to travel as far as possible and learn as much as he could. And, despite later attempts to distance himself from his shady past, it seems that along the way, he was perfectly happy to seek his fortune as a pirate .

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Distillations magazine

William dampier, revered and reviled.

The pirate-turned-naturalist-turned-pirate-again inspired generations of British writers and scientists.

As the judge banged the gavel, William Dampier hung his head in disgrace. One of the most celebrated scientists of his age was now a convicted felon.

It was June 1702, and because this was a British naval court, the lawyers and defendant had convened on the deck of a ship, the 55-yard-long, 100-gun HMS Royal Sovereign , then anchored off the southern coast of England near Spithead. A salty wind whipped the air as three dozen judges, including four admirals, considered the case. It focused on Dampier’s actions as captain during a recent voyage to Australia—an extraordinary mission that had begun with high hopes. Rather than trade or war, its main objective had been the gathering of plant and animal specimens and information about the distant continent. It was arguably the first scientific expedition in history.

But however noble the plan, the voyage had been cursed from the start, full of mistakes and mutiny. Dampier had struggled to even reach Australia, then had to abandon his mission after a disgraceful clash with an Indigenous group. On the way home he lost the Crown’s leaky ship to the sea—a final humiliation that culminated in his trial.

To be sure, most of the charges against Dampier had no chance of sticking. The murder claim was flimsy, and the accusations of incompetence were laughable: he was the best navigator alive, an expert on winds, currents, and weather. But as the trial progressed, Dampier sensed the court was determined to punish him somehow, for something. The 50-year-old captain, whose baggy eyes and long, limp hair cast a hangdog expression, braced for the worst. And so it was: the judges found him guilty of thrashing his lieutenant with a cane and declared him “not a fit person to be employed as commander of any of Her Majesty’s ships.” He was fined three years’ pay and dismissed from the navy.

Dampier staggered off the ship embittered and broken. He was the greatest naturalist of his day—so much so that Charles Darwin later counted himself a disciple. But whatever his brilliance, William Dampier would always be guilty of one thing in the eyes of the authorities. He would always be a pirate.

Dampier’s descent into piracy was perhaps inevitable. Although born relatively well off in Somerset in western England, he lost his father at age 7 and mother at age 14 and was plunged into poverty. After being apprenticed to a shipbuilder, he took to the sea, visiting Java and Newfoundland on merchant ships before an unhappy stint in the navy. He eventually sailed to the Caribbean in April 1674 at age 22 and became a logger. In his spare time, Dampier took long nature hikes and was thrilled to encounter creatures that he had only heard about in tall tales—porcupines and sloths, hummingbirds and armadillos. These treks awakened a love of natural history that would last his whole life.

His troubles started in June 1676, when a hurricane destroyed his logging camp and washed away his equipment—axes, saws, machetes. Loggers in that era had to provide their own tools, and Dampier had no money to buy more. So, as Dampier later wrote, “I was forced to range about to seek a subsistence.” This was a euphemism. “Ranging about” meant piracy. He joined a crew of ruffians and set sail.

At the time there were two distinct classes of pirates. Some were so-called privateers, who had tacit permission from their home governments to harass enemy ships. Privateering overall was tolerated if not respectable. Dampier, in contrast, was a buccaneer, and buccaneers had no permission to raid anyone. They were simple criminals, and their home governments scorned them as much as their enemies did. The buccaneering crew Dampier joined stood even lower than most, because instead of raiding ships full of luxuries, they often stormed pathetic little coastal camps, stealing from folks no better off than themselves.

Dampier and his crew spent the next several years waylaying ships and raiding settlements along Latin American coastlines. It’s not always clear what role Dampier played during these attacks. He recorded priests being stabbed, prisoners being tossed overboard, and Indigenous people being picked off with rifles or tortured for intelligence. And there is indirect evidence that he partook in at least some atrocities: once, during a fierce storm when he feared dying, Dampier looked back with “Horrour and Detestation on Actions which before I disliked, but now I trembled at the remembrance of.” He hadn’t been to confession in years, and scores of unnamed sins apparently weighed on his soul.

