Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 14.djvu/8

 that as bishop of Rochester he proposed an address from the clergy 'thanking the crown for requiring an undertaking from the ministry not to move in the matter of catholic emancipation.' Dampier published several sermons. He was celebrated for his love of literature, and for the splendid library and collection of prints which he accumulated throughout his life, often at considerable cost, and of the rarer books in which he left an account in Latin, the manuscript of which was extensively used by Dibdin in compiling his 'Aedes Althorpianae.' His bibliomania had begun early in life before he went to college, and remained his ruling passion to the day of his death. His library was sold by his half-brother, Sir Henry Dampier (a baron of the exchequer and a celebrated ecclesiastical lawyer), and his widow, to the Duke of Devonshire at a valuation amounting to nearly 10,000l. His portrait was painted by J. J. Masquerier, of which Dibdin giyes an engraving in his 'Bibliographical Decameron.'



DAMPIER, WILLIAM (1652–1715), buccaneer, pirate, circumnavigator, captain in the navy, and hydrographer, son of a tenant-farmer at East Coker, near Yeovil, was baptised on 8 June 1652. His father died ten years afterwards; and his mother, who had kept on the farm, died in 1668, when the boy, who had alternated between the neighbouring grammar school and his mother's house, was sent to sea in charge of a Weymouth trader. The hardships of a voyage to Newfoundland disgusted him with that employment; but after a short spell at home, he went to London and entered on board an East Indiaman, in which he sailed to Bantam, returning to England just as the Dutch war broke out in 1672. In 1673 he was an able seaman on board the Royal Prince, Sir Edward Spragge's flagship, and in her was present in the hard-fought engagements of 28 May and 4 June, but was sent to hospital, sick, before the third battle on 11 Aug. He was shortly afterwards put on shore at Harwich, whence he was permitted to return to Somersetshire. Here he soon recovered his health, and the next year accepted the offer of Colonel Helyar, his father's old landlord, to go out to Jamaica as assistant-manager of his plantation. Soon tiring of this employment, Dampier engaged himself on board a coasting trader. About the beginning of August 1675 he shipped on board a ketch bound to the bay of Campeachy with a cargo of rum and sugar to exchange for logwood. His attention was early turned to hydrography and pilotage, the points of which he seems to have carefully noted throughout his whole career; and in his account of this voyage he has ‘described the coast of Yucatan from the landfall near Cape Catoche to the anchorage at One-Bush-key with minuteness and accuracy’. Although life among the logwood cutters was hard and involved much drinking of punch, Dampier, though only a fore-mast hand, was able to keep some sort of a diary, and to note the incidents of a voyage protracted by the ignorance and incapacity of the master. While homeward bound, the ketch blundered on to almost every shoal, reef, or island on the way, as well as on to some that were not on the way; ‘and so,’ says Dampier, ‘in these rambles we got as much experience as if we had been sent out on a design.’ When at last, after thirteen weeks, the ketch managed to reach Jamaica, the recollection of the rollicking times among the logwood cutters still lingered pleasantly in Dampier's memory. He determined to go back and join them, and made his way to Triste, where he arrived in February 1676. The logwood cutters were a wild set; the work was severe, the lodging rude, the earnings high, and the debauchery excessive; and among them, alternating log-cutting with piracy or ‘buccaneering,’ Dampier continued for rather more than two years, in which time he managed to accumulate a considerable sum of money. In the autumn of 1678 he returned to England, proposing, it would appear, to employ his capital in the West India trade, and especially in the logwood traffic, which was exceedingly lucrative. While in England he filled up the intervals of business with courtship and matrimony. Of his wife nothing is known except that her christian name was Judith, and that he describes her as a young woman ‘out of the family of the Duchess of Grafton.’

In the spring of 1679 he sailed again for the West Indies, leaving his wife at Arlington House. He remained at Jamaica for some months, and at Christmas, when on the point of returning home, was persuaded to go on a short voyage to the Mosquito coast, and, putting into Negril Bay, was tempted to join a party of buccaneers, or, as he calls them, privateers. Four men of the same party besides Dampier kept journals, which are now in the British Museum, and of which more or less garbled versions have been published. We have thus a fairly complete account of the exploits of these ‘privateers,’ whose only commissions—as their commander, Sawkins, sent word to the governor of