d Team Liddell et al c
“No Longer Separated by Oceans and Centuries”
I have just finished reading a new book just out: "A Pirate of Exquisite Mind--Explorer, Naturalist, and Buccaneer: The Life of William Dampier" by Diana and Michael Preston, 2004, Walker Publishing Company, Inc., New York. (www. walkerbooks.com), and it was a sheer delight.
I think "The Life..." would be interesting to each of you receiving this message.
In summary, Dampier was not a pirate but a buccaneer, the distinction apparently being that buccaneers waged war against and stole from their nation's enemies but lacked letters of marque which dignified privateers (slightly) and were not pirates who attacked and stole from anyone weaker within reach regardless of nationality. But that's hardly the measure of the man!
Why Dampier is worth a book over and above his adventurous life especially derives from his being a highly observant amateur scientist who roved the globe--one voyage lasted 12 years!--at the very dawning of the Enlightenment and of methodical science (1675 through 1707 or so). His observances and explorations in the Caribbean, Pacific and in and around western Australia assisted in the founding of biology and botany and strongly informed Darwin, Halley and others. He was also an expert navigator and his charts of tides, currents and winds, and reading of magnetic variance across the globe either laid the foundations of those sciences or have been used as practical knowledge even into our own day.
He is the first Englishman to circle the globe three times and the first to make landfall in Australia--well ahead of Cook--and also on some of the islands to the north of that continent--and he also was the first White to explode inland and map these areas as well..
According to the authors, a number of Dampier's plant specimens are still well-valued in the collections of Oxford University and other artifacts, including exotic seashells, are still prominent in other holdings. During his time, he became a famous and popular author who wrote about his adventures and scientific findings and set the style for all subsequent travel books and plain-language (non-Latin) science writings understandable by the public.
What makes this book particularly interesting to Team Liddell et al are some of the Prestons' background facts used to illustrate Dampier's life. These include their statements that Virginia at the advent of the 1700s had only 45,000 residents and that most of the area's settled population was concentrated around the Chesapeake Bay area, which they clearly divide into a West Shore and an East Shore--capitalized as if these were formal names in those days. This could easily explain the alleged remark by James Liddell (b. 1712) that his line came to South Carolina from the "Jerseys"--that is, as we have heretofore understood it, the early East Jersey and West Jersey colonies. Perhaps Brig. Gen. St. John Richardson Liddell (CSA) misunderstood his grandfather's mentioning an East and West "something", since all of our records concerning his early years in North America point to the northern edge of the East Shore only, which would have have meant West Jersey, only, whenever the region was not being counted as part of the Maryland colony.
Of more specific interest was the Prestons' presentment that the Bay was a rest-and-rehabilitation "hideaway" for both buccaneers and pirates whenever they were out of the Caribbean area. (We have a record of a William Liddell sailing as crew [or trader?] on the Ann in the late 1600s or very early 1700s from Maryland to Barbados. There are other records of a number of Captains Liddell in command of British ships throughout the Caribbean and North Atlantic during the same period, and decades later as well.)
It is probably a coincidence and nothing more than that, but this William Liddell was listed in a old book quoting earlier sources as one of a number of men who sailed into the Caribbean on the Ann. I don't have the date handy at this writing but it is interesting that the queen of England who was crowned in 1702 is named Anne. Could Ann be a transcription error and "Anne" instead meant in the earliest version of the record? If so, this could point back to an officially-sectioned sailing as a quasi-officially approved buccaneer raid on Spanish interests and the name reflected the effort financial backers' gratitude to English officialdom for lending its support. This is certainly quite a stretch but it is worth investigating.
Dampier's first voyage which departed London in 1674 took him as a young man hired to a plantation owner in Jamaica and then, he failing completely as a plantation strawboss, on to Barbados and what we today call the Yucatan Peninsula and then to points further south including Panama and Nicaragua. In 1682, he was in Virginia and the Prestons write that he arrived on the East Bank where living was very easy and about one-sixth the cost of living in London. Evidently, the East Shore was also a buccaneer recruiting zone for in 1683, he departed on the Revenge under a captain he had served under during a failed treasure-raid on Portobello Panama. Their goal was the South Pacific and the treasures of Chile and Peru.
Chesapeake Bay's East Shore must have had quite a reputation for being a place to find buccaneers and pirates for the Prestons related a 1685 incident in which two of Dampier's former shipmates from the Panama raid were challenged while sport-fishing out in the bay by the captain of HMS Dumbarton and questioned concerning their background as part of an official general sweep to clean up the area.
On page 254, there are several interesting footnotes about the origins of the Whigs and Tories political parties--the former, "sour, bigoted, money-grubbing Scots Presbyterians" and the latter, "Irish Catholic Brigands". In the same general section of the book, there is a discussion of an attempt to establish in the late 1600s, a Scot equivalent of England's East India Company, which was underwritten by 300,000 Scot Pounds, nearly the entire wealth of that kingdom, this nation later to pass under the united throne of Great Britain in 1707 by uniting with England. Nearly the entire Scot investment was lost in the effort, according to the Prestons. The company's failure undoubtedly gave reason to a significant number of Scots to pass out into the world during that period and into the early 1700s. The following is my speculation and not in the book, but perhaps the bankruptcy of the Scot Kingdom was reason for both the unification of the thrones and for the migration. If so, this, too, is another point of interest to Team Liddell et al.
A third point raised in this section is the event of the "Glorious Revolution" also occuring during this time, and yet another probable reason (religious persecution) for social unrest and migration out into the world for (some) Scots.
Finally, a number of Dampier's subsequent courts martial in England were reported in 1707 by a Narcissus Luttrell, who was a type of early journalist. Interesting name, Luttrell.
That's it. I think this book would be interesting reading from the halls of British academia to the shores of the Caribbean islands and Australia and across North America as well. I highly recommend it.
Jim Liddell