A New Voyage Round the World

Description

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.

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 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. Nicholas Thomas has been Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge since 2006. He has worked in archives and collections in Europe, North America, New Zealand and the Pacific. His books include Discoveries- The Voyages of Captain Cook (2003), and Islanders- the Pacific in the Age of Empire (2010), which was awarded the Wolfson History Prize.