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Maritime Exploration of Australia: William Dampier


William Dampier memorial, Derby, WA

Born in East Coker, Yeovil, England, on 5 September 1652 his varied career included fighting in the Dutch War (1673), managing a plantation in Jamaica, then working with logwood cutters in Honduras (1675-78). After taking part in a buccaneering expedition against Spanish America (1679-81) “more to indulge my curiosity than to get wealth”, he sailed from Virginia in 1683 on a piratical voyage along the coast of Africa, across the Atlantic, and around Cape Horn to prey on Spanish cities on the west coast of South America. The party split up, and Dampier joined a group that crossed to the Philippines. Dampier was marooned (probably voluntarily) on the Nicobar Islands. After many hardships, he returned to England in 1691. He published an account of his experiences in A New Voyage round the World (1697), supplemented by Voyages and Descriptions (1699), which included Discourse of Trade-Winds, a masterly treatise on hydrography.

Dampier was made a naval officer and commanded an expedition (1699-1701) to Australia, New Guinea, and New Britain (which he discovered to be an island and named) to copllect plants. Dampier was one of the crew of the Cygnet which sailed around the King Sound area in the north-western of Western Australia for three months in 1688. The Cygnet was actually under the command of Captain Read but it was Dampier who, upon his return to England, published “A New Voyage Round the World” and thus was incorrectly credited as leading the expedition which anchored in Cygnet Bay and sailed around King Sound. It was in “A New Voyage Round the World” that Dampier made his observations about the Aborigines of Western Australia and the poor quality of Western Australia. These observations ensured that no one in Britain took any great interest in Australia for the next century:

“New Holland is a very large tract of land. It is not yet determined whether it is an island or a main Continent….. This part of it that we saw is all low even land with sandy banks against the sea…… The land is of a dry sandy Soil, destitute of Water, except you make wells, yet producing divers sorts of Trees; but the Woods are not thick, nor the trees very big…..We saw no Trees that bore Fruit or Berries. We saw no sort of Animal…..Here are a few small Land-birds… The Inhabitants of this Country are the miserablest People in the World…. And setting aside their human Shape, they differ but little from Brutes…. Their Eye-lids are always half close, to keep out the Flies out of their Eyes….. They have great Bottle Noses, pretty full Lips and wide Mouths…. They have no sort of Cloaths, but a piece of the Rind of a tree…to cover their nakedness. They have no Houses, but lye in open air without any covering, the earth being their Bed, and Heaven their Canopy…… Their only Food is a small sort of Fish… they have no Instruments to catch great Fish….. so that their chiefest dependence is upon what the Sea leaves in their Wares”.

Dampier returned to collect scientific specimens at Shark Bay and in the Dampier Archipelago for five weeks in August 1699 in Command of the Roebuck before captaining the British Admiralty’s first South Seas voyage. Dampier then commanded an unsuccessful privateering expedition (1703-7) in the course of which Alexander Selkirk was voluntarily marooned. Though an excellent hydrographer and navigator, he proved an incompetent commander, guilty of drunkenness and overbearing conduct.









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