Another recent English biographer, Anton Gill, author of The Devil's Mariner (1997), was equally at sea (so to speak) until 1988, when a footnote on Dampier "caught my eye" while researching another subject.Īppalled by their own ignorance, the wife-and-husband team of Diana and Michael Preston have written a biography that comes across, despite its catalogue of Dampier's flaws, as an entertaining act of hero-worship. The Oxford-trained authors of the biography A Pirate of Exquisite Mind "knew nothing of him when we found his portrait in a book of pirates". as the person who described the coast's inhabitants as "the miserablest people in the world".Įven less is known about Dampier in his native land, where, although his fame and notoriety survived for many decades after his death, he seems to be barely remembered today. And, given a TV quiz multiple-choice question (a. They know that he was an English sailor who had something to do with the "discovery" of the west coast of Australia. William Dampier is a name that rings at least faint bells with most broadly educated Australians. A PIRATE OF EXQUISITE MIND: THE LIFE OF WILLIAM DAMPIER, EXPLORER, NATURALIST AND BUCCANEER By Diana and Michael Preston, Random House, $32.95
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