Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
it was not long before he and his followers joined forces with anoth-
er group led by Captain Swan of the
Cygnet,
out of London.
Swan seems to have been the more intelligent and resourceful
of the two leaders, even though he was a reluctant pirate. He was a
merchant captain who had been forced by a mutinous crew to go 'on
the account' and was, so Dampier assures us, eager to find an oppor-
tunity of abandoning the criminal life. After ten months of mixed for-
tunes, Davis and Swan parted company again. The former remained
on the South American coast, but the stocky captain of the
Cygnet
wanted to cross the Pacific. To his men he held out the lure of rich
pickings from the Spanish Manila trade. It seems, however, that his
real concern was to escape from pirate-infested waters, get rid of
his troublemakers, resume legitimate trade and return to England
as soon as possible. Dampier decided to transfer his allegiance not,
he assures us, 'from any dislike to my old captain', but from a desire
to see new lands. From the
Cygnet's
quarterdeck he watched his old
companions sail out of the harbour while Swan fired a fifteen-gun
salute in their honour.
The crew of the
Cygnet
were far from unanimous in their desire
to set course across the empty Pacific, and the captain had resort to
trickery to gain their agreement. He had two sets of charts: Spanish
ones which showed the distance from Acapulco to Guam as between
2,300 and 2,400 leagues; and English ones which computed the
same distance as less than 2,000 leagues. In fact, even the Spanish
charts underestimated the distance by more than 200 leagues
(about 6oo miles). Swan assured his men that the English calcula-
tions were the true ones. Drake, he told them, had made the cross-
ing in fifty days (in fact, Drake took sixty-six days) and that was over
a century before, in a much inferior ship. There was, therefore, no
doubt that the
Cygnet
and her consort, a tiny barque commanded by
Captain Teat, could complete the voyage in forty days or less. Swan
