A Brief History of Circumnavigators

by Derek Wilson

  Captain Heath’s problem was hiring enough seamen to make up his depleted crew. He hoped to obtain some from other homeward-bound vessels but they were in as dire a case as the Defence. Eventually, he had to resort to stealth, contracting with outward-bound men who wished to break their contracts. These would abscond, having arranged a secret, night-time rendezvous with Heath, who then sent his boat for them and concealed them aboard his ship.

  The Defence left the Cape on 23 May in convoy with two other English ships and reached the Downs on 16 September. Dampier’s plans to make a fortune as a travelling showman, like so many of his commercial enterprises, soon collapsed. He had hardly landed in London before financial necessity forced him to part with his share in the painted prince. Alas, Jeoly did not long survive to enrich his new owners. They paraded him before an amazed public in many towns and issued handbills telling his colourful – and totally spurious – life history. But at Oxford he caught smallpox and died.

  But Dampier did have his journal. He spent six years, interspersed with mercantile voyages, preparing his manuscript. At last, in 1697, it was published with this impressive and intriguing title page:

  The New Voyage was one of those rare books that catch the imagination of a whole generation and win immortality for their authors. People clamoured to buy it – captains, merchants and would-be adventurers, as well as armchair travellers. In his mid-forties Dampier achieved the fame and fortune he had so long craved.

  It was impossible for a man like Dampier to lead an uneventful life. The eighteen years remaining to him were crowded with incident and controversy and included two more circumnavigations.

  His fame and achievements had won him patrons and friends in high places. Thus, when he put forward proposals for a government-sponsored voyage of discovery he was taken seriously. His plans, as described in a letter to the Admiralty, were clear and detailed. He proposed to travel via the Cape to New Holland (Australia) to see if it was part of the unknown southern continent, Terra Australis. He would, he declared, run across the Indian Ocean from Madagascar:

  to the northernmost part of New Holland, where I would water if I had occasion, and from thence I would range towards New Guinea. There are many islands in that sea between New Holland and New Guinea . . . and it is probable that we may light on some or other that are not without spice. Should I meet with nothing on any of these islands, I would range along the main of New Guinea, to see what that afforded; and from thence I would cross over to the island Gilolo, where I may be informed of the state of those parts by the natives who speak the Malayan language. From Gilolo I would range away to the eastward of New Guinea, and so direct my course southerly, coasting by the land; and where I found a harbour or river I would land and seek about for men and other animals, vegetables, minerals, etc., and having made what discovery I could, I would return home by the way of Tierra del Fuego.27

  What is interesting is that Dampier here proposes an east-about circumnavigation. If he had carried his plans into effect he would have achieved something truly remarkable and changed the history of long-distance sailing. As it was, another seventy-six years were to pass before the globe was successfully circumnavigated from west to east.

  The voyage Dampier did make was a fiasco. He set out in January 1699 in command of the twenty-one gun Roebuck and he did successfully reach Western Australia. But by then the whole enterprise had begun to fall apart for a variety of reasons. The ship was not up to a long voyage. The crew were decimated by scurvy. Some of the officers were mutinous and Dampier, who had learned his seamanship among pirates, lacked the qualities of a naval commander. The voyage ended in chaos and recriminations. The Roebuck turned for home and got as far as Ascension before having to be scuttled. Back in England, in 1702, Dampier faced a court martial for over-harsh discipline. He was found guilty and declared ‘not a fit person to be employed as commander of any of his majesty’s ships’.

  The prohibition was scarcely serious, for within ten months Dampier was preparing to put to sea as captain of the privateer St George, having also under his command the Cinque Ports. Once again quarrels soon broke out between Dampier and his subordinates. Charges of drunkenness, brutality and cowardice were levelled against Dampier. Such dissensions were common on privateering/piratical voyages and, since the only account to survive is one hostile to Dampier, it is difficult to know how much truth there is in the criticisms. The voyage was a failure and sauve qui peut was the motive of all the officers called to account by the Admiralty on their return. What is clear is that Dampier and Captain Stradling who took over the Cinque Ports when her captain died off Brazil did not see eye to eye. As soon as the ships rounded the Horn they separated. The St George was involved in several indeterminate actions along the coast of Peru and Mexico which culminated in Dampier’s failure to capture the Manila galleon. At this point, several of his men defected and made their way westward in a prize ship. Dampier and his depleted crew were obliged to abandon the St George and make their way across the Pacific in a captured Spanish barque. In Amboyna they were imprisoned as pirates by the Dutch and it was only in December 1707 that Dampier reached England to discover that Stradling and others had already savaged his reputation. The most interesting point about this, otherwise sordid, expedition is that Stradling fell out with his sailing master, Alexander Selkirk, and abandoned him on Juan Fernandez in September 1704.

