William Clark Russell

“ It is impossible to appreciate the intrepid seamanship of the early navigators without first taking a view of the art of navigation as it was in their time, and understanding the shapes, bulk, and rigs of the vessels in which they cruised in search of plunder or started on long voyages of discovery. In these days one is so used to the facilities of science for traversing the deep with swiftness and certainty, that it is necessary to bend the mind with some severity of thought to compass the difficulties of the old sailors and honour their triumphs justly. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Captain George Shelvocke, writing in 1726, has left us a gloomy picture, full of power, of the Horn in winter. “I must own,” he says, “the navigation here is truly melancholy, and it was the more so to us who were a single ship and by ourselves in this vast and dreadful solitude; whereas a companion would have mixed some cheerfulness with the thoughts of being in so distant a part of the world exposed to such dangers, and, as it were, separated from the rest of mankind. ”

“ No one can follow them without wonder and admiration. We find them in crafts of forty, twenty, even ten tons—boats half-decked and undecked—exploring the frozen silence of the North Pole, beating to the westward against the fierce surge of the Horn, seeking [Pg 13] land amidst the vast desolation of the southern ocean, and making new history for their country upon the coast of North America and in the waters of the Mozambique. Their lion-hearts carry them all over the world, and they have nothing to help them but the lead-line over the side and a quadrant big enough to serve as a gallows. ”

“ As a mere journal of exploits perhaps the narrative grows after a while a little tedious. One sea-fight is like another; the assaults by land lead to nothing; the prizes captured at sea are insignificant. [Pg 56] Yet Dampier's page continues to charm us by the vivacity of his descriptions of coasts, of storms, of the corposant, of the turtle, and by a hundred unlaboured and unconscious felicities of phrase. ”

“ But the very existence of the facilities of the engine-room, of the nimbleness of the clipper-moulded keel, of the capacity of the towering and exquisitely-calculated heights of cloths to snatch a desired power of propulsion from the teeth of the antagonistic gale, is, I take it, an admission of our own weakness when we contrast the ocean-machinery with which science has dowered us with the contrivances with which the early seamen triumphed over the forces of Nature and created new worlds as heritages for a self-complacent posterity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is nothing, perhaps, in what may be termed the romantic chapters of the maritime annals more picturesque and impressive than the discovery by the Duke and Dutchess of Alexander Selkirk on the island of Juan Fernandez. The accentuation the story obtained from the genius of Defoe makes [Pg 152] it immortal. But even as a mere anecdote, without better skill brought to bear upon it than is found in the plain relations of Rogers and Cooke, its interest is so remarkable, it is so brimful of fascinating inspiration, that of all sea-stories it bids fair to be the longest remembered. ”

“ Two sailors escaped into the woods, but were so terrified by the sight of a number of monkeys and baboons which they mistook for tigers, that they plunged into the water to the depth of their waists, and stood bawling for help until a boat was sent to fetch them aboard. One thinks of Dampier, hot-tempered and prone to despondency, talking with his friend Rogers about the troublesome posture of the crew, expressing many doubts as to the practicability of the voyage, and perhaps suggesting adventures remote from the prescription of the Bristol merchants. ”

“ The draughts of Tasman, the relations of De Quiros, Le Maire, and others, were regarded for the most part as travellers' tales. Dampier might justly hope in an age when the colonising instincts of the English were never keener, that money and honour must be the reward of the man who should be the first to open out a country fabulous yet in the judgment of mankind, and, by the light of discovery, resolve what was still visionary and dark into a magnificent reality.
His next step, at all events, was to seek ministerial and official help for a voyage of discovery to New Holland. ”

“ Those twenty-three ships at anchor in Table Bay, surveyed by the eyes of Dampier [Pg 181] and his toil-worn comrades, make but a little part of a great marine pageant; yet it is a detail to constrain the gaze. Fancy reconstructs them; they cease to be visionary; they float before us as substantial fabrics, brave with pennons and the glitter of brass guns and the gay raiment of their time. They illustrate the most strenuous of all the periods of the world's maritime life ”

“ It is consistent that a man who had traversed on foot the dangerous and poisonous Isthmus of Panama should parallel that accomplishment by a remarkable boat-voyage. The craft was a canoe of the size of a London wherry, deeper but not so broad, sharp after the whaling pattern at both ends, and so thin and light that when empty four men could lift her. She carried a mat-sail, and outriggers to prevent her from capsizing. In this little ark Dampier and his shipmates embarked—eight men, four of whom were Malays—and started for Acheen on May 15th, 1688. ”

“ There is little of the enthusiasm of the explorer in this avowal; all through his career, in fact, Dampier exhibits himself as a man of caprices easily diverted from his first intentions, quickly sickened by failure, though never discomfited by the harshest sufferings or by the most formidable difficulties, so long as he can keep himself in spirits by the assurance of some approach to good fortune attending the issue of his adventure. ”

“ 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 ”

“ One beholds them poring upon their old-fashioned charts, pointing to the singular configurations of the mainland and islands with hairy hands, and disputing with little anxiety on a difference between easting and westing measuring as many leagues as the space from the Lizard to the Western Islands. Indeed the real flavour and charm of the buccaneer's life are not to be expressed by any mere method of historical treatment. The hand of the artist is wanted, with imagination vigorous and discerning enough to strictly correspond with the traditionary truth. ”

“ The decks were full of water, the seas thundered over them in cataracts, the hatches, closed and battened down, kept the atmosphere of the 'tween decks black and poisonous. The crew were commonly so numerous as to be in one another's way, and imagination can picture nothing more unendurable than a dark and vermin-ridden forecastle crowded with half-suffocated men; the rigging and sails frozen to the hardness of iron ”

“ Sea, and were obliged to grope their way in their square-built, round-bowed, and clumsy old craft past the stormiest headland in the world, through weather blind with snow and black with cloud, and over seas running in mountains to the pressure of five hundred leagues of gale. When to the westward of the Cape they encountered one Captain Eaton in a privateer that had been equipped and despatched from London to plunder the Western American coast, and proceeded with him to Juan Fernandez, where they arrived eight months after leaving Achamack. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 187] 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. ”

“ Four guns were struck into the hold, which yet left sixteen mounted, a greater number than Dampier had men to fight, if the need arose, “for,” says Funnell, “there remained with him no more than twenty-eight Men and Boys, and most of them landmen; which was a very insignificant Force for one who was to make War on a whole Nation.” One might think that the spectacle of such a ship as this would inspire even a larger spirit of desertion than her crew manifested. ”

“ 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 ”

“ He was of opinion that the lands lying nearest the equator would best repay the explorer. Nor perhaps could he guess how far he would have to penetrate the high latitudes if he stood south; and having passed the greater portion of his seafaring life in Mexican, Pacific, and Indian seas, his love of the sun, fortified by [Pg 88] recollection of the cold of the Horn and of the one bitter voyage he took to Newfoundland, might suffice to determine him on pinning his faith as an explorer and on limiting his curiosity as a sailor to the summer regions of the globe. ”

“ Dampier of course well remembered the circumstance; he had been with Swan in the Cygnet at the time, and could recollect that provisions being scarce they had left the unhappy Indians to make, as Rogers says, a miserable end on a desert Island. To judge, however, from the refreshments these uninhabited spots yielded, the Indians could not have perished from starvation. The buccaneers met with hares, turtle-doves, pigeons, and parrots, on all of which they fared sumptuously. The sick thrived, and the general health of the crews was never better. ”