Every so often, Dampier’s crew made a decent score: gems, bolts of silk, a stock of cinnamon or musk. One time they seized eight tons of marmalade. More often the pirates struck out and spent the night outdoors with nothing but “the cold ground for our bedding and the spangled firmament for our covering.”

Dampier returned to England in 1678 and soon married a lady-in-waiting to a duchess. He had every intention of going straight and decided to return to the Caribbean with a load of trade goods. But his lust for new lands, new skies, new plants and animals, proved too strong. After a trip to Jamaica, he fell in among pirates again—against his will, he claimed—and took off. Ultimately, he “was well enough satisfied” wherever he ended up, he said, “knowing that the farther we went, the more Knowledge and Experience I should get, which was the main Thing that I regarded.”

After his Caribbean exploits, Dampier joined another pirate crew that lit out for territories in Southeast Asia. While there he became something of a proto-anthropologist, recording details about the cultures he encountered. And for his time, he proved remarkably open-minded. Whenever he saw a (to him) strange custom or rite, he strove to understand it. He later gave the first account in English of “ganga,” or marijuana (“Some it keeps sleepy, some merry, some putting them into a laughing fit, and others it makes mad”), and introduced dozens of new words into English, including banana , posse , smugglers , tortilla , avocado , cashews , and chopsticks . He described a mass circumcision of 12-year-olds in the Philippines, as well as tattooing in Polynesia.

Throughout these journeys Dampier took copious notes on everything he saw, stuffing them into bamboo tubes for safekeeping. When he finally returned to England in 1691, he began preparing a travelogue. A New Voyage Round the World appeared in 1697 and was a smash hit. Some historians even credit it with launching the entire genre of travel writing. After its publication, Dampier received an invitation to lecture at the prestigious Royal Society in London, the world’s premier scientific club. He also dined with several eminent statesmen, including diarist Samuel Pepys. The bigwigs wanted to talk natural history, of course, but some of them no doubt felt a frisson of pleasure in knowing they had a real-life pirate at their table.

With the public clamoring for more, Dampier published a sequel to A New Voyage in 1699. It included his famous essay “A Discourse of Winds,” which later captains, such as James Cook and Horatio Nelson, considered the best practical guide to sailing they had ever read. The essay also greatly advanced the scientific study of winds and currents. Two of Dampier’s contemporaries, Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley (of comet fame), had recently published treatises on the origins of tides and rainstorms, respectively. Dampier’s essay nailed down where winds and currents come from. In one sweep, then, these three scientists solved several age-old mysteries about the sea and the cyclical movement of water around the globe. We normally wouldn’t include a pirate in the same company as Halley or Sir Isaac, but in this field, Dampier held his own.

Oddly, though, Dampier wasn’t in England to see his second book published. He had made very little money from the first one, in part because authors didn’t enjoy many copyright protections at the time; most of the book’s profits were scooped up, ironically enough, by literary pirates. Dampier still needed to earn a living somehow.

Moreover, he desperately wanted to leave piracy behind and reinvent himself as a respectable scientist. He jumped at an offer from the First Lord of the Admiralty to lead an expedition to Australia. Part of Dampier’s mission was to scout out commercial opportunities down under to help jump-start Great Britain’s colonial and imperial ambitions; these were the early days of the British Empire. But the main goal was to collect flora and fauna. It was unlike any mission the navy had ever undertaken. And with Dampier in charge, it was a disaster from the get-go.

Dampier had a curmudgeonly streak. He delighted in nature but grumbled about his fellow human beings. He could also be arrogant, especially when dealing with subordinates. It didn’t help matters that Dampier’s second-in-command on the Roebuck , a lieutenant named George Fisher, despised Dampier as pirate scum. Fisher swore up and down that Dampier was plotting to commandeer the ship and go privateering as soon as they hit open water.

The Roebuck set sail in January 1699. Even before it reached its first stop—the Canary Islands, to stock up on brandy and wine—Dampier and Fisher were quarreling. As one witness reported in blunt sailor speech, Fisher “gave the captain very reproachful words and bade him kiss his arse and said he did not care a turd for him.”

