Chapter VII

CONCLUSION

As Dampier steps over the ship's side the reader is prepared to learn that no more is heard of him. He is a shadow amongst a congregation of shades, and when he quits his comrades his first stride carries him into absolute obscurity, and he vanishes like a puff of tobacco smoke. One would be glad to be able to do more than give a mere handshake of farewell to such an English sailor as this. It would be pleasant to be able to follow him, to learn what sort of life he led, what new adventures, if any, he met with, what his health was, and what his means, the pleasures he took ashore, and the esteem in which he was held by those with whom he conversed before that dark old soldier Death quietly beckoned him out. I think we may take it that he never married whilst he pursued his sea-life; but when he came ashore for good he was tolerably advanced in years, and it would not be safe to conjecture what he did then. He had never known the comforts of a home, and the old seaman might find a kind of excuse for marrying in that reflection. Captain Cooke says that the net profits of Rogers's voyage (see previous page) were fairly divided amongst the officers and crew. This is to be doubted. Before the officers and crew touched a penny the Bristol merchants, of whom there was a great number in the venture, would take their share, and we may suppose that their dividend did not leave the balance a very big one for the many people who had claims upon it. A man named Hatley, who sailed in 1719 with Shelvocke and Clipperton, was wont to declare that “he knew by woeful experience how they were used on board the Duke and Dutchess; that they were never paid one-tenth of their due, and that it plainly appeared how a certain gentleman designed to treat them, by his bullying them, and endeavouring to force them from Gravesend before they had received their river pay and impress money.” [31] Dampier's claims were no doubt ranked amongst those of the officers; but whatever his share might have been, it is not very conceivable that, invested, it yielded him an income sufficient for his plainest requirements.

He was fifty-nine years old when he returned from his last voyage. Even assuming that his health was good enough to suffer him to go on using the sea, it is more than probable that at the age of sixty he would exhibit no further taste for the hard, perilous, and unremunerative calling. Considering the eminence he had achieved, it is strange that there are no discoverable contemporary references to this portion of his life; none, at all events, that I have been able to meet with or hear of, though I have not spared inquiry. This silence might sanction the conjecture that on his return he went into the country, perhaps to his little Dorsetshire estate, if it be reasonable to suppose that he had not parted with it in the time of his poverty, and died not long afterwards amid the obscurity of rural and provincial surroundings. But speculation is fruitless, and even unwise, in the face of the chance of the story of his ending being some of these days lighted upon; for the literary digger was never more active than he is now, and a spadeful of the old mould of time may yet be thrown up with information enough in it about this circumnavigator to answer all questions as to his closing years. Anyway I think we may be pretty sure that he never went to sea again. A sailor ages rapidly on the salt-beef, honeycombed biscuit, and stormy weather of his vocation, and at fifty is commonly as old in body and mind as the landsman at seventy. Dampier was a seaman when he was a boy, and no man, even in those strenuous ocean-going days, ever lived a harder and more wearing life. He had spent years in the most unhealthy and enfeebling climates in the world; he had starved on rotten food, lain unsheltered on deck through the damp and fever-breeding nights of the West Indian and Panama parallels; he had had more than most men's share of worry and anxiety; he had drunk deep of the cup of disappointment, and he had sounded poverty to its depths. We may then fairly consider him as an old man at sixty, and assume with confidence that as he wanted both the taste and the opportunity for further seafaring, the last voyage he ever took in this world was as pilot to his friend Woodes Rogers. [32]

There is a tradition that he was known to Defoe, which Sir Walter Scott traces to a passage in the Review. Whether Defoe knew Dampier in the flesh or not, his literary obligations to him appear considerable. Captain Singleton, published in 1720; the nautical passages in Colonel Jack, published in 1722; A New Voyage Round the World, published in 1725; together with a variety of ocean incidents to be met with in Roxana, Moll Flanders, and in others of the voluminous publications of this master, seem to me directly inspired by Dampier's writings. There were indeed Cowley, Wafer, Ringrose, Cooke, and the contemporary buccaneering authors to consult; but it is only necessary to contrast Defoe's tales of the sea, the marine passages in his shore stories, and his accounts of foreign countries, with the descriptions of Dampier, and more particularly the reflections with which he interpolates his narratives, to perceive the true source of some of the finest of the imaginations of the author of Captain Singleton and Robinson Crusoe. Defoe exhibited his gratitude in an odd form. Here are some opening passages in his New Voyage Round the World:

“It has for some ages been thought so wonderful a thing to sail the tour or circle of the globe, that when a man has done this mighty feat he presently thinks it deserves to be recorded, like Sir Francis Drake's. So, as soon as men have acted the sailor, they come ashore and write books of their voyage, not only to make a great noise of what they have done themselves, but, pretending to show the way to others to come after them, they set up for teachers and chart-makers to posterity. Though most of them have had this misfortune, that whatever success they have had in the voyage they have had very little in the relation, except it be to tell us that a seaman, when he comes to the press, is pretty much out of his element, and that a very good sailor may make but a very indifferent author.”

