William Dampier. William Clark Russell
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commanded by Captain Harris, was of the burden of one hundred and fifty tons, mounted twenty-five guns, and carried one hundred and seven men; whilst the smallest, commanded by Captain Macket, was of fourteen tons, her crew consisting of twenty men. They sailed on March 23rd, 1679, for the province of Darien, their designs being, as Ringrose candidly admits, to pillage and plunder in those parts. But they do not appear to have arrived off the coast until April 1680, this being the date given by Ringrose, who says that there they landed three hundred and thirty-one men, leaving a party of sailors behind them to guard their ships. They marched in companies; Captain Bartholomew Sharp's (in whose troop, I take it, was Dampier) carried a red flag, with a bunch of white and green ribands; Captain Richard Sawkins's company exhibited a red flag striped with yellow; the third and fourth, commanded by Captain Peter Harris, bore two cream-coloured flags; the fifth and sixth a red flag each; and the seventh a red colour with yellow stripes, and a hand and sword thereon by way of a device. “All or most of them,” adds Ringrose, “were armed with Fuzee, Pistol, and Hanger.” This is a description that brings the picture before us. We see these troops of sailors carrying banners, dressed as merchant seamen always were, and still are, in twenty different costumes, lurching along under the broiling equatorial sun, through forests, rivers, and bogs, trusting to luck for a drink of water, and with no better victuals than cakes of bread (four to a man), called by Ringrose “dough-boys,” a name that survives to this day, animated to the support of the most extraordinary fatigues, the most venomous country, and the deadliest climate in the world, by dreams of more gold than they would be able to carry away with them.
But the whole undertaking was a failure. They attacked and took the town of Santa Maria, and found the place to consist of a few houses built of cane, with not so much as the value of a single ducat anywhere to be met with. Their disappointment was rendered the keener by the news that three days before their arrival several hundred-weight of gold had been sent away to Panama in one of those ships which were commonly despatched two or three times a year from that city to convey the treasure brought to Santa Maria from the mountains. Their ill-luck, however, hardened them in their resolution to attack Panama. The city was a sort of New Jerusalem to the imaginations of these men, who thought of it as half-formed of storehouses filled to their roofs with plate, jewels, and gold. They stayed two days at Santa Maria, and then on April 17th, 1680, embarked in thirty-five canoes and a periagua, and rowed down the river in quest of the South Sea, upon which, as Ringrose puts it, Panama is seated. Their adventures were many; their hardships and distresses such as rendered their energy and fortitude phenomenal even amongst a community who were incomparably gifted with these qualities. Ringrose, whose narrative I follow, was wrecked in the river by the oversetting of his canoe, and came very near to perishing along with a number of his comrades. He fell into the hands of some Spaniards, with whom, as they understood neither English nor French, whilst he was equally ignorant of their tongue, he was obliged to converse in Latin!—a language in which, I suspect, not many mariners of to-day could communicate their distresses. He and his shipmates narrowly escaped torture and a miserable death, and eventually recovering their canoe, they started afresh on their voyage, and were fortunate enough next morning to fall in with the rest of the buccaneers, who had anchored during the night in a deep bay.
Trifling as these incidents are, it is proper to relate them as examples of the life and experiences of Dampier during this period of his career. Unfortunately, until one opens his own books one does not know where to look for him. In whose troop he marched, in whose canoe he sat, in what special adventures he was concerned, whether he was favoured for his intelligence above the others by the commanders of the expedition, cannot be ascertained. When Ringrose wrote, Dampier was still a mere privateersman, a foremast hand, a man without individuality enough to arrest the attention of the sturdy, plain, and honest historian of the voyage in which they both took part. Indeed, there is no reason to suppose that Dampier at this time was regarded by his fellows as better than the humblest of the shaggy, sun-blackened men who, with fuzees on their shoulders and pistols in their girdles, tramped in little troops through the swamps and creeks and over the swelling lands of the Isthmus, or who in their deep and narrow canoes floated silent and grim upon the hot and creeping river in search of the unexpectant Don and his almost fabulous wealth.
Dampier introduces a curious story in connection with Panama and the South Seas in his first volume. He says that when he was on board Captain Coxon's ship, there being three or four privateers in company, they captured a despatch boat bound to Cartagena from Porto Bello. They opened many of the letters, and were struck by observing that several of the merchants who wrote from Old Spain exhorted their correspondents at Panama to bear in mind a certain prophecy that had been current in Madrid and other centres for some months past, the tenor of which was—That there would be English privateers that year in the West Indies, who would make such great discoveries as to open a door into the South Seas. This door, Dampier says, was the passage overland to Darien through the country of the Indians, a people who had quarrelled with the Spaniards and professed a friendship for the English. At all events, these Indians had been for some time inviting the privateers to march across their territory and fall upon the Spaniards in the South Seas. Hence when the letters came into their hands they grew disposed to entertain the Indians' proposal in good earnest, and finally made those attempts to which I have referred in quoting from the pages of Ringrose. The cause of the friendship between the English buccaneers and the Darien Indians is a story of some interest. About fifteen years before Dampier crossed the Isthmus a certain Captain Wright, who was cruising in those waters, met with a young Indian lad paddling about in a canoe. He took him aboard his ship, clothed him, and, with the idea of making an Englishman of him, gave him the name of John Gret. Some Mosquito Indians, however, begged the boy from Captain Wright, who gave him to them. They carried him into their own country, and by and by he married a wife from among them. Through the agency of this John Gret, who always preserved an affection for the English, a friendship was established between the buccaneers and the Indians. Presents were made on each side, and a certain secret signal was concerted whereby the Indians might recognise their English friends. It happened that there was a Frenchman among one of the buccaneering captain's crew. He was artful enough to commit this signal, whatever it was, to memory, and on his arrival at Petit Guavres he communicated what he knew to his countrymen there, and represented the facility with which the South Seas might be entered now that he had the secret of winning over the Indians to help him. On this one hundred and twenty Frenchmen formed themselves into a troop, with the buccaneer, whom Dampier calls Mr. la Sound, as their captain, and marched against Cheapo, an attempt that proved unsuccessful, though the simple Indians, believing them to be English, gave them all the assistance that was in their power. “From such small beginnings,” adds Dampier, “arose those great stirs that have been since made in the South Seas, viz.: from the Letters we took and from the Friendship contracted with these Indians by means of John Gret. Yet this Friendship had like to have been stifled in its Infancy; for within few months after an English trading Sloop came on this Coast from Jamaica, and John Gret, who by this time had advanced himself as a Grandee amongst these Indians, together with 5 or 6 more of that quality, went off to the Sloop in their long Gowns, as the custom is for such to wear among them. Being received aboard, they expected to