William dampier Author:W. Clark Russell Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV 1699-1701 THE VOYAGE OF THE "ROEBUCK."1 Dampier tells us nothing of his private and home-going life after he carries us to sea with him in the ... more »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 1 A Voyage to New Holland, tc., in the Year 1699, by Captain William Dampier. 1709. 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. His next step, at all events, was to seek ministerial and offici...« less