Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
after three years, he was able to return to England with sufficient
capital to set himself up as a merchant trading to the West Indies.
It is easy to imagine William, fashionably dressed and bewigged, his
purse well-lined, swaggering his way into London society and turn-
ing the heads of the young ladies with exciting stories of his adven-
tures. At any rate, he seems to have impressed a certain Judith, kins-
woman of the Duchess of Grafton, for they were soon married. A
runaway romance? A shotgun wedding? We do not know, for Judith
remains a shadowy figure, one of the many instant patterns which
came and went in the kaleidoscope that made up Dampier's life. It is
probably very significant that within six months he was on his way
back to Campeche.
He never got there. Disembarking in Jamaica, he devoted sever-
al months to trading and then joined a party of buccaneers. The de-
cision is not as odd as it might, at first, seem. On Jamaica the buccan-
eers lived like lords - at least, they did so until unscrupulous pub-
licans and bordello-keepers had extracted from them the profits of
their latest voyage. In Port Royal, the 'sin city' of the Caribbean, there
was more money per head of population than in London. Dampi-
er saw for himself the excitement that seized the town when the
cannon at Fort Charles announced the entry of a pirate ship to the
harbour, the seamen spending gold as if from bottomless purses,
the self-styled heroes telling tales of brave exploits to an audience
of admiring catchpennies, the eccentric captains sitting on the har-
bour wall with barrels of rum from which draughts were offered
gratis to passers-by. He saw for himself that living legend, Sir Henry
Morgan, the pirate king who but eight years before had marched
an army of desperadoes across the Isthmus of Darien, looted and
burned Panama, been clapped in irons and sent to London, only
to return with the king's commission as Lieutenant-Governor of Ja-
maica. Under a lenient administration, piracy, directed largely
against the Spanish colonies, thrived. For, whatever the official
 
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