“Sir,” says Dampier to the publican, “that painted prince is dead.”
And, wiping the surface filth into filthy circles with a blackened rag, the publican nods, which he thinks generous enough for such a comment.
And Twice!
The second circumnavigation was to be his undoing, but only because its inception had been Dampier’s glory, Captain Dampier now, in command of the Roebuck. The Roebuck’s charge was to menace French ships and collect information. Dampier was pleased to have finally escaped being a pirate, although even he—who knew through qualification (which helped with the Royal Navy) and suffering (which appealed to his sense of justice) that he had earned it—felt the whole thing to be somewhat ironic. When the charge of piracy was leveled against him upon his return—destroying whatever reputation he had managed to cobble together on that first long voyage—he could not have been surprised.
Captain Dampier is busy writing, yet he raises his head to answer this charge.
“What is the difference between a pirate captain and one of the English Royal Navy?” he says. “Two things: the pirate menaces everyone, not just those enemies of the Crown, and the pirate publishes as buccaneer, not scholar. Although perhaps the running of the ship is more democratic in the former.”
Surely you mean the latter: the Royal Navy.
“I certainly don’t,” says Dampier, and he lays down his pen to spend some time with this and me and my lack of understanding. “The pirate defines justice through equality: what’s good for him is good for me. The Crown defines justice through adherence: if this is not done, it will be punished. So you decide. Choose as you like. I don’t care.”
That’s sour grapes, Dampier, because of your court-martial. I know all about Fisher.
“Fisher? Has history bothered with him?”
I’m afraid so, even though Dampier left from his works—mentioning only in passing “the Refractoriness of some under me”—any mention of Fisher. But Lieutenant Fisher, Dampier’s second-in-command, was his undoing.
“Do you find me so undone?” says Dampier, and he looks offended.
But let’s return to a time when Fisher was still on board the ship, before Dampier deposited him in a Portuguese prison in Bahia. Dampier had little control in choosing his crew, and he knew that many sailors were pirates and vice versa—in truth, piracy versus sailoring was factored in degrees; the factions beloved of simpleminded people like Fisher had no business on board a ship. Fisher disliked being second-in-command in general, and in particular to a known buccaneer. These things he let be known, and he is on record these long years since as having called Dampier everything from an “Old Dog” to a “dissembling, cheating rogue.” And Dampier is on record for beating him about with his walking stick—as ridiculous then as it would be now—and, in response to Fisher’s angry threats, responding that he did not care “a farthing for what your Lordships [can] do to [me].”
Dampier desired to be a captain not to rule over men, but in order not to be ruled, there being no way to avoid both these situations without returning to piracy. Being a pirate interfered with his career as a writer and explorer. What he really liked to do was make maps—maps of things never done before: obvious things, such as certain stretches of the west Australian coastline; and inventive things, such as the winds, which had certain noteworthy characteristics, and tides, which operated with some regularity. All of these were of value to the mariner. And who before had thought to map the wind?
The trade winds blow at an acute angle on any coast, and Dampier is wondering how best to communicate the specifics of this situation when there is an aggressive pounding on his door. Dampier is silent, hoping that the person might leave, but of course whoever it is knows him to be in his cabin: this is a ship, where else could he be? After a second series of thumps, Dampier responds with a weary, “Enter.”
And Fisher enters. “I must report a breach in authority.”
“Really?” says Dampier. But he doesn’t look up from his papers. “Is that all?”
“The nature of the breach,” says Fisher.
And Dampier is not sure how to respond because this is not a question. He finally says, “Yes?” as it is clear that Fisher has no intention of leaving until he has communicated the details of the transgression. Dampier watches Fisher speak, his mouth and jaws in rapid exercise, the hands over here, then over there, a righteous angry flush about the cheeks, the fists at the sides, then in conscious, punctuating gestures in the air in front. A fleck of spittle catches the light. And then another. Could that be sweat collecting at the man’s temples? Why has Dampier never noticed just how short Fisher is—diminutive—a fact underscored by the tall boots? He looks like a uniformed mouse. And then Dampier realizes that Fisher has fallen silent.
