[CHAPTER V]
Dampier's Voyages
William Dampier—the surname, like so many in England, is of French origin—was born, the son of a farmer, at East Coker, near Yeovil, in the south of Somersetshire. His attention no doubt was directed to a seafaring life by the constant intercourse which at that time went on between Yeovil and Weymouth; and when Dampier was about seventeen years old, at his own desire he was apprenticed to the master of a ship at Weymouth, with whom he made a voyage to Newfoundland. But the cold experienced in this voyage so disgusted him that he managed to get his indentures cancelled, and in 1671 engaged himself as an able seaman on a great vessel of the East India Company which was leaving England for Java. He soon returned from the Malay Archipelago, however, and enlisted on board a ship of the British navy, in which he took a small part in the naval war with Holland. Then he was sent out to Jamaica as a plantation manager by the lord of the manor of East Coker (the village in which he was born). Except for a brief visit to England in 1678, when his marriage took place, he lived chiefly in the West Indies and on the coast of Central America. He had soon left the work on a plantation to join the buccaneers, or English, French, and Dutch pirates, who were attempting to break down the supremacy of Spain in the waters of the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico. With a party of these buccaneers he established himself on the coast of Yucatan to cut log-wood, and after his return to and residence in England between 1675-9 he came back to the neighbourhood of what is now British Honduras. Together with a party of buccaneers he crossed the Isthmus of Panama, and, reaching the Pacific littoral, embarked in Indian canoes. And in these they ranged up and down the coast of Central and South America, attacking Spanish towns and shipping. Apparently they must have captured from the Spaniards something more serviceable for ocean traffic than Indian dug-out canoes, because in 1680 they voyaged across the Pacific as far as the lonely island of Juan Fernandez, on which Alexander Selkirk was afterwards stranded by an English buccaneering captain. Some of his adventures in this direction will be described in another volume of the present series dealing with that region. The success of these bold pirates in capturing Spanish treasure ships and seizing Spanish towns on the coasts of Mexico and Peru, and holding them to ransom, was so great that they decided to return in force and renew their operations to the west coast of South America. Thus with bigger ships they passed through the Straits of Magellan and navigated the Pacific Ocean unopposed.
It is interesting to note that on these truly remarkable voyages, which few living seamen would be heroic enough to undertake, their chief means of sustenance were flour (probably from maize) and chocolate mixed with sugar, besides the fish obtained for them by their Indian companions. The buccaneers afterwards recrossed Central America, and rested for a time in the English colony of Virginia. From this region Dampier accompanied a captain, John Cook, in the Revenge (a privateer or buccaneering ship), on a voyage to the Pacific. They sailed first to the Cape Verde Islands in the eastern Atlantic.
On one of the easternmost of this still-little-known archipelago Dampier made some most interesting and truthful observations regarding the nesting of flamingoes, though he jumped to a wrong conclusion as to the attitude in which the female flamingo hatches her eggs; but he observes that a dish of flamingoes' tongues is fit for a prince's table, the tongue of this bird being very large and fat. From the Cape Verde Islands they passed on to the Sherboro River (near Sierra Leone), even in those days an English trading settlement. Then, boldly leaving the West African coast, they steered right across the Atlantic to the extremity of South America, helped by a succession of tornadoes to cross the region of equatorial calms till the trade winds blew them over to the Falkland Islands and round Cape Horn. Soon after entering the Pacific Ocean they fell in with other English ships, quite a number of which were now being dispatched round the extremity of South America to the Pacific Ocean, not so much to make discoveries in that direction as to trade with or to plunder the west coast of South America. To all such the Islands of Juan Fernandez[51] were a favourite and safe rendevous for repairs and for obtaining supplies of fresh water. But that the Spaniards became during the seventeenth century perfectly inept in the matter of defending their monopolist pretensions in seas which they attempted to forbid to the rest of the world, they would have occupied and garrisoned at an early date the principal island of the Juan Fernandez group.[52] On this island—Mas-a-tierra—goats and pigs had been landed by the Spanish pilot, Juan Fernandez himself, in the sixteenth century. They had increased and multiplied, and furnished excellent mutton and pork for ships that called there. There were only two bays in Mas-a-tierra Island (which was about 36 miles in circumference and of very broad, diversified surface, "high hills and small pleasant valleys") wherein ships might anchor. In the vicinity of each harbour there were rivulets of good fresh water. In course of time the goats multiplied to such an extent that they began to destroy the forests, which still in Dampier's time were a prominent feature in the landscapes, and which included not only good timber trees but an Areca cabbage-palm, the head of which formed an excellent vegetable for seafaring people, badly in need of such an addition to their diet. The sea round about Mas-a-tierra swarmed with fish, and was thronged by seals and sea-lions, which came ashore to breed or to bask in the sun. Dampier states that there were possibly "millions of seals", "either sitting on the shore of the bays or going and coming in the sea round the island". Both seals and sea-lions provided the ships with quantities of train-oil, but the flesh of these aquatic mammals was not liked. [Dampier notes with correctness the abundance of seals along the coasts of North and South America, but their relative absence from the seas washing the East Indies, where indeed they only reappear in the far south along the coasts of Australia and New Zealand.]
From the Juan Fernandez Islands Dampier's ship made its way to the Galapagos archipelago, where Dampier duly noted the large, fat, and tame land-lizards—a species of iguana—and, above all, the enormous tortoises "extraordinarily large and fat; so sweet that no pullet eats more pleasantly". A very large tortoise might weigh as much as 200 pounds. He also observed the abundance of turtle of four kinds in the sea round the coasts of this archipelago.[53]
After their stay at the Galapagos Islands Captain John Cook died, and his place was taken by a commander named Davis. Two other English buccaneering ships had joined Dampier's vessel at the Galapagos, and the adventurers spent months which became years in various piratical adventures up and down the west coast of Central and South America from California to Peru. At last a Captain Swan, to whose ship the Cygnet Dampier had transferred himself on 25 August, 1685, decided, probably on Dampier's advice, to return to England by way of the East Indies. Accordingly they steered right across the Pacific from Cape Corrientes on the coast of Mexico to Guam in the Ladrone Islands, a passage in which they had been preceded by Francis Drake in 1580 and Sir Thomas Cavendish in 1588. Of course the terrors of this voyage across some seven thousand miles of sea was diminished by this time owing to the frequent passages made by the Spanish ships between Mexico and the Philippine Islands. Apparently this somewhat northern track across the tropical regions of the Pacific Ocean was relatively free from violent tempests, and at the right season of the year provided with continuously favourable winds in one direction or the other. At any rate, the two ships of the expedition, under Captain Swan and Captain Teat (Dampier being with Swan), set out from Cape Corrientes on 31 March, 1686, and reached Guam on 21 May with only three days' provisions left for the ships' crews. The somewhat strict allowance of food and drink on which all were placed was thought by Dampier to have cured him of a dropsy from which he was suffering at the time of his departure from Cape Corrientes. Their sustenance consisted of ten spoonfuls of boiled Indian corn a day, together with a little water for those who were thirsty; but Dampier noticed that some of the seamen did not drink for nine or ten days at a time, and one man went without any liquid for seventeen days, declaring he was not thirsty. For such as these the moisture in the boiled maize seems to have sufficed. But the men had grimly resolved that they would not long grow hungry if Captain Swan's estimate was at fault. It had been decided that, as soon as victuals failed, Captain Swan should be killed and eaten!