Those tensions erupted into violence in mid-March. It started with a keg of beer. Nautical tradition held that a keg be tapped when a ship first crossed the equator, allowing men to blow off steam in the torrid weather. Dampier’s crew ran through their keg a little too quickly, though, and begged Fisher to let them tap a second. Instead of consulting Dampier, as navy regulations required, Fisher gave assent alone.

To most captains, this might have been a forgivable offense. But Dampier was already on edge: rumors were swirling that Fisher planned to heave him overboard to feed the sharks. And on seeing the second keg open, Dampier lost it. He grabbed his cane and confronted Fisher, demanding to know why he had tapped the keg. Before Fisher could answer, Dampier clubbed him and proceeded to beat him bloody. He then clapped Fisher in leg irons and confined him to a locked cabin for two weeks. Fisher couldn’t leave even to use the head; he was left to stew in his own filth.

The crew stopped in Brazil for a few weeks, where Dampier had Fisher jailed. And the moment his cell door clinked shut, Fisher climbed up to his window and began yelling to passersby in the street, railing about his imprisonment and slandering Dampier left, right, and sideways. He later composed letters to authorities in England to expose the pirate-scientist as a tyrant. Fisher’s every waking thought was to destroy Dampier.

While Fisher plotted, Dampier disappeared into the bush around Bahia, Brazil, taking notes on indigo and other crops the British would later use to build their colonial empire. One observation during this time stands out for its scientific and historical importance. After observing some flocks of “long-legg’d fowls” at different sites, Dampier realized that, while each flock was distinct, no one group was distinct enough to count as its own species. There was a continuum of variation. So he coined a new word, sub-species , to describe this phenomenon. He was groping toward an idea—about variation in nature and the relationships among species—that his admirer Darwin would later run with in On the Origin of Species .

Dampier eventually shipped Fisher back to England—where, Dampier assumed, there would be a humiliating trial for insubordination. Dampier was only half right. There would be a trial and humiliations aplenty, just not for Fisher.

With Fisher absent, however, tensions cooled on the Roebuck , and by mid-August the crew reached western Australia, landing on the gleaming white beaches of what Dampier, for good reason, named Shark Bay. They spent the next few weeks observing dingoes, sea serpents, humpback whales, and more—a brilliant start to their scientific-imperialist campaign.

Their luck didn’t hold. Northwest Australia is arid, and despite scouring the coast, the Roebuck could not find a source of fresh water. The thirsty sailors tried approaching some Aboriginal people, whom they assumed had tricks for finding water. (Indigenous Australians did have such tricks, including tracking birds and frogs and hacking at tree roots.) But whenever the sailors came near, the locals scattered. So Dampier came up with a desperate plan.

After creeping ashore, he and two companions hid behind a sand dune to ambush the locals. The plan was to kidnap one and force him to lead them to a spring. When the Englishmen jumped out, the locals once again ran, and the sailors gave chase—not realizing they were falling into a trap. As soon as Dampier and company were exposed on open ground, the Australians wheeled and attacked with spears. One of Dampier’s men was slashed in the face; Dampier himself was nearly impaled. When warning shots failed to drive the locals back, Dampier took aim and wounded one with his pistol. It’s a rare moment in his books where he admits to violence.

Given Dampier’s earlier comments, this assault probably shouldn’t come as a surprise. He had visited Australia before, and despite his magnanimity toward most cultures, he had dismissed Indigenous Australians in his 1697 book as the “miserablest People in the World,” adding that “they differ little from brutes.” Some scholars have argued that Dampier’s publishers added those words to sensationalize his voyages and goose sales; Dampier’s original journals are less harsh. Regardless, Dampier knew that the ambush on the Roebuck voyage was unforgivable, calling himself “very sorry for what had happened.”

Dawn Casey, an Aboriginal woman who formerly served as the director of the National Museum of Australia and the Western Australian Museum, has harder words for Dampier , citing the role his racist language played in setting the tone for the colonization of Australia.  “Dampier, Joseph Banks, Captain James Cook and those governors that came after them who employed academics and anthropologists, have certainly, no doubt, set the tone and the blueprint for Aboriginal Australia.” The attack also foreshadowed centuries of ugly clashes between white Europeans and Indigenous Australians, the fallout of which Australia is still dealing with in multiple forms .