“So what you’re saying,” says Dampier, “is that you wished to issue beer and the purser refused?”
“Of course that’s what I’ve been saying.”
“And this is important?”
There is a moment during which Dampier sincerely hopes Fisher has seen the light, but he suspects this to be un-justified optimism, and is right.
“You are a captain, and as such must maintain authority.”
“Yes, but not an abstract authority, an authority to maintain order. And I fail to see the necessity of serving men beer.”
“The breach is not in the men being deprived of beer, but in the purser refusing my order.”
“This is a breach of authority that represents a breach of authority, but also maintains order. Perhaps the men are better off without the beer.”
“Then you must order that, in order to have me order the purser not to issue beer, who must obey said order.”
“Then I do just that.”
“But sir, that cannot be done.”
“Why?”
“Because my order has already been disobeyed!”
“I don’t have time for this,” says Dampier. “Go away, and that’s an order.”
It is hard to blame Dampier for having Fisher locked up in a Brazilian prison, but surely he saw his reputation would suffer. The judges found Dampier’s treatment of Fisher to be extreme, his defense of fearing mutiny without justification. They fined Dampier all the proceeds from his journey and said he was unfit to command any of Her Majesty’s ships.
“Is this Fisher business of interest to anyone?” says Dampier. “And who are you? Why bother to write my tale when others of far more prominence have done it justice—justice that has stood the test of time? What do you think you can bring to my equation when Swift has brought pen to it already? What bastard do you hope to birth from humping the margins of Defoe?”
I know of Swift, and Humboldt, and Coleridge, but what of Defoe?
“I dropped Alexander Selkirk off on my second journey and picked him up on my third. So perhaps one cannot credit me with the story of the maroon, but for putting a start and end to it, that is surely me. And since the book is what is important, then that is surely me, since the story needed a beginning and an end, Selkirk just supplying the middle: his demand to be left on the desert isle, his regret as the ship sailed off, his ability to survive until I rescued him. But let me tell you one thing: Selkirk did not survive because he was a noble soul, but rather because he was the most stubborn, ill-tempered, fiery, blighted soul, and nothing could kill him. But were it not for me, who bothered to pass by and bring him on board, who deposited him in London, where he soon returned to drink and fisticuffs and syphilitic women, his story would have died among the goats and turnips and sea lions of islands.”
Fair enough.
And Thrice!
I feel compelled to tell you that Dampier did indeed make it a third time around the globe, as sailing master to privateer Woodes Rogers on the Duke. Had he survived his arrival, he would have achieved the prosperity that he pursued all his life. But he died a drunk, which is a shame, considering he had spent so much of his life amongst alcoholics without affliction; consider his d
runkenness a choice. As he grabbed the bottle, he thought, “Why the hell not? What is there to be sober for?” And haven’t we all felt that way?
So let’s not bother with his final months, characterized by a chill misery. Let’s leave out the Thames, her clippers and slavers and sloops bobbing tantalizingly, paused before they journey off into history, literature, art, and politics. Let’s leave the gin drinkers, and poxed lovers, and dimwitted royals, and crooked merchants, the shit-slicked London streets, and tubercular whores, and set Dampier back at sea, where he was always more comfortable anyway.
I would love to ask him what he thinks, but I doubt he would respond kindly to me, so instead I send in a man of the cloth—a missionary of sorts—who perhaps has been working among savages somewhere (although it might be too early for this), and is headed home to rejoin his wife. We are already in deep night, and the only light in the captain’s cabin is a flickering lamp that intermittently flares, illumining the corners of the ceiling, but most often burns from below, lighting up Dampier’s drooping features as though he were the subject of a painting by Joseph Wright of Derby. And the missionary, sitting back in his chair in shadow, leans forward only to speak, his face revealed as he does, then lost again as he sits back, leaving Dampier to appear alone while he speaks, as he declaims into, no, against the dark—a beacon to vanquish abysmal ignorance.
