The Icepick Surgeon

by Sam Kean

  Especially when dealing with officers. Dampier’s second-in-command, a naval lieutenant named George Fisher, despised Dampier as pirate scum. He swore up and down that Dampier was plotting to commandeer the Roebuck and go privateering as soon as they hit open water. The Roebuck set sail in January 1699, and even before it reached its first stop (the Canary Islands, to stock up on brandy and wine) Dampier and Fisher were quarreling. As one witness reported, in that blunt way of sailors, Fisher “gave the captain very reproachful words and bade him kiss his arse and said he did not care a turd for him.”

  Those tensions erupted into violence in mid-March. Like so many troubles in life, it started with a keg of beer. It was a nautical tradition to tap a keg whenever a ship first crossed the equator, to let the men blow off some steam in the torrid weather. Dampier’s crew ran through their keg a little quickly, though, and complained that their throats were still parched. They begged Fisher to let them tap a second. Instead of consulting Dampier, as navy regulations required, Fisher gave assent alone.

  This was hardly mutiny. But Dampier was already on edge: Rumors were swirling that Fisher planned to heave him overboard to feed the sharks. And this deliberate undermining of his authority snapped the last frayed band of restraint he had left. Upon seeing the second keg, he grabbed his cane, found the cooper who’d tapped it, and cracked him upside the head. Then he wheeled on Fisher and demanded to know why he’d allowed this. Before Fisher could answer, Dampier clubbed him, and proceeded to beat him bloody. He then clapped Fisher in leg irons and confined him to a locked cabin for two weeks. Fisher couldn’t leave even to use the head, and had to stew in his own filth. When the ship reached Bahia, on the Brazilian coast, Dampier had his lieutenant arrested and jailed without food.

  If Dampier thought he’d won this power struggle, however, he miscalculated. The moment his cell door clinked shut, Fisher climbed up to his window and began yelling at passersby in the street, railing about his imprisonment and slandering Dampier left, right, and sideways. He later composed letters to authorities in England to expose the pirate-scientist as a tyrant. Fisher’s every waking thought was to destroy Dampier.

  Dampier, in contrast, dealt with the matter by burying his head in natural history. While Fisher plotted, Dampier disappeared into the bush around Bahia, taking notes on indigo and coconuts and tropical birds. One observation in particular on this trek stands out for its historical importance. After observing some flocks of “long-legg’d fowls” at different sites, Dampier realized that, while each flock was distinct, no one group was distinct enough to count as its own species. There was a continuum of variation. So he coined a new word, “sub-species,” to describe this state. That might seem like a minor insight, but Dampier was groping toward an idea—about variation in nature and the relationships among species—that his admirer Charles Darwin would later run with in On the Origin of Species.

  The Catholic Inquisition in Brazil finally put a stop to Dampier’s hikes. They didn’t relish the thought of a Protestant pirate wandering around and taking notes on everything, and there were rumors afoot that the church planned to arrest or even poison him. Perhaps fearing he’d end up in chains next to his second-in-command, Dampier made haste to sail. He also arranged to ship Fisher back to England, to what he no doubt assumed would be a humiliating trial for insubordination. Dampier was only half right. There would be a trial, and humiliations aplenty, just not for Fisher.

  With Fisher absent, tensions cooled onboard the Roebuck, and by mid-August the crew reached western Australia, landing on the gleaming white beaches of Shark Bay. They spent the next few weeks observing dingoes, sea serpents, humpback whales, and more—a brilliant start to their scientific campaign.