The parched crew slunk away from Australia after the attack, and things only got worse from there. Dampier tried to salvage the voyage by exploring and collecting specimens in New Guinea. But the British navy hadn’t exactly handed him its trustiest ship in the Roebuck . Its hull leaked and was infested with shipworms, and it soon got so creaky that Dampier had to turn tail and make a run for England. But on the shores of Ascension Island in the Atlantic tropics, the Roebuck sprung a massive leak. Fearing he would be blamed for its demise, Dampier tried plugging the hole with anything he could think of, including a side of beef and his personal pajamas. Both stopgaps failed. The crew abandoned ship at Ascension, and Dampier lost virtually every specimen he had gathered. The men spent five weeks watching other ships sail blithely by in the distance until a flotilla finally pulled in and rescued them.

Returning to London without a ship or specimens was bad enough. But when Dampier arrived in August 1701, he found that George Fisher had been poisoning English society against him—damning him in such lusty terms that the admiralty felt obliged to court-martial Dampier and try him in June of the following year.

To their credit, the judges dismissed most of the charges against Dampier, including one that he had murdered a querulous crew member by locking him into a cabin for a spell. (The man actually died 10 months after the punishment ended.) But the judges could not abide the caning of Fisher, a fellow officer, and they found Dampier guilty of “very hard and cruel usage” of his second-in-command.

Dampier had tried to turn respectable, and it had profited him nothing. He was as penniless as ever and more of a pariah than ever. He had only one option left: the 50-year-old naturalist returned to piracy.

In 1703, Dampier caught a break. A war with Spain and France had broken out, and England sought out pirates to harass the enemy. Though he was barred from commanding her ships, Queen Anne summoned the 51-year-old pirate for an audience. Dampier kissed the royal hand and soon received a commission to captain a private vessel named St. George .

Alas, the voyage of St. George was another messy, mutinous affair. Dampier’s men accused him of accepting silver dinnerware and other bribes from captains of the ships he captured. In exchange, Dampier would conduct only a superficial search of their holds and let them sail away with most of their treasure intact. Rumor also held that Dampier was drinking heavily. When the voyage ended in 1707, Dampier’s reputation as a captain was in shambles, and he never commanded another ship. He died, poor and obscure, in 1715.

Despite his rough last years, Dampier’s legacy improved considerably after his death. Jonathan Swift poached his stories for Gulliver’s Travels , as did Samuel Taylor Coleridge for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.  Dampier’s most influential fan, Charles Darwin, even brought Dampier’s books along on his formative  Beagle  voyage in the 1830s. Darwin studied Dampier’s descriptions of species and pored over his accounts, effectively using Dampier as a guide. Darwin might never have become Darwin without Dampier.

But while adventure writers and scientists have ignored Dampier’s sins, latter-day George Fishers have found him harder to abide. When Dampier’s hometown in England discussed putting up a plaque to honor him in the early 1900s, one God-fearing fellow stood up and damned him as “a pirate ruffian that ought to have been hung [sic].” Critics nowadays go even further. They contend that Dampier’s science, however groundbreaking, merely blazed a trail for colonialism and its brutalities. His natural-history raids also arguably paved the way for biopiracy—the cavalier theft of natural resources from developing countries.

The thing is, both sides have a point. Dampier was lowdown and brilliant, inspiring and unscrupulous. His work advanced nearly every scientific field that existed at the time—navigation, zoology, botany, meteorology—and he did despicable things in the meantime. As one biographer noted, the likes of Darwin and Swift “owed much more to Dampier than a single model. It can in truth be said that they owed the entire spirit of a new age to this one man.” That new spirit included many good things, and many ugly ones as well.

Sam Kean is a best-selling science author. His latest book is  The Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science .

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Arrival of English explorer William Dampier

1699: William Dampier becomes the first Englishman to explore parts of the Australian coastline

William Dampier, Thomas Murray, about 1697–98, oil on canvas, 75 x 63 cm. National Portrait Gallery, London NPG538

William Dampier was an explorer, naturalist, author, hydrographer and pirate.