Dampier, who feels the end of his life approaching and, as a man of no faith, senses the futility of the future.
Dampier, who has been taught that he is the only one to be trusted—he and his own eyes—and that brotherhood, companionship, and trust are but self-perpetuating myths or, worse, luxuries: things valuable only to those in power, whom others dare not cross, or to savages and those living in abject poverty, who have nothing to lose.
Speak, Dampier! Speak, while I can still hear you, before I lose you to history.
History!
Dampier clears his throat. Although it is plain that he is hobbled—tongue, thought, and senses—by drink, he still has a few useful words to share. What are you thinking, Dampier? What keeps you now in motion?
“It is my fate to trust only the stars, those bitter shards sunk deep in night’s abysmal, gawping bog. The stars keep me in motion. A navigator is one who navigates. But my life is lived in knots and naughts—a speedy tangle of days amounting to nothing. Am I taking this voyage, or is it taking me? Am I drinking this bottle, or is it drinking me?”
I tap my man of the cloth on the shoulder, for it is his turn to speak, and I would feel bad if Dampier were declaiming to nothing but the stinking, still air of his cabin.
“But life is not so void of meaning,” says he, who may or may not be a missionary, startled to attention.
“Don’t talk to me of God, for I will smash this bottle against your head and give you visions.”
“But what of—” and here the chaplain stops, for he means to speak of love, but seeing Dampier’s dissipated state, the very air around his head corrupted by proximity, the bitterly curled lip hoping for a vindicating violence, he substitutes the less contentious—“family?”
“Family?”
The chaplain proposes, “Perhaps a wife.” Although seeing Dampier’s countenance, the thought of someone cleaved to that, cleaving to that, even clinging, even a louse, seems impossible, absurd. But what relation to one so stiff in solitude would not offend? What would comprise solace to one so locked within disdain? A thought: perhaps molestation would offer a relief, a distraction, from the stilled thoughts that press upon the pirate’s soul. But what guise would this molestation take? The chaplain’s thought circles back, for the answer is, of course, a wife. Dampier—his eyes bloodshot and drooping, the pouches beneath them weighted with a low-burning, unrelieved, and general grief—exudes an assertive, skeletal awareness.
“Perhaps a wife,” repeats Dampier, not bitterly, but lightly and without anger.
He had been listening. “So were you never married?” asks our man of the cloth.
“Certainly not. Never. And I know Never, for I did stand there once, and so situated, understood her borders. Never! I know her hectares marked off by my fences. For I am wed to her. She is my wife!”
The chaplain sips nervously at his brandy, and watches Dampier’s head droop, and droop, and then, with a hollow thunk against the table’s rough wood, he falls to sleep. Carefully the chaplain places his half-full glass against the table and, rising from his chair, contemplates the distance to the door. For surely this is madness. Madness, yes, for drink has never been so complicated.
His End!
Our brilliant buccaneer and naturalist has, in the grip of drink, wandered off the page. If you wish to see him, there is a painting hanging in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Beneath the painting is the inscription, “Pirate and Hydrographer,” and maybe it’s the smell wafting up from this that has set the dour expression upon his face. Dampier is unhappy, of course, to have been so stuck—to him no less an ordeal than the “painted ship upon a painted ocean,” words that he also inspired.
Since our friend Dampier spent his final days in London, we can presume him to be buried in a damp square of ground, his bare bones laid out in proximity to the bones of others, an uncaring population passing by above, as equally uncaring moles and worms pass through: an end befitting a buccaneer whose brilliant writing and adventurous soul fed the brilliance of others, with this result: he is outshone by his fictionalized self, without even the benefit of being the author of that which threw him into shadow. Ultimately, the fact that Dampier was so intriguing during his life has left him buried in time, tossed out with the historical detritus: Gulliver and Crusoe and the Ancient Mariner sit in the center of the page, and Dampier—the foundation of it all—peers, lips pursed, from the margins.
