Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
they either lay their eggs or hatch them, they stand all the while, not
on the hillock, but close by it with their legs on the ground and in the
water, resting themselves against the hillock, and covering the hol-
low nests upon it with their rumps: for their legs are very long; and
building thus, as they do, upon the ground, they could neither draw
their legs conveniently into their nests, nor sit down upon them oth-
erwise than by resting their whole bodies there, to the prejudice of
their eggs or their young, were it not for this admirable contrivance,
which they have by natural instinct. They never lay more than two
eggs, and seldom fewer. The young ones cannot fly till they are al-
most full grown; but will run prodigiously fast; yet we have taken
many of them. The flesh of both young and old is lean and black, yet
very good meat, tasting neither fishy, nor any way unsavoury. Their
tongues are large, having a large knob of fat at the root, which is
an excellent bit: A dish of Flamingo's tongues being fit for a Prince's
table.
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In such passages - and they are many - Dampier, the companion
of cut-throats and roisterers, resembles nothing so much as a kind
of globetrotting version of Gilbert White, the self-effacing parson of
Selborne. He has both the fascinated involvement and the scientific
detachment of the true naturalist. Seventeenth-century profession-
al sailors were not the most reflective of men. They were coarsened
by rough conditions and could do little more than live for the mo-
ment a life which might be quickly cut short by accident or disease.
And buccaneers, we must assume, were among the hardest and least
sensitive of all seafarers. What, one wonders, did Cook's crew make
of this young member of the company who spent most of his off-duty
hours scribbling, who seldom joined in their drunken sprees ashore
(more than once in his journal Dampier expressed stern disapproval
of intoxication) and who could become very excited at the sight of a
shoal of red lobsters 'no bigger than the top of man's little finger'.
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