He was the first Englishman to chart part of the Australian coastline, and the first European to undertake a scientific study of its landscape, seas, plants and animals.

Though he intended to circumnavigate the entire continent, he was prevented from doing so by the unseaworthiness of his ship.

Letter from Dampier to the Earl of Pembroke, President of the Privy Council:

The world is apt to judge of everything by the success; and whoever has ill fortune will hardly be allow’d a good name.

An adventurous life

William Dampier was born to tenant farmers in a village in Somerset, England in August 1651. He went to sea at 17, and five years later joined the Royal Navy, fighting in the Third Anglo–Dutch War of 1672–74.

He left the navy shortly afterwards and sailed to the West Indies, where he worked on a plantation. When England went to war with Spain, Dampier tried to make his fortune by becoming a privateer, which was effectively a state-sanctioned pirate.

Ascension Island in the mid-Atlantic, 2011. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Nations at war often bolstered their naval strength by authorising pirates to attack enemy merchant ships. This provided pirates with the opportunity to enjoy their plunder without fear of retribution.

In 1678 Dampier returned to England and married his fiance, Judith, in Dorset. The following year he went to sea again, becoming only the third Englishman in history to sail around the globe. It was a voyage that lasted 12 years, involved several ships and long periods ashore.

First visit to Australia

After years of buccaneering around Central America, in 1685 Dampier joined a privateering vessel, the Cygnet . He spent the next three years in the Cygnet as it sailed the Pacific in search of vulnerable vessels.

In January 1688 the Cygnet arrived at King Sound, near present-day Broome, where the captain beached the ship for urgent repairs.

The crew were the first Britons to set foot on the Australian mainland – then known as New Holland, the name Dutch explorer Abel Tasman had given it in 1644 – 82 years before Lieutenant James Cook arrived at Botany Bay . The party remained for two months and established friendly relations with the local Aboriginal people, most likely the Bardi people.

Dampier’s map in his book,  A Voyage to New Holland , 1703

Man of letters

Dampier returned to England in 1691. Six years later, he published an account of his travels, titled A New Voyage Round the World .

It was an immediate success, owing to Dampier’s brisk writing style, his obvious enthusiasm and his accurate observations. The book went through multiple editions, was widely translated and helped establish travel writing as a popular genre.

It also established Dampier as an expert on the East Indies (present-day Indonesia), and in 1698 the Admiralty commissioned him to return to New Holland to explore and chart its coasts. The underfunded Admiralty could only spare HMS Roebuck , a 290-ton vessel that was not seaworthy enough for such a long voyage.

Mariner's callipers traditionally thought to have belonged to William Dampier. National Library of Australia nla.obj-139492102

Voyage to Australia

Dampier had intended to travel westwards to New Holland via Cape Horn (the tip of South America), but delays in fitting out the Roebuck meant he arrived in South America in winter, when it was too dangerous to attempt to round the Horn.

Instead he headed east and entered the Indian Ocean via the Cape of Good Hope (the tip of Africa), which meant it was the west coast of New Holland that he encountered, not the east.

The west coast had already been mapped by the Dutch, most notably by Abel Tasman, whose chart Dampier used.

Though a capable navigator, Dampier was not a good leader of men.

Soon after the Roebuck left England, he had his second in command, Lieutenant George Fisher, caned and clapped in irons following a heated argument – a punishment inappropriate for an officer. Dampier then put him ashore in Brazil.

It is likely that Fisher and the other officers resented having a civilian in command, particularly one with a buccaneering background.

Arrival at Shark Bay

Dampier headed for Dirk Hartog Island at the entrance to Shark Bay, near present-day Carnarvon in Western Australia. He made landfall on 6 August 1699.

From there, he spent about three months charting the roughly 1400 kilometres of coast between Shark Bay and Lagrange Bay, south of Broome. He stopped on several occasions, collecting biological specimens, taking careful scientific notes and keeping a meticulous diary. He was unimpressed with the sandy, dry and barren coast.

The land … is low but seemingly barricaded with a long chain of sandhills to the sea, that lets nothing be seen of what is farther within land … The land by the sea for about 5 or 600 yards is a dry sandy soil, bearing only shrubs and bushes of divers sorts.