  Their luck didn’t hold. Western Australia is as bleak as it is arid, and despite scouring the coast, the Roebuck found zero sources of fresh water. The sailors were soon desperately thirsty, so they tried approaching some Aborigines, who they assumed had tricks for finding water. (The Aborigines did, including tracking birds and frogs and hacking at tree roots.) But whenever the sailors came near, the natives scattered. So Dampier came up with a desperate plan. After creeping ashore, he and two companions hid behind a sand dune to ambush the natives. The plan was to kidnap one and force him to lead them to a spring. When the Englishmen jumped out, the Aborigines once again ran, and the Englishmen gave chase—not realizing they were falling into a trap. As soon as Dampier and company were exposed on open ground, the Australians wheeled and attacked with spears. One of Dampier’s men was slashed in the face, and Dampier himself almost got impaled. When warning shots failed to drive the natives back, Dampier took aim and wounded one with his pistol. It’s a rare moment in his books where he admits to committing violence.4

  Realizing they’d never find water now, Dampier’s crew slunk away from Australia in disgrace, and things only got worse from there. After Australia, Dampier tried to salvage the voyage by exploring New Guinea and collecting specimens. But the English navy hadn’t exactly handed him its trustiest ship in the Roebuck. Its hull leaked and was infested with worms, and it soon got so creaky that Dampier had to turn tail and make a run for England. The ship never arrived. On the shores of Ascension Island in the southern Atlantic, the Roebuck sprung a fatal leak. Fearing he’d be blamed for its demise, Dampier tried plugging the hole with anything he could think of, including a side of beef and his personal pajamas. Both stopgaps failed. The crew abandoned ship at Ascension and Dampier lost virtually every specimen he’d gathered. The men spent five weeks watching other ships sail blithely by in the distance until a flotilla finally pulled in and rescued them.

  Returning to London without specimens, not to mention the ship, was bad enough. But when Dampier arrived in August 1701, he found that George Fisher had been poisoning English society against him—damning the ex-pirate with such lusty broadsides that the admiralty felt obliged to court-martial Dampier and try him aboard a ship.

  Dampier defended himself as best he could, marshaling witnesses who swore that Fisher was plotting mutiny. Dampier also fought dirty, accusing Fisher—no one knows how truthfully—of sodomizing two young cabin boys on their voyage. (Pirates tolerated homosexuality to some degree; the navy did not.) For his part, Fisher harped on Dampier’s character, denouncing him as a poltroon and a scoundrel. He also ginned up charges that Dampier had murdered a querulous crew member by locking him into a cabin for a spell, even though the man died ten months after the punishment ended. To their credit, the judges dismissed that and other charges, including one of negligence for letting the Roebuck sink. But they could not abide the caning of Fisher, a fellow officer, and they found Dampier guilty of “very hard and cruel usage” of his second-in-command. As punishment, they banned him from commanding any English ships and fined him three years’ salary.

  William Dampier had tried to go respectable, and it had profited him nothing. He was as penniless as ever, and was now a pariah in government circles. He had only one option left: the 49-year-old naturalist would have to return to piracy.

  Dampier’s life and times might seem remote to us, but the ethical issues he raises are still relevant today. For one thing, scientific piracy didn’t end in the 1700s. Moreover, the kind of fieldwork he did is, in some ways, even more dangerous now than several centuries ago.

  Countless naturalists over the years have died with their boots on. Most succumbed to malaria, yellow fever, or another disease, but there are enough snake bites, stampedes, puma maulings, mudslides, and accidental poisonings to fill a whole volume. Scientists have been murdered, too. In 1942, Ernest Gibbins, a British biologist studying blood-borne diseases in Uganda, was ambushed in his car and stabbed to death by local warriors who were convinced he was stealing their blood for “white man’s witchcraft.” A police officer said his body was “as full of spears as a bloody porcupine.” Since then, a rise in tribal wars and ethnic conflicts in the twentieth century, exacerbated by global arms trafficking, has only increased the danger o
f fieldwork in many places. Dampier and his contemporaries suffered gravely at times, but he never had to worry about being kidnapped and held for a $6 million ransom by an armed militia, as happened to a rice scientist in Colombia in the 1990s. For these reasons, many research institutes are far less tolerant nowadays of the haphazard, let’s-just-wing-it fieldwork of yesteryear.

  As for scientific piracy, its nature has changed since Dampier’s day. Again, Dampier became a pirate largely to feed his scientific obsessions; he had no other means to visit distant lands. In contrast, with later scientists, the very nature of their work was criminal in that it involved the theft of natural resources—so-called biopiracy.