  Dampier did not have to spend long ashore. In August 1708 he sailed as pilot and sailing master in the Duke, a privateer under the command of Woodes Rogers, a tough but good-humoured seaman and an excellent captain. The Duke and her consort, appropriately named the Duchess, were pretty foul vessels and manned by the usual riff-raff supplied to privateers and it is to Rogers’s credit that he maintained discipline throughout the voyage. A mutiny in mid-Atlantic was swiftly suppressed and the captain had the ringleader flogged by a fellow conspirator, to break ‘any unlawful friendship amongst them’. He could be ruthless when necessary but he also saw that the men’s wages were paid promptly and he took his officers into his confidence. Dampier’s advice he found particularly valuable, since Rogers, himself, had never been into the South Sea. Rounding the Horn in January 1709, the ships ran into severe storms and were driven far to the south. By Rogers’s reckoning they reached 61°53′, which was probably the highest latitude any mariners had reached in the southern hemisphere. The men suffered terribly during those weeks through being incessantly soaked to the skin and frozen by biting winds. Rogers, on Dampier’s advice, decided to put in at Juan Fernandez. Approaching the principal anchorage, he was surprised to see smoke rising from a signal fire on the beach. A boat was sent ashore and brought back, much to Dampier’s amazement, Alexander Selkirk. The lank-bearded, goatskinclad creature was scarcely recognisable, especially as after four years of solitary confinement, he had almost lost the use of his native tongue. Selkirk’s story was included by Woodes Rogers in his account of the voyage and this became the basis for Daniel Defoe’s classic The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, which was first published in 1719. A hundred and sixty years later the castaway’s tale had not lost its appeal, for Robert Louis Stevenson almost certainly took Selkirk as his model for Ben Gunn, in Treasure Island. Yet neither Defoe’s resourceful hero nor the half-crazed pirate of Stevenson’s yarn come as close to the original as the desperately lonely mariner imagined by the poet William Cowper in his Verses Supposed to be Written by Alexander Selkirk:

  I am monarch of all I survey,

  My right there is none to dispute;

  From the centre all round to the sea

  I am lord of the fowl and the brute.

  O solitude! where are the charms

  That sages have seen in thy face?

  Better dwell in the midst of alarms

  Than reign in this horrible place.

  I am out of humanity’s reach

  I must finish my journey alone

  Never hear the sweet music of speech;


  I start at the sound of my own.

  The beasts, that roam over the plain,

  My form with indifference see;

  They are so unacquainted with man,

  Their tameness is shocking to me.

  Society, friendship, and love,

  Divinely bestowed upon man,

  Oh, had I the wings of a dove,

  How soon would I taste you again!

  My sorrows I then might assuage

  In the ways of religion and truth,

  Might learn from the wisdom of age,

  And be cheered by the sallies of youth . . .

  Ye winds, that have made me your sport,

  Convey to this desolate shore

  Some cordial endearing report

  Of a land I shall visit no more.

  My friends, do they now and then send

  A wish or a thought after me?

  O tell me I yet have a friend,

  Though a friend I am never to see

  Many visitors have eulogised about the remote beauty of Juan Fernandez but to the man who had spent fifty-two months of solitude there the island was indeed a ‘horrible place’. Selkirk was frantic to be taken off and pathetically grateful to Dampier, who persuaded Rogers to appoint him mate aboard the Duke.

  A marauding trip along the Pacific coast of South and Central America culminated in the capture of one of the Manila galleons. Thus, when Dampier returned in October 1711 from his third circumnavigation it was as a member of an extremely successful voyage. The profit amounted to some £200,000. Unfortunately Dampier was not destined to receive his share. The wheels of the Admiralty ground slowly and though Dampier lived for another three and a half years the distribution of the booty had not by then taken place. This extraordinary man died at his London lodgings in March 1715, ‘diseased and weak of body but of sound and perfect mind’, as his will declared. It would be unwise to attempt a summary of a life so full of contradictions. It is not only later generations who have been hard put to it to understand William Dampier. On 6 August 1698 a meeting took place between Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, the greatest diarists in the English language. Dampier was also present, as Evelyn noted:

  I dined with Mr Pepys, where was Captain Dampier, who had been a famous buccaneer, had brought hither the painted prince Job, and printed a relation of his very strange adventure, and his observations. He was now going abroad again by the King’s encouragement, who furnished a ship of 290 tons. He seemed a more modest man than one would imagine by the relation of the crew he had assorted with.28

  *The name entered the language via the Danish scorbuck from the Old Icelandic skyrbjügr, meaning ‘ulcerated sores’.

  * The word ‘tattoo’, which is of Tahitian origin, did not enter English until the 1770s when Captain Cook visited Polynesia.

  5

  ‘ENOUGH TO DESTROY A MAN’

  For many years privateers and pirates continued to be the most persistent circumnavigators. Driven by the basest human motives – greed, violence and the desire to shake themselves free of society’s restraints – they scavenged the seven seas in single ships or packs and, in doing so, made themselves masters of the oceans. But it was not much of a life; certainly it lacked any of the romance with which later writers were to invest voyages ‘under the skull and crossbones’. Rather did it qualify for Hobbes’ definition of the existence of primitive savages:

  No arts; no letters; no society; and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.1

  Nothing illustrates more clearly than the list2 opposite the varied and terrible risks that any seaman ran who signed on with a privateer. It is a catalogue prepared for the Admiralty showing the fate of 83 men out of a crew of 115 who sailed in the Speedwell in the years 1719–1722.

