Nature's Messenger by Patrick Dean

Author:Patrick Dean
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2023-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Early naturalists would eventually summon to the popular imagination familiar stereotypes: picture the aged Darwin puttering in his garden, or the shy nineteenth-century Anglican parson with his butterfly net. But in the late 1600s, the path of British natural history was blazed by a self-taught observer of natural phenomena who also happened to have been, at several points in his life, a pirate.

William Dampier’s early life, like most in the seventeenth century, left little historical record. He was baptized on September 5, 1651, at East Coker in Somersetshire. Although he lost both parents early on, he managed to receive some education. At seventeen, the year after the death of his mother, he became an apprentice on board a ship which sailed to France and to Newfoundland, where the English fished the immense schools of cod. Dampier’s adventurous and curious spirit, and his distaste for what he called “the rigours of that cold climate,” led him to quit the apprenticeship in 1671 at about age twenty.

From there Dampier’s service with the East India Company, the Royal Navy, and private concerns took him to Java, Jamaica, and the Gulf of Mexico. In 1679 he joined up with the buccaneers John Coxon, Richard Sawkins, and Bartholomew Sharp. Over the next twelve years his travels and adventures took him on the first of his three circumnavigations of the globe. Among his exploits was one of the early traverses by a European of the brutally wild stretch of the isthmus of Panama known today as the Darien Gap, due to a break there in the Pan-American Highway. Voyages to Mexico, Virginia, and West Africa followed. His was the first European party to reach the Galapagos Islands, in 1684; four years later Dampier reached northern Australia, the first European to make contact with the Aboriginal people there. By September 1691 he was back in England.

All the while Dampier had been studying and recording what he saw. According to his biographers Diana and Michael Preston, “Like Catesby, Dampier was an instinctive, intuitive naturalist. He pioneered what today is known as descriptive botany and zoology, in other words, the careful, detailed, and objective recording of the world’s living things.” The publication in 1697 of A New Voyage Round the World caused a literary sensation, and made Dampier a celebrity, worthy of mention by the diarist John Evelyn: “I dined with Mr. Pepys, where was Captain Dampier, who had been a famous buccaneer… and printed a relation of his very strange adventure, and his observations.”

Dampier himself had little doubt of his book’s worthiness:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.