Members' Lecture: A Pirate of Exquisite Mind

William Dampier started his career in 1676 as a buccaneer in the Caribbean, preying on ships and settlements on the Spanish Main. He could easily have ended up on the gallows for piracy. Instead, his sense of adventure and curiosity about the natural world led him to become the first person to circumnavigate the world three times and to map the winds and currents of the world's oceans. 

He landed in Australia eighty years before James Cook and visited the Galapagos Islands one hundred and fifty years before Charles Darwin.

William Dampier has been called our first real travel writer. His bestselling books inspired Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver's Travels and enriched the English language with many new words, from ‘barbecue’, ‘avocado’ and chopsticks’ to ‘sub-species’.

A curious man in a curious age, William combined a life of swashbuckling adventure with remarkable intellectual achievements. In later generations, the famous German scientist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt praised the man he called ‘the remarkable English buccaneer’ to whose work ‘the subsequent studies of great European scholars, naturalists and travellers had added little’, while the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge praised his ‘exquisite mind’.

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