On 5 September Dampier abandoned his exploration of New Holland when he began to run out of water. He went to Timor to replenish his stores and from there charted the north coast of New Guinea. He then named and circumnavigated New Britain, proving it was a separate island.

Shell Beach, Shark Bay, near present-day Carnarvon in Western Australia, 2006. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Return to England

Dampier intended to return to New Holland and visit the east coast. But the Roebuck was now leaking badly and his crew’s morale was running low, so he decided to return to England.

The Roebuck finally sank at Ascension Island in the mid-Atlantic. Everyone aboard survived, and Dampier was able to rescue his notes, diary and some specimens before the ship went down.

Upon his return to England in 1701, Dampier was court-martialled for his mistreatment of Fisher. He was found guilty and had his entire salary for the expedition docked.

However, the expedition provided Dampier with the material for his next book, A Voyage to New Holland , which was published in two parts in 1703 and 1709.

As with his first book, it sold well, in part because it contained engravings of birds, fish and plants drawn by drafter James Brand. The drawings are not very accurate, but they are the first known images of Australian flora and fauna made by a European.

Despite its success, A Voyage to New Holland , like all of Dampier’s books, made much more money for its unscrupulous publisher than it did for its author.

Dampier’s subsequent life

In 1703, with England fighting the War of the Spanish Succession, Dampier returned to privateering. His first trip as commander of the pirate ship St George was a failure.

On his return to England in 1707 he joined another privateer as navigator, and again circumnavigated the world, returning to England four years later. Yet again, the trip brought him little reward.

In 1708 Dampier left on his final major voyage. He circumnavigated the globe again on a series of ships, and the crew amassed a small fortune in plunder. However, less than four years later he died in London, with his estate in serious debt.

Dampier’s legacy

Dampier’s contribution to the exploration of Australia was slight, but he was the first European to conduct a detailed scientific study of the continent’s terrain, seas and biology. He was also the first person to circumnavigate the world three times.

Dampier’s books were read with interest by subsequent explorers and naturalists, including James Cook and Matthew Flinders , as well as Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin.

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You may also like

William Dampier, Australian Dictionary of Biography

Leslie R Marchant, An Island unto Itself: William Dampier and New Holland , Hesperian Press, Victoria Park, 1988.

Diana and Michael Preston, A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: The Life of William Dampier , Walker & Company, New York, 2004.

Joseph C Shipman, William Dampier: Seaman, Scientist , University of Kansas Libraries, Lawrence, Kansas, 1962.

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Dampier's voyages : consisting of a New voyage round the world, a Supplement to the Voyage round the world, Two voyages to Campeachy, a Discourse of winds, a Voyage to New Holland, and a Vindication, in answer to the Chimerical relation of William Funnell

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"This edition is limited to one thousand copies for sale in the United Kingdom"--fly leaf.

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A New Voyage Around the World Paperback – November 10, 1999

• Print length 294 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Hummingbird Press
• Publication date November 10, 1999
• ISBN-10 0953291820
• ISBN-13 978-0953291823
• See all details

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Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hummingbird Press; First Thus edition (November 10, 1999)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 294 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0953291820
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0953291823
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.54 pounds
• Best Sellers Rank: #9,108,975 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books )

About the authors

Nicholas thomas.

Nicholas Thomas, who grew up in Sydney, visited the Pacific Islands first in 1984. He has written many acclaimed books about art, history and cross-cultural encounter, and collaborated in exhibition and book experiments with artists including John Pule and Mark Adams.

His books include Entangled Objects (1991), a celebrated exploration of the changing lives of things in the Pacific; Discoveries: the voyages of Captain Cook (2003); Islanders: the Pacific in the Age of Empire (2010) which was awarded the Wolfson History Prize; The Return of Curiosity (2016), about what museums offer today, and most recently Voyagers: the settlement of the Pacific (2021).

Thomas co-curated, with Peter Brunt and Adrian Locke, the landmark exhibition Oceania, shown at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris over 2018-19.

Nicholas Thomas lives in the Corbières, in the south of France and in London with his partner Annie Coombes, and their son.

William Dampier

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