Language of this sort does not sound very graciously in the mouth of a man whose best work is owing to the hints he obtains from the people whose labours and publications he ridicules. I hope I shall not be deemed heterodox if I say that, in my humble judgment, great as is my veneration for Defoe, in point of interest neither his New Voyage nor his Captain Singleton is to be compared with the narratives of Dampier, Cooke, Rogers, and Shelvocke; whilst there is a quaintness and freshness about their plain, manly, sailorly style which I instantly miss on turning to Defoe's later books. It is quite true indeed that when the New Voyage Round the World was written the circumnavigation of the globe was no longer considered an extraordinary feat; but then forty-two years had elapsed since Dampier had sailed with the buccaneers from Virginia on his first tour, and in that interval the experiences of the journey—deemed remarkable at the time—had been often enough repeated by his own and the voyages of others, to rob the accomplishment of all its wonder. Dampier's best merits have been fairly expressed by Sir Walter Scott, whose reference to him in connection with the life of Defoe was inevitable. He speaks of him as a mariner “whose scientific skill in his profession and power of literary composition were at that time rarely found in that profession, especially amongst those rough sons of the ocean who acknowledged no peace beyond the Line, and had as natural an enmity to a South American Spaniard as a greyhound to a hare, and who, though distinguished by the somewhat mild term of buccaneer, were little better than absolute pirates.” This is true, but more may be said. Dampier was not only the finest sailor of his day—I mean in the strictly professional sense of the word—his travels are to this hour foremost among the best-written and most interesting in the language. Seafaring and literary qualifications are a rare combination even in our own age of stiff marine-examinations, of a race of naval officers distinguished for their culture and their breeding, and of a merchant navy whose masters and mates are, in the higher ranges at least, persons of education and intelligence. But in Dampier's day the sailor, whether he fought for the throne or for merchant adventurers, or toiled for himself as a sea-carrier, was a coarse, unlettered man. The union in Dampier of the qualities which he exhibited must have rendered him something of a prodigy to his contemporaries, whilst it forms his claim upon the attention and esteem of posterity. No mariner ever observed more closely. In his Discourse of Winds he anticipates half the contents of the volumes of Piddington and Reid. [33] One would say indeed that Dampier never passed an hour without pulling out his notebook. Piddington particularly calls attention to the accuracy of the old sailor's touches in his picture of the banks of red clouds which herald the bursting of a typhoon in the China seas. He also refers to Dr. Franklin's Letters, in which there is a paper of extracts from Dampier's Voyages that was read at the Royal Society—he does not say when—and quotes at large, as substantiating a theory of his own, a passage in the extracts descriptive of the appearance, motion, and danger of the waterspout. So in a score of other directions. No bird of strange plumage meets Dampier's eye but his pen, with microscopic fidelity, reproduces its hues, form, and tricks of flight and movement. He will pause in his narrative to describe a fish, and make you see it as clearly as though you leaned over the side with him watching it. All variety of products he carefully notes. He has also a quick eye for human nature, detects and dryly represents the characteristics of his shipmates, and sketches with humorous gravity the hideous New Guinea savage whose tatooings he enlarges upon, or the primrose-coloured Chinaman whose tail he measures. He is probably at his best in the Supplement he wrote to the Voyage Round the World. The mariner must have received with gratitude this remarkable description of the towns and coasts of the Dutch possessions in the East Indies and of Tonquin. There was nothing in “Waggoner” at all resembling such writing as this, nothing so trustworthy, nothing indeed in any other existing sea-volume so helpful to the sailor. He was the best hydrographer and geographer of his age, and in truth in many respects I hardly know where to look for his equal when I reflect upon what he did, and consider the heroic obstinacy with which he persevered in his high resolution to observe and note down all that he saw in defiance of the distractions of a life of hardship, conflict, and brutal association, and despite the lack of the twenty scientific conveniences which now facilitate the labours of the navigator and explorer.

And perhaps those who respect his memory most will be best pleased to think he was a failure as a buccaneer. I have already quoted a passage from his preface in which he does not dissemble the repugnance with which he recurs to his life of piracy. Nothing could be more intelligible than the disgust and loathing that possessed him when he sat in silence writing his book, and thinking of the character of the persons whom it was necessary he should refer to as his intimates. They were sailors indeed, but they were also brutes; no man knew that better than Dampier; no man was better acquainted than he with the vices, the profligacy, the horrors of the every-day speech of the men whose company he had kept for months and years. [34] That quality of sympathetic adhesion which the French call esprit de corps was not likely to exist in a man who, when he had parted from his shipmates, found the recollection of them insupportable. Indeed he was but a poor buccaneer. He was as courageous as the best man he ever sailed with; plunder he loved as well as the rest; but he despised and detested his associates, and probably only held his own amongst them by the exaction of that sort of respect which such fellows would feel for a man of education, of wide experience, and the best navigator of his time. The reason of his failure as a commander his own narratives make clear. His books show that he understood human nature, but his actions prove that he could not control or direct it. Nor is it hard to see why he was unsuccessful as an explorer. He appeared to exhaust his energy in theories, so that by the time he addressed himself to action nearly all his enthusiasm was gone. The importunities which led to his being placed in command of the Roebuck and despatched to the Southern Ocean must have been eloquent. No doubt he was perfectly sincere in his representations. As a privateersman he had sighted the shores of the unknown land of the antipodes; how far south it extended he could not imagine, but vast portions of it lay under heights which by analogous reasoning he could prove fertile and beautiful, rich in promise to the coloniser, and assuring an enlargement of the dominions of the sovereign by the acquisition of a territory possibly vaster than the whole of Europe. All this, we may take it, he fully believed, and eagerly, impetuously, and eloquently expressed. But the passage from England to Western Australia was a long one. His ardour had cooled before he was off the coast of Brazil. He was chagrined by the behaviour of his crew, and there were other causes to cloud and chill his excitable and impressionable nature. You can see that he had lost all heart, or at least all appetite, for the quest he had undertaken long before the coast of New Holland rose over his bows. Men of Dampier's temperament may be able to write engaging narratives of their adventures, and exhibit all the solid virtues of the sober, as well as all the airy qualities of the poetic, observer; but they are not formed of the stuff of which explorers are made. Their pulse beats too hotly at the start and too languidly towards the end. Yet the world does well to hold the name of Dampier in memory as a skilful seaman, an acute observer, an agreeable writer, and a thorough Englishman.

THE END

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