“You fool,” says Dampier from his grave, his jaws working admirably without the aid of muscles, his bad teeth bare for all to see, the skull like any other, since—whatever Dampier might have thought before—death is the real equalizer. He says, “I am not a character, but a writer. A writer happy to be such, not desperate like you, who for a reason unknown to me has felt the need to put herself in her own story. My book is still on the shelf of every library. I do not need to be hero, only author. Gulliver is welcome to command whatever tale he wishes and does not impugn my work, nor steal my thunder. Shut up, just shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
All right, Dampier, I can take such criticism. But nothing shuts me up. And I am not happy with this end: London, graveyard, presumed Christian burial. We can do better.
We’re on a lonely stretch of coastline, and I think it must be the western coast of Australia because it’s very hot and very dry and alien to most, but familiar to me, who has seen it. A stiff wind is blowing on the shore. We’re floating along bird-like in the air, but we throw no shadow. There’s a point of interest on the beach, but the sand seems uninterrupted, so initially we’re not sure why we focus on this place. Then, yielding to the force of wind, we see the sand sift away to reveal a skeleton, bleached by sun, buffed clean of any meat or tendon, elegant, and alone. And this is you, Dampier. We draw close and pause at our fallen buccaneer, our mood reverent, our steps careful. We fall to our knees: how much of our understanding do we owe to this man? (Are you happy now? Is this better?) Oh, Dampier, great explorer, naturalist, to have you still with us, “man of exquisite mind”! But what is that sound? I hear a strange singing. We bring ourselves closer, almost touching the vaulted hall of your ribs. It’s the wind singing through you, the very wind of which you wrote, that shifting, impossible power upon which your life depended, that unpredictable force to which you presumed to bring understanding —the wind has loosed itself about you, making of your skeleton a mouth. But what is it saying? What could it say? Ah. Now it speaks clearly, and I make out at first one word, then more, then a flood as it plays upon your bones:
“. . . we left Captain Sharp and those who were willing to go with him in
the Ship, and imbarqued into our Lanch and Canoas, designing for the River of Santa Maria . . .”
And it’s your story, Dampier, the whole thing, put down exactly as you wanted it.
Periplus
I. Embarkation
In the final days of 1959, a Jesuit Scholastic sits at a desk in the seminary library. He is twenty-four years old. Outside, a death knell sounds on the frenetic fifties, while the sixties wait twitching in the wings. In the library, all is peaceful. Or is it merely quiet? Does he care? He must. Regardless of whatever philosophical bent is endemic in the role of seminarian, he is only twenty-four years old—young—and the world, that unwritten void beyond the tall walls of the seminary, still belongs to him. Here, in the print, all is quiet. Silence holds fast. Silence is what precedes the slam of a book, the accidental grind of a chair across well-waxed floorboards. Silence follows everything, is the destiny of everything. The pencil is sharp. His notes already fill an entire legal pad. He writes with the confidence that never fails him in independent endeavors, in moments of solitude:
With perhaps the exception of the mysterious Euthymenes, of whom little is known, the first recorded navigator of the west coast of Africa is Hanno the Carthasinian, whose voyage is reported to us in The Periplus of Hanno.
He makes a note in the margin—this will need citation—and wonders about the Periplus—the “wandering around”—and what he knows from where he sits: mapped worlds blocked horizontally, realms stacked one upon the other, the specter of evolution. Time—a length of rope wound round and round and round it all. Print: words uncoiling as if they too were twisted out of hemp, pausing and then restarting while read: a hushed unspooling as his eyes sweep right and right, the length of the page. Words: carried like oil lamps, illuminating a little in the darkness.
Tales of the New World: Stories Page 17
