A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: Explorer, Naturalist, and Buccaneer: The Life of William Dampier - Hardcover

Preston, Diana; Preston, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802714250 ISBN 13: 9780802714251

Publisher: Walker Books, 2004

Synopsis

Darwin took his books aboard the Beagle. Swift and Defoe used his experiences as inspiration in writing Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe. Captain Cook relied on his observations while voyaging around the world. Coleridge called him a genius and "a man of exquisite mind." In the history of exploration, nobody has ventured further than Englishman William Dampier. Yet while the exploits of Cook, Shackleton, and a host of legendary explorers have been widely chronicled, those of perhaps the greatest are virtually invisible today―an omission that Diana and Michael Preston have redressed in this vivid, compelling biography.

As a young man Dampier spent several years in the swashbuckling company of buccaneers in the Caribbean. At a time when surviving one voyage across the Pacific was cause for celebration, Dampier ultimately journeyed three times around the world; his bestselling books about his experiences were a sensation, influencing generations of scientists, explorers, and writers. He was the first to deduce that winds cause currents and the first to produce wind maps across the world, surpassing even the work of Edmund Halley. He introduced the concept of the "sub-species" that Darwin later built into his theory of evolution, and his description of the breadfruit was the impetus for Captain Bligh's voyage on the Bounty. Dampier reached Australia 80 years before Cook, and he later led the first formal expedition of science and discovery there.

A Pirate of Exquisite Mind restores William Dampier to his rightful place in history―one of the pioneers on whose insights our understanding of the natural world was built.

About this title

About the Author

Born and raised in London, Diana Preston studied Modern History at Oxford University, where she first became involved in journalism. After earning her degree, she became a freelance writer of feature and travel articles for national UK newspapers and magazines and has subsequently reviewed books for a number of publications, including The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times. She has also been a broadcaster for the BBC and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and has been featured in various television documentaries.

A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: Explorer, Naturalist and Buccaneer: The Life of William Dampier (Walker & Company, April 2004) is a new biography of the 17th-century British explorer, naturalist, scientist, pirate and buccaneer William Dampier coauthored by Diana and her husband, Michael Preston.

Diana's decision to write "popular" history led her to The Road to Culloden Moor: Bonnie Prince Charlie and the '45 Rebellion (Constable UK, 1995). It was followed by A First Rate Tragedy: Robert Falcon Scott and the Race to the South Pole (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), The Boxer Rebellion (Walker & Company, 2000), and Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy (Walker & Company, 2002).

When not writing, Diana and Michael are avid travelers. Together, they have sojourned throughout India, Asia, Africa, and Antarctica, and have climbed Mount Kinabalu in Borneo, Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and Mount Roraima in Venezuela. Their adventures have also included gorilla-tracking in Zaire and camping their way across the Namibian desert. They live in London, England.

Reviews

William Dampier is important today for many of the same reasons that made him fascinating to his 17th- century contemporaries. He was a representative man of his time: master navigator and peerless recorder of winds, currents, coastlines, seasonal weather and even magnetic fluctuation in England's great age of exploration. As another biographer of Dampier, W. Clark Russell, remarked, "No skillfuller body of seamen were ever afloat." Although more mariners of his time than might be expected left journals, maps and other writings, Dampier was but one example of the breed, and hundreds of other men lived out similar stories.

The men who became sailors were younger brothers like Dampier -- or poor, reckless characters greedy for wealth, experience and adventure. Dampier knew some Latin. Perhaps his parents did what they could to prepare him for the clergy or the law, but, orphaned at 16, he was instead apprenticed to a shipmaster. His first trips, which this biography by Diana and Michael Preston omits, along with almost all of his early life, were standard experiences: commercial voyages and then a stint in the navy in the Third Dutch War. Dampier's rambling, opportunistic travels, which had him jumping from ship to ship, experiencing sudden destination changes and enduring deprivation, were all common. After serving in the merchant marine and the navy, he became by turns coastal trader, privateer and outright pirate, and he rose to the leadership of two financed expeditions, one by Bristol speculators.

In his sealed bamboo carriers, Dampier preserved botanical and zoological notes, as was expected of a man in his position. As early as the 1660s, the Royal Society asked mariners to do exactly what Dampier did. Books before his, such as Robert Knox's An Historical Relation of Ceylon (1681), organized their chapters according to the Society's categories of knowledge. In contributing to the evolution of lists of what was to be collected, Dampier helped shape his own, Edmund Halley's and others' scientific expeditions.

There are two problems with this biography. First, it is not well written. Dampier's sea life can be divided neatly by his major voyages, but A Pirate of Exquisite Mind is imbalanced toward his first. The prose is often turgid and far too dependent on A New Voyage Around the World, Dampier's first and least impressive book. His slogs on foot through Central America seem endless and pointless. We are not told that buccaneers were usually trying to establish dependable trading contacts and routes or even settlements in parts of the world beyond the laws of any nation. Dampier's ambitions largely conformed to this economic model, as we see, for example, in his attempts to set up as a logwood trader. He and other privateers were also patriots, disrupting the shipping lines of England's enemies, attempting to intercept shipments of gold that paid for war.

