Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
in the Moluccas. Schouten lost only three men during the whole voy-
age. All went well until he reached the East India Company's factory
at Bantam on the coast of Java. There, the governor, Jan Pieterzoon
Coen, was outraged at the appearance of 'interlopers'. He refused to
believe the 'cock and bull' story of a new route to the East, confis-
cated the
Eendracht
and her cargo, and sent Schouten and his men
back to Europe under escort. They arrived on 7 July 1617 and be-
came the fastest men to have circled the globe. It was not the kind of
homecoming Isaac Lemaire had hoped for. It faced him with a long,
but ultimately successful, legal battle for the restitution of his ship
and cargo. Also Schouten brought him the sad news that among the
voyage's few fatalities was his son, who had died at Mauritius.
Of the captains who followed Schouten round the Horn in the
next few years the most notable was the unfortunate James
l'Hermite. In 1623 he led a fleet of eleven ships bent on nothing less
than the conquest of Peru. By the time he had reached the Pacific
his convoy was already greatly depleted. He had to content himself
with raiding Spanish coastal settlements and then making for home
via the Dutch factories in the East Indies. Scurvy took a heavy toll of
his crew and l'Hermite, himself, died off Java. Only one ship straggled
back to the Texel in July 1626.
Now that two clear pathways had been found linking the Atlant-
ic and the Pacific, the number of the mariners who made the round-
the-world journey increased. Many of these ventures have left no re-
cords. Even if this were not so, it would be tedious to narrate every
voyage. What is fascinating from this point onwards is to see what
kind of men risked their lives in such a hazardous enterprise and
what motivated them to do so. Some were merchants. Some were ex-
plorers. Some were pirates. Some were adventurers. And a few do
not fit neatly into any of those categories.
William Dampier was one of those colourful, enterprising char-
acters who defy any attempt to put them into neat pigeonholes: a
