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See Also

See Also in
Notorious Lives

Charlotte de Berry

Stede Bonnet

Anne Bonny

William Kidd

Sir Henry Morgan

Grace O’Malley

John Quelch

John Rackham

Mary Read

Bartholomew Roberts

Edward Teach.

Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives

William Dampier

by Milton Berman

English pirate, naturalist, and explorer

Cause of notoriety: Dampier engaged in piracy in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean; he circumnavigated the globe and carried out scientific observations during his voyages.

Active: c. 1679-1708

Locale: Caribbean coast, Panama, South America, Southeast Asia, and Australia

Early Life

After the death of his tenant-farmer parents, the guardians of William Dampier (DAM-peer) apprenticed the teenage boy to a shipmaster. Dampier mastered his trade and enjoyed life at sea, especially a long voyage to the East Indies in 1671-1672. He volunteered for the Royal Navy in 1673 during the Third Anglo-Dutch War. In 1674 Dampier accepted a position on a Jamaica sugar plantation but quarreled with the manager and left the following year for the Bay of Campeche, Mexico, to engage in the logwood trade (a valuable source of dyestuff). After a 1676 hurricane destroyed his stock, Dampier joined a group of buccaneers who raided nearby Spanish towns. Dampier acquired sufficient funds from his logwood business and piracy to return to England in 1678 and marry. The following year he acquired a small estate in Dorsetshire.

Piracy Career

Dampier left England in the spring of 1679 for a short trading voyage to Jamaica that stretched to twelve years, during which he took part in several pirate cruises and circumnavigated the globe. Despite difficult conditions, Dampier preserved careful notes on what he saw. In 1680 he joined a buccaneer fleet of some dozen vessels and nearly five hundred men that captured and looted the city of Portobello on the north coast of the Isthmus of Panama. Attempting to imitate Henry Morgan’s highly lucrative 1670 seizure of Panama City, Dampier and his companions crossed the isthmus to the Pacific side but found the city too well defended. After unprofitable raids along the coast of South America, the buccaneers painfully struggled back, taking twenty-three days to walk 110 miles to the Atlantic. Dampier then joined a group that raided Spanish possessions along the Caribbean coast.

William Dampier.

ph_0111206538-Dampier_W.jpg

(Library of Congress)

In 1683 Dampier enlisted in a fleet that sailed around Cape Horn to attack the Pacific coast of South America, provisioning at the Galápagos Islands, where the unique natural life fascinated him. Unsuccessful in raiding coastal cities, and failing to capture the extremely valuable Manila galleon, Dampier’s captain decided in 1686 to try his luck in the Philippines, depending on Dampier’s navigational skills to guide the ship across the Pacific. In 1688 Dampier left his pirate companions and spent eighteen months traveling in Southeast Asia before returning to England in 1691 aboard an East India Company ship, the third Englishman to circumnavigate the world, and the first in more than a century.

During the following six years Dampier transformed the notes and journals he had painstakingly protected during his voyages into a book that won him fame. His narrative of buccaneering adventures and detailed sketches of exotic places and customs made A New Voyage Round the World popular in 1697. His accurate, precise descriptions of weather, scenery, people, plants, and animal life won Dampier the respect of scientific and literary England.

Dampier always referred to his companions as privateers—piracy being a crime punishable by hanging. However, it does not appear that any commander Dampier joined had government authorization to raid Spanish possessions in America, which legal privateering required, nor were they concerned with whether Britain was at war with Spain when looting Spanish ships and towns.

His literary fame won Dampier command of ships for his next two voyages. The Royal Navy sent him on an exploratory voyage(1699-1701) to the seas around Australia, but he did little exploring and lost his ship. Returning home, Dampier was court-martialed, convicted of mistreating his officers and men, and fined his entire three year’s pay. In 1703 Dampier commanded a privateering expedition to the Pacific. Although he now had authentic letters of marque (authorization papers), he captured so few prizes that he lost money for his investors. He did, however, complete a second circumnavigation. His service as pilot in a 1708 privateering fleet that captured a Manila galleon earned him considerable prize money while providing a third circumnavigation of the globe.

Impact

William Dampier’s enduring reputation came from his literary and scientific achievements, not from bloody exploits as a pirate, though he undoubtedly witnessed more gore than he recorded. Other seventeenth century buccaneer authors, A. O. Exquemelin and Basil Ringrose, attracted readers with lurid accounts of violence and looting, but Dampier downplayed criminal aspects of his life as a pirate.

Major English literary figures eagerly borrowed Dampier’s descriptions of pirate life and exotic places and people. Daniel Defoe used Dampier’s books in his A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724-1728). Defoe’s portrayal of Robinson Crusoe’s island closely matched Dampier’s depiction of the Islas las Aves in A New Voyage Round the World by a Course Never Sailed (1724). Jonathan Swift openly praised Dampier in Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Samuel Taylor Coleridge admired Dampier and drew on his work for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798).

Dampier’s scientific reputation grew over succeeding centuries. His precise descriptions of natural phenomena were adopted by eighteenth century dictionaries and encyclopedias. Captain James Cook consulted Dampier’s books during his explorations of the Pacific. Cook and Admiral Horatio Nelson praised the information on winds, tides, and currents contained in Dampier’s 1699 “Discourse on Winds”; the Royal Navy continued to cite Dampier’s observations well into the twentieth century. Charles Darwin used Dampier’s detailed information in formulating his theory of evolution.

Dampier’s extreme admirers implausibly claim he was uninterested in monetary gain and sailed with pirates only for scientific purposes. More realistic defenders assert that the value of his scientific and literary contributions far outweighs whatever illegal acts he committed during his pirate career.

Further Reading

1 

Cordingly, David. Under the Black Flag: The Romance and Reality of Life Among the Pirates. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995. Provides detailed context for Dampier’s accounts of pirate life.

2 

Preston, Diana, and Michael Preston. A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: Explorer, Naturalist, and Buccaneer—The Life of William Dampier. New York: Walker, 2004. A carefully researched, highly laudatory biography of Dampier.

3 

Shipman, Joseph P. William Dampier: Seaman-Scientist. Lawrence: University of Kansas Libraries, 1962. Brief, judicious evaluation of Dampier’s scientific contributions.

4 

Williams, Glyndr. The Great South Sea: English Voyages and Encounters, 1570-1750. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997. Records criticisms as well as praise of Dampier’s exploratory voyages in the South Pacific.

Citation Types

MLA 9th
Berman, Milton. "William Dampier." Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives, edited by Carl L. Bankston III, Salem Press, 2007. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLN_1148.
APA 7th
Berman, M. (2007). William Dampier. In C. L. Bankston III (Ed.), Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Berman, Milton. "William Dampier." Edited by Carl L. Bankston III. Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2007. Accessed September 17, 2026. online.salempress.com.