  The captain of the Speedwell was George Shelvocke, as shifty a man as ever trod upon neat’s leather. He was a naval officer of some thirty years’ experience who was down on his luck when it was proposed that he might take command of the Speedwell in an expedition under the leadership of Captain John Clipperton in the Success. Naturally, he accepted but he had no intention of carrying out the instructions of the little group of idle gentlemen and money-grubbing traders promoting the enterprise. For one thing he was not prepared to take orders from a mere merchant captain like Clipperton. For another, this would probably be his last chance to provide comfortably for his old age. He had given the best years of his life to the service only to find himself, at the age of 38, retired without pay. Now he had an opportunity to get what he felt was only his due. Throughout the forthcoming cruise everything was to be subordinated to Shelvocke’s personal profit.

  His first move was to lose contact with the Success. An obliging storm when they were six days out provided the ideal opportunity. Rendezvous orders had, of course, been issued to cover just such an eventuality, but Shelvocke avoided the meeting place in the Cape Verde Islands. He seems to have carried his crew with him in this deliberate disobedience. Doubtless, he persuaded them that the pickings would be richer if they went it alone. He could also offer a more immediate incentive: the Speedwell carried the expedition’s entire stock of wine and spirits.

  A LIST OF SUCH OF MY SHIPS COMPANY AS DIED, DESERTED, OR WERE TAKEN OR KILLED BY THE ENEMY DURING THE VOYAGE, VIZ.:

  W. G. PERRIN.

  Off Brazil Shelvocke made a completely unjustifiable attack on a Portuguese merchant ship and took off money and silk. Part of the rich cloth was devoted to making an exotic suit of black and silver for the captain. His next move was to use agents provocateurs to stir up a ‘mutiny’ among the men. They were manipulated into demanding a more egalitarian share-out of loot, to be paid before the ship returned to England. Shelvocke’s objective was to secure more for himself at the owners’ expense, while giving the impression that he had only agreed to new arrangements under duress. Raiding along the Pacific coast of South America yielded considerable plunder and, in May 1720, Shelvocke retired to Juan Fernandez to rest his crew. While the men were camped ashore, the Speedwell’s anchor cable parted in a storm. She was driven onto rocks and completely wrecked. The privateers were able to recover sufficient timber and canvas to build a smaller craft but most of the bullion was lost. Accident or another example of Shelvocke’s greed and trickery? Anchoring the Speedwell in that particular spot was an uncharacteristic example of poor seamanship and an action taken against the advice of the officers. The loss of the ship had two immediate results: it deprived the owners of any share in the profits of the voyage and it enabled Shelvocke to put the expedition on a completely new footing. His crew now accepted the ‘Jamaica discipline’, that is they formed themselves into a sort of piratical co-operative in which all major decisions were, theoretically, taken by democratic vote. At a stroke, Shelvocke had transformed the entire operation into one in which he alone had any authority and could make the rules. It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that he had also secretly removed all easily-portable treasure from the Speedwell before her wreck.

  Off Peru in November the brigands made good their loss by capturing a 200-ton merchantman, the Jesu Maria, and renamed her the Happy Return. They sailed on to the Isle of Coiba, off Panama, to lie low. And there Shelvocke had a nasty shock. Who should be already anchored there but John Clipperton in the Success. Inevitably, there was a scene. Clipperton upbraided his disobedient subordinate and demanded the immediate handover of the proceeds of his activities which were the property of the expedition’s backers. Shelvocke maintained that, since the loss of the Speedwell, the owners had no claim upon him or his men. His adversary was in no position to press the point and the two once more – and finally – parted company.

  Higher up the coast Shelvocke discovered a superior vessel, the Sacra Familia and boarded her. The Spanish captain drew his attention to the fact that peace had recently been signed between their respective countries. Such technicalities were of little consequence to Shelv
ocke. He transferred his crew and stores to the new prize and sailed on. In May 1721 he encountered his best victim of the entire expedition. From the Concepcion de Recova he took ample provisions and $100,000 in coin.

  After a period of recuperation on the Californian coast, Shelvocke took the Sacra Familia across the Pacific to Canton, where he had agreed with the crew to sell the ship, cash up the voyage and distribute the spoils. Here the unscrupulous captain played his last – and perhaps meanest – trick on the men who had shared with him all the dangers of the previous two and a half years. He did a deal with the Chinese customs officials. They billed him for harbour dues of £2,166.13s.4d. The appropriate charge, which his men could not know, was about £350. Shelvocke divided the difference with his Cantonese accomplice. The Sacra Familia was sold for £700 and the proceeds put into the common pot. The thirty-two surviving crewmen were shown the cooked books and took what they, presumably, believed to be their fair shares (varying between £220 and £1100 per man). Shelvocke’s official portion was £2,642. 10s. In fact, thanks to the various frauds he had perpetrated, he cleared at least £7,000.