A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: Explorer, Naturalist, and Buccaneer: The Life of William Dampier. By Diana and Michael Preston. NY: Walker & Company, 2004. 372 pages. $27.

Reviewed by Margaret Black

Some heroes of science have had decidedly unpleasant characters or engaged in questionable activities, but their achievements have nonetheless lifted them to historical fame, leaving their unattractive qualities forgotten except by grumpy biographers. Not so with William Dampier. His impressive achievements sank beneath the obloquy that came to attach to his often questionable career. In A Pirate of Exquisite Mind, Diana and Michael Preston explore Dampier’s fascinating life, which included three trips around the globe between 1674 and 1711 and produced a treasure trove of scientific information (plus more than a thousand new words, including barbecue, chopsticks, avocado, and breadfruit). Dampier’s meticulous hydrographic observations were indispensable to the English Navy into the 1900s. Charles Darwin constantly referred to his careful descriptions of flora and fauna. And few writers prior to the 20th century matched Dampier’s dispassionate descriptions of newly encountered peoples. His first book created a new kind of travel writing that made him wildly popular with the reading public and inspired Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Caruso and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

So why did Dampier sink almost completely out of historical mind? Well, he was also a privateer, a pirate, and a buccaneer. As the Prestons so lucidly make clear, society at one time drew sharp distinctions about these occupations. A privateer clutched government papers (the famous letters of marque) that permitted him to attack and rob his country’s enemies. Sir Francis Drake’s piratical career had made him a hero to queen and country, and privateering was still legitimate in Dampier’s time. But communication being what it was, you could mistakenly ransack a ship belonging to a nation no longer at war with your country. You might even know it wasn’t. Your victims would, of course, consider you a pirate, an out-and-out maritime robber. Buccaneers were originally escaped indentured servants and slaves in Spanish America who had banded together in small groups with a fairly elaborate code of democratic cooperative living. When the Spanish attempted to wipe out their jungle communities, the buccaneers began attacking Spanish settlements and shipping in the Caribbean. Eventually “buccaneer” became synonymous with “pirate.” To further complicate the picture, sailors moved easily from one sort of craft to another, from legitimate trading ships to privateers or pirate ships, or even to ships of the Royal Navy.

At age 22, a restless Dampier left England for Jamaica to work at a sugar plantation. Quickly disabused of his hopes for advancement, he signed aboard a small ship loading a cargo of timber. The rough democracy practiced among the loggers—many of them former pirates and buccaneers—appealed to Dampier. Disappointed with the navigational incompetence of his captain, he left ship and took up logging. As he labored to cut a stock of the valuable logwood, however, he also kept a detailed journal, in which his accurate description of an Atlantic hurricane, the first ever written, was all that survived the storm that left Dampier and his companions destitute. Seeking another means to wealth, they reverted to buccaneering. But despite tremendous effort, including horrifying marches across the Panamanian isthmus and killer voyages, Dampier made only enough money to get back to England.

Here, in a four-year nutshell, is a pattern that the Prestons show recurring again and again. Dampier was enormously hardworking and learned quickly, but he was a loner who had little patience with ignorant leadership or bad planning. And this with good reason, for his buccaneering rarely brought much profit. But even as he joined in attacks on settlements or struggled to barren islands in search of water, he was also consciously noting how England might benefit by legitimate trade with the country or set up resupply depots.

Back in England, Dampier married, but soon took off again. He was gone twelve years, sailing the Caribbean, and later the South Sea—as the Pacific side of America was called—with various privateers and pirates. Ultimately his ship struck out across the Pacific, with Dampier guiding it dead-on to the island of Guam. Look at a map of the Pacific. You’ll be impressed.

Dampier spent considerable time in what are now the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam. He landed on Western Australia. Always, he wrote in his journal. Despite dire threats to his health, he survived, crossed to South Africa, then sailed to England, where he wrote a book that won him instant fame, scientific celebration, and a government commission to explore Australia with two Royal Navy ships.

A violent conflict between Dampier and his second-in-command made an issue of his buccaneering past. For business reasons—pirates had recently sacked pilgrim ships protected by the Mughul emperor, who then threatened the East India Company—England was seriously cracking down on piracy. But Dampier survived his court martial, provided the government with valuable information, and wrote another book. Two years later he circled the globe as navigator one last time on a privateering expedition (these were legal, remember).

The authors bring Dampier’s extraordinary adventures vividly to life, despite Dampier’s own dry, matter-of-fact narrative style. They have a fine appreciation of the era and the frequent difficulty of distinguishing between robbery and trade. To understand Dampier’s experience, they not only read widely, but also traveled where he traveled, slogged across the still-dangerous jungles of Panama, walked the beaches of Australia with Aboriginals, and even went to sea. In a book filled with more riches than can be described here, the authors portray Dampier as a restless, curious, enormously intelligent and observant man who had no patience with social hierarchy and no talent for human interaction, but who was also unusually tolerant and open-minded for a man of his time.