A New Voyage Round the World

with the highly comical accounts of his comrades' escapades, proved so popular with a public hungry for tales of discovery and adventure that A New Voyage went into its third reprint within a year of publication. So ground-breaking was Dampier's account that the writers Swift and Defoe were inspired to create two of the most famous books in the English language, Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe . B Dampier's commentators have portrayed him as an unusual, not to say peculiar, man. Notwithstanding his undoubted qualities as an observer, he has been variously characterised as aloof, arrogant, hot-tempered and a weak leader of men. When he arrived on the western coast of Australia, he promptly elected to leave and head north out of dislike for the cold of more southerly latitudes. This physical sensitivity has often been seized on by his detractors, who point out that, as a result, Dampier missed out on becoming the name forever associated with the European discovery of Australia, that honour instead going to Captain James Cook some 80 years later. Yet it should be remembered that he was able to endure a never-ending plague of discomforts and ailments in the tropics. And once, wrecked off Ascension Island in the South…