  One highly coveted good during colonial times was quinine, a drug derived from the cinnamon-colored bark of the cinchona tree. When ground into powder and drunk with water, quinine helps combat malaria, the deadliest disease in human history. (According to some estimates, mosquito-borne diseases have killed a full one half of all 108 billion human beings who’ve ever lived, and malaria represents the biggest chunk of that carnage.) Unfortunately, while malaria was a worldwide scourge—killing people in Africa and India, Italy and Southeast Asia—cinchona trees grew only in South America. So European nations began sending botanists undercover into South America to steal cinchona seeds. It proved a fool’s errand. The most valuable, quinine-rich species lived on stupidly steep slopes in the Andes that were shrouded in mist three-fourths of the year. As a result, every single smuggler failed, and several perished in the attempt.

  The man who finally succeeded was a Bolivian Indian named Manuel Incra Mamani. Very little is known about Mamani. Stories that he descended from an Incan king are almost certainly bogus, though he might have come from a line of medicine men who prized botanical knowledge. Regardless, he could tramp through the Amazon for weeks at a time, fueled by little more than coca leaves, and he had an uncanny ability to scan the endless green canopy of the forest and pick out a tiny wisp of scarlet—the signature color of cinchona leaves. After harvesting a few sacks of seeds in 1865, he tramped a thousand miles, on foot, over the freezing Andes highlands, and delivered them to the Englishman who’d commissioned him. For this deed, he got $500, two mules, four donkeys, and a new gun. He was also sentenced to death in absentia for betraying his country. The greedy Englishman later sent him back into the jungle for more seeds, at which point Mamani got caught and charged with smuggling. He was thrown into jail, denied food and water, and beaten savagely. He was released two weeks later, so crippled he couldn’t stand upright. His donkeys were taken from him, and he died within a few days.

  Historians still debate whether Mamani’s crime was justified. On the one hand, Peru and Ecuador had been hording an essential medicine and charging wildly inflated prices—profiteering on death. Moreover, they’d been husbanding the trees so poorly that cinchona was on the verge of extinction by the mid-1800s. After Mamani, several European nations established cinchona plantations in Asia with the smuggled seeds, thereby saving millions of lives worldwide.5 (Incidentally, British officers in India consumed the bark as bitter tonic water, which they mixed with booze to make it go down more smoothly. Thus was born the gin and tonic.) On the other hand, the plantations in Asia undermined and eventually wiped out the native cinchona industry in South America, impoverishing people there. And given the value of cinchona as a medicine, one historian has called the theft, only slightly hyperbolically, “the biggest robbery in history.” It was colonialism at its most exploitative. It also saved countless lives in Africa and Asia.

  Other biopiracy seems harder to justify. One key ingredient in industrialization was rubber, which was derived from the sap of certain trees native to the Amazon. Without rubber tires, cars and bicycles wouldn’t exist, and rubber tubes and seals made modern chemistry and medicine possible. Nor would we have electricity without rubber insulation for wires. But rubber remained a niche good until British explorer Henry Wickham broke Brazil’s monopoly on it in 1876 by smuggling out 70,000 rubber seeds, which were used to set up more plantations in Asia. The world at large benefitted, no question, but stealing seeds to make consumer goods seems less ethical than stealing seeds to make medicine. Other cases of smuggling seem even less moral. Consider the Scottish botanist in China in the 1840s who dressed up in local garb, shaved the front half of his head, pulled his remaining hair into a ponytail, infiltrated a state-run plantation, and stole 20,000 prize tea plants for transport to India. You’d be hard-pressed to make a humanitarian case for Earl Grey.

  Biopiracy continues in modern times. Billionaires in China pay fortunes to poachers for rhinoceros horns and other supposed priapics. Pharmaceutical companies develop blockbuster drugs from viper venom and periwinkle plants and other tropical resources, and only rarely does the money trickle back down to the indigenous peoples who, in some cases, first discovered their medicinal properties. It’s not all the mega-rich, either: everyday people around the world support an extensive black market of exotic flowers and pets. Even if the offenders aren’t hunting down doubloons and pieces-of-eight anymore, the spirit of Dampier-era piracy lives on.

  In 1703, William Dampier finally caught a break. A new war with Spain and France had broken out, and England needed privateers to harass the enemy. So despite his being barred from commanding her ships, Queen Anne summoned the 51-year-old pirate for an audience. Like the basest courtier, Dampier kissed the royal hand and kissed the royal ass, and soon received a commission to captain the St. George.

  Alas, the voyage of St. George was another messy, mutinous affair. Dampier’s men accused him of taking bribes (e.g., silver dinnerware) from the captains of the foreign ships he’d captured. In exchange, Dampier would conduct only a superficial search of their holds, and let them sail away with most of their treasures intact. Rumor also held that Dampier was drinking heavily, although it’s hard to blame him. He spent all day every day tacking back and forth, back and forth, scouring the horizon for distant ships. It was dreadfully boring, and unlike in his buccaneering days, he couldn’t just chuck his duty and sail for some distant port. He had responsibilities now, and his inability to indulge his scientific curiosity left him miserable. (Modern research shows that IQ correlates strongly with alcohol abuse, and it stands to reason that people would drink more when they feel intellectually thwarted.) When the voyage ended in 1707, Dampier’s reputation as a captain was in shambles, and he never again commanded another ship.

  However poor a captain, though, Dampier was still a brilliant navigator, and a few years later he joined another privateering cruise that made literary history. On an excursion in the Pacific Ocean the crew began running low on water and drooping from scurvy, so Dampier steered them toward the nearest land, the Juan Fernández Islands off Chile. While approaching, they were astonished to see a hairy bipedal beast onshore, waving its arms. It was a marooned sailor named Alexander Selkirk. He was clad in goatskins and looked, as one witness recalled, “wilder than the first owners of them.” For four years, four months, and four days Selkirk had eked out a living on the island—snagging goats, gnawing wild cabbages, making knives and fishhooks from barrels that washed ashore. His feet were as leathery as iguana hides, and after four years of isolation, his voice was so hoarse he could barely speak. Dampier’s crew rescued him and brought him back to England in triumph. His story would soon inspire Daniel Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe.

  Dafoe was hardly alone in mining Dampier’s life for inspiration. Jonathan Swift poached his stories for Gulliver’s Travels, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge did the same for “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Dampier’s most influential fan, Charles Darwin, even brought Dampier’s books along on his formative Beagle voyage in the 1830s. Darwin chuckled over his pirate predecessor’s naughty deeds, calling him “Old Dampier” in his notes. More importantly, Darwin studied Dampier’s descriptions of species and subspecies and pored over his accounts of places like the Galápagos, effectively using Dampier as a guide. Darwin might never have become D
arwin without the old pirate.

  But while adventure writers and scientists have always forgiven Dampier, latter-day George Fishers have found him harder to abide. When Dampier’s hometown in England discussed putting up a plaque to honor him in the early 1900s, one god-fearing fellow stood up and denounced him as “a pirate ruffian that ought to have been hung [sic].” Critics nowadays go even further. They contend that Dampier’s science, however groundbreaking, merely blazed a trail for colonialism and was therefore a crime against humanity.

  The thing is, both sides have a point. Dampier was lowdown and brilliant, inspiring and a blackguard. His work advanced nearly every scientific field that existed then—navigation, zoology, botany, meteorology—and he did despicable things in the meantime. As one biographer noted, “Defoe, Swift, and all of the others owed much more to Dampier than a single model. It can in truth be said that they owed the entire spirit of a new age to this one man.”

  Alas, this new age would have atrocities of its own to reckon with—especially slavery. At a glance, science and slavery might not seem to have much to do with each other. But both were fundamental forces in shaping the modern world, and historians have started to recognize that they shaped each other in disturbing ways as well.

  Footnotes