A New Voyage Round the World

William Dampier, Nicholas Thomas

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Paperback

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English

Penguin
20 October 2020

True stories: discovery, historical & scientific; Literature, Poetry & Criticism; Maritime history; Geographical discovery & exploration; Classic travel writing; Expeditions

A magical, substantially true narrative of piracy, zoology, anthropology, danger and adventure in the seventeenth-century Caribbean, Pacific and East Indies

The first great English-language travel book, A New Voyage Round the World (1697) is an incomparably vivid, chaotic and fascinating account by the pirate, explorer and naturalist William Dampier of his many adventures.

The world he describes sprawls all the way from the Caribbean west across the Pacific to the Philippines and Southeast Asia - a vast expanse tied together by the Spanish Empire.

Dampier and his men live lives of rascally precariousness, in the shadow of great Spanish galleons and fortresses, always on the verge of disaster.

His book is filled with raids, escapes, wrecks and storms, but Dampier is also a great observer of animals, exotic foods, boats, customs- the book is a cornucopia of descriptions of everything from giant centipedes to bananas.

It was originally designed simply to entertain and inform, but it is now a unique document, miraculously preserving glimpses of now long-vanished peoples and places.

This new edition, introduced and annotated by Nicholas Thomas, makes clear Dampier's key role as a proselytizer for the early British Empire, as an inspiration for generations of naturalist and explorers, and as a uniquely curious character.

By: William Dampier
Edited by: Nicholas Thomas
Imprint: Penguin
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 198mm, Width: 129mm, Spine: 29mm
Weight: 371g
ISBN: 9780241413289
ISBN 10: 0241413281
Pages: 304
Publication Date: 20 October 2020
Audience: General/trade , College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

William Dampier (c.1651-1715) was a pirate and adventurer who was (albeit for chaotic and unintended reasons) the first man to voyage round the world three times. A New Voyage Round the World (1697), written from notes kept during his first long voyage, was a literary sensation (inspiring Gulliver's Travels) and the model for all the great British naturalists and explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His many wanderings took him from the Arctic to the South Pacific. He rescued Alexander Selkirk from his four years in the Juan Fernandez Islands (inspiring Robinson Crusoe). He died back in England, having had one final triumph in successfully piloting a small fleet in the Pacific to capture a treasure-crammed 'Manila Galleon', a Spanish trading ship. Nicholas Thomas has been Director of Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology since 2006. He visited the Pacific Islands first in 1984 to research his PhD thesis on the Marquesas Islands and later worked in Fiji and New Zealand, as well as in many archives and museum collections in Europe, North America, and the Pacific. His books include Entangled Objects (1991), Oceanic Art (1995), Discoveries- the voyages of Captain Cook (2003), and Islanders- the Pacific in the Age of Empire (2010), which was awarded the Wolfson History Prize.