And perhaps those who respect his memory most will be best pleased to think he was a failure as a buccaneer. I have already quoted a passage from his preface in which he does not dissemble the repugnance with which he recurs to his life of piracy. Nothing could be more intelligible than the disgust and loathing that possessed him when he sat in silence writing his book, and thinking of the character of the persons whom it was necessary he should refer to as his intimates. They were sailors indeed, but they were also brutes; no man knew that better than Dampier; no man was better acquainted than he with the vices, the profligacy, the horrors of the every-day speech of the men whose company he had kept for months and years. [34] That quality of sympathetic adhesion which the French call esprit de corps was not likely to exist in a man who, when he had parted from his shipmates, found the recollection of them insupportable. Indeed he was but a poor buccaneer. He was as courageous as the best man he ever sailed with; plunder he loved as well as the rest; but he despised and detested his associates, and probably only held his own amongst them by the exaction of that sort of respect which such fellows would feel for a man of education, of wide experience, and the best navigator of his time. The reason of his failure as a commander his own narratives make clear. His books show that he understood human nature, but his actions prove that he could not control or direct it. Nor is it hard to see why he was unsuccessful as an explorer. He appeared to exhaust his energy in theories, so that by the time he addressed himself to action nearly all his enthusiasm was gone. The importunities which led to his being placed in command of the Roebuck and despatched to the Southern Ocean must have been eloquent. No doubt he was perfectly sincere in his representations. As a privateersman he had sighted the shores of the unknown land of the antipodes; how far south it extended he could not imagine, but vast portions of it lay under heights which by analogous reasoning he could prove fertile and beautiful, rich in promise to the coloniser, and assuring an enlargement of the dominions of the sovereign by the acquisition of a territory possibly vaster than the whole of Europe. All this, we may take it, he fully believed, and eagerly, impetuously, and eloquently expressed. But the passage from England to Western Australia was a long one. His ardour had cooled before he was off the coast of Brazil. He was chagrined by the behaviour of his crew, and there were other causes to cloud and chill his excitable and impressionable nature. You can see that he had lost all heart, or at least all appetite, for the quest he had undertaken long before the coast of New Holland rose over his bows. Men of Dampier's temperament may be able to write engaging narratives of their adventures, and exhibit all the solid virtues of the sober, as well as all the airy qualities of the poetic, observer; but they are not formed of the stuff of which explorers are made. Their pulse beats too hotly at the start and too languidly towards the end. Yet the world does well to hold the name of Dampier in memory as a skilful seaman, an acute observer, an agreeable writer, and a thorough Englishman.
THE END
Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Harris's Collection, “Cowley's Voyage,” vol. i. 1748.
[2] A Discourse of the First Invention of Ships, p. 7. Ed. 1700.
[3] Hackluyt, i. 243. There is also a reference to sheathing in Sir Richard Hawkins's Observations in Purchas, vol. iv. p. 1387. In 1673 an order was issued by the Lord High Admiral to sheath some of the ships of war with lead; but on Sir John Narborough a few years afterwards objecting to it, the practice was discontinued.—See Schomberg's Naval Chronology, vol. i. 75.
[4] Preserved in Churchill's Collections of Voyages and Travels, 1704, vol. ii.
[5] The buccaneers had “Waggoners” of their own. One was compiled by Basil Ringrose, who called it the South Sea Waggoner (circa 1682). Another by Captain Hack, the author of a History of the Buccaneers, was published in or about 1690.
[6] Dampier calls him Spragg, others Sprague.