The pirate naturalist who gave English the words barbecue and chopsticks
William Dampier raided Spanish ships, sailed around the world three times, and wrote the first European description of making guacamole. The buccaneer turned author bridged the eras of Francis Drake and James Cook, charting Australian coasts and cataloguing strange foods, while leaving a record marred by cruelty and a trade in human beings.
Born in East Coker, Somerset, and baptised on 5 September 1651, Dampier sailed to Newfoundland and Java, fought at the Battles of Schooneveld with the Royal Navy in 1673, then tried plantation work in Jamaica and logging in Mexico. In 1679 he joined the buccaneer Bartholomew Sharp, crossing the Isthmus of Darién and raiding Spanish Peru. Later voyages under John Cooke and Charles Swan took him across the Pacific to Guam, Mindanao and, on 5 January 1688, the northwest coast of Australia near King Sound, where he noted plants, animals and, dismissively, the Aboriginal people.
He reached England in 1691 penniless, owning only his journals and an enslaved tattooed man, Jeoly, whom he sold to be exhibited in London; Jeoly died of smallpox three months later. Dampier's book A New Voyage Round the World became a sensation in 1697, and in 1699 the Admiralty gave him the 26-gun HMS Roebuck. Entering Shark Bay on 6 August 1699, he produced the first detailed record of Australian wildlife, but the worm-eaten ship foundered at Ascension Island on 21 February 1701. Its wreck was found in 2001.
Home again, he was court-martialled on 8 June 1702 for cruelty to his lieutenant, George Fisher, whom he had jailed in Brazil, and was judged unfit to command a royal ship. Privateering beckoned instead. On a 1703 expedition, the companion ship Cinque Ports left Alexander Selkirk alone on an island, and on a later voyage Dampier helped rescue him; Selkirk may have inspired Robinson Crusoe.
His writings introduced Europeans to avocado, breadfruit and the taste of flamingo and manatee. Later figures who drew on his work range from James Cook and George Anson to Horatio Nelson, and on to Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin, and he is sometimes called Australia's first natural historian.
Source: William Dampier