The authors are better at narrating his expedition to Australia and make telling points about the contrasts between the culture of buccaneers, with the rules that had evolved to govern independent men on long voyages in close quarters, and that of the Royal Navy. It is not until the authors introduce another privateer, Woodes Rogers, into the narrative and compare him in some detail to Dampier that they establish a smooth, authoritative voice. Even so, they squash this voyage into 14 pages, although it was Dampier's third around the world and took three years.

The second problem is the portrait of Dampier. The Prestons desperately want him to be first and singular. They repeat "first to . . . ," sometimes correctly, but more often not. For example, they want Dampier to be the first European to reach Australia, but their muddled prose suggests that they are straining to obscure the Dutch explorer Janszoon Tasmen. Almost all of their claims about Dampier as a writer are inaccurate. Voyage literature was enormously popular before he wrote -- he joined the second great outpouring. Books such as Knox's, a reprint of Drake's voyages and Alexander Exquemelin's fascinating Buccaneers of America, which Dampier mentions, may have inspired his accounts, as he surely encountered them all when he arrived in London in 1691. Dampier's dedication to A New Voyage claimed he had "a hearty Zeal for the promotion of useful knowledge" (the motto of the Royal Society). As a privateer, he devoted that zeal to his "Country's advantage."

In the Prestons' hands, however, Dampier emerges as irascible and driven by a hunger for gold. In reality, he was a premier example of his time's embrace of empirical methods and desire to explore the entire globe. He explained one of his changes of ships by noting, "It was not from any dislike to my old Captain but to get some knowledge of the Northern Parts of this Continent of Mexico." The authors also leave out other major aspects of his personality, which are apparent in his four autobiographical books. His religion, for instance, is gone, as is the fascination with forms of government that he shared with his contemporaries (including Knox and Exquemelin) in the time when Englishmen remembered a civil war and a republic, and then saw a hereditary monarch displaced by a foreigner. The authors lose sight of his lively sense of humor, the detail that his interest in zoology seems to have been largely culinary and his ability to make himself unnoticeable when that was appropriate. Yet he could not have survived to age 63 had he not been a master of managing intricate situations and avoiding confrontations. The authors' inattention is especially frustrating since, in nearly every respect, Dampier is that best of biographical subjects -- the representative but exceptional person, one who reveals the indomitable spirit and amazing knowledge of the hundreds of men who lived out the same stories but did not find a publisher.

Reviewed by Paula R. Backscheider

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Dampier's adventures and observations ignited the imagination of a generation, but today his name is largely unknown. This exhaustive biography by Diana Preston (Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy; The Boxer Rebellion; etc.) and husband Michael won't make Dampier famous again, but it will give readers a clear understanding of one of the most well-traveled men in history. In the late 1600s, Dampier, an Englishman, circumnavigated the globe three separate times. The authors draw heavily on the books and articles Dampier published about his adventures, and they include the most mundane of details ("The buccaneers sailed on, pausing to bury at sea one of their number, who apparently expired of high fever exacerbated by hiccups brought on by a drinking bout at La Serena"). During his time as a buccaneer, Dampier launched dozens of raids on gold-laden Spanish ships, marched through Panama's jungles and mutinied many times. What distinguished him from an ordinary pirate, as the title indicates, was his sharp eye for observation. He was the first self-made naturalist to visit the Galapagos; his sketches of the region's turtles set the stage for Darwin's future visit. He also drew detailed maps of nearly every place he visited, charts that defined Western Europe's knowledge of the Americas and the South Seas. His theories about how wind patterns affect ocean currents are still used today. Indeed, Dampier's scientific and historical legacy holds up better than his swashbuckling escapades, which, though exciting, hold slightly less novelty. 65 b&w illus., maps.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

William Dampier's name crops ups constantly in tales of adventure, exploration, and piracy (e.g., Diana Souhami's Selkirk's Island, 2001). His ubiquity creates high expectations for Preston and her husband coauthor's full-scale biography. Dampier was well esteemed in the days of Charles Darwin, who consulted Dampier's New Voyage Round the World (1697) while at sea. Darwin was probably less interested in yarns of depredation upon the Spanish Main, however, than in Dampier's precise and sensitive observations of nature, peoples, and geography. We contemporary readers, however, demand dollops of buccaneering, boarding, and the occasional mutiny, narrative elements that Dampier's three circumnavigations of the globe permit the Prestons to deploy. Integrating them with the England-bound events of Dampier's life--which included a marriage, publication and fame, organization of voyages piratical and scientific, and a court-martial--the Prestons make the "self-conceited" Dampier, as an acquaintance described him, every bit as complex and interesting on paper as he was in life. Supported by dozens of contemporary maps and illustrations, the authors credibly contend that Dampier was a pioneer of the travelogue--not bad considering his day job. A superbly rendered popular history in a superpopular genre. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Walker Books
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802714250
• ISBN 13: 9780802714251
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416