Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
captain by the name of Cook was projecting a privateering voyage to
the South Sea and hastened to sign on with him. Cook recruited sev-
enty men and, Dampier assures us, they all swore to keep 'some par-
ticular rules, especially of temperance and sobriety, by reason of the
length of our intended voyage'.
5
The first stop was the Cape Verde Islands, where the ship was
beached for scrubbing down. The leisurely stay gave Dampier time
to explore - and to write an account of what he saw. It was his
keen eye and vivid powers of description that set the young traveller
apart from all circumnavigators before him. He was passionately in-
terested in what he saw and he kept a record, not just for the benefit
of other mariners, but for all those who loved to hear stories of dis-
tant lands. Perhaps he resolved from the first to publish his journ-
al as soon as he reached home again. Certainly he guarded it as his
most treasured possession and when, later, he lost everything else
through being wrecked or cast adrift, he always kept his precious
pages with him, tightly wrapped in sailcloth. Everything of interest
went into his narrative - geographical features, observations about
wind and current, anthropological details and curiosities of natural
history - such as the strange wading birds of the island of Sal, which
congregate so closely that from a distance they look like a red brick
wall:
I saw a few flamingo which is a sort of large fowl, much like a
heron in shape, but bigger, and of a reddish colour. They delight to
keep together in great companies, and feed in mud or ponds, or in
such places where there is not much water . . . They build their nests
in shallow ponds, where there is much mud, which they scrape to-
gether, making little hillocks, like small islands, appearing out of the
water a foot and half high from the bottom. They make the found-
ation of these hillocks broad, bringing them up tapering to the top,
where they leave a small hollow pit to lay their eggs in; and when
