William Dampier by W. Clark Russell

Dampier tells us nothing of his private and home-going life after he carries us to sea with him in the _Loyal Merchant_, and so little is known of that side of his career that there is no means of supplying his omissions except by conjecture. It is pretty certain that he was very needy when he returned from his first voyage round the world. The value of his Dorsetshire estate cannot be guessed, but even if he still retained it, his views and endeavours are at this time those of a poor man. In the first volume of his Travels, as we have seen, he treats of New Holland as a privateersman would,-glances, to use his own metaphor, at the fringe of the carpet without desire to examine the texture or the body of it, and quickly shares the disgust of his shipmates, whose dreams are wholly of plunder. But on coming home and reflecting, whilst setting about the writing of his Travels, on the land he had sighted in the distant southern ocean, it is conceivable that ambitious thoughts should begin slowly to fill his mind. The world at large at that time barely credited the existence of a continent south of the East Indies. 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.[14]

His next step, at all events, was to seek ministerial and official help for a voyage of discovery to New Holland. He lived in the days of Dryden and of the patron, and his dedications exhibit him as possessed in a high degree of the art of literary congeeing. This undesirable but profitable capacity of cringing serviceably supplemented the reputation he had made for himself as a traveller. He found patrons in Charles Montague, afterwards Earl of Halifax, President of the Royal Society, and one of the Lord Commissioners of the Treasury; in Edward, Earl of Oxford, one of the principal Lords of the Admiralty; and in Thomas Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, who filled the office of Lord High Admiral. His representations were successful, probably beyond his own expectations, and in the beginning of the year 1699 he was appointed to the command of His Majesty's ship _Roebuck_ of twelve guns, manned by a crew of fifty men and boys, and victualled for a twenty months' cruise. Confidence, such as this trust implies, in the character and qualifications of a man whose rating even as a privateersman was but that of an able seaman, handsomely testifies to the very high opinion in which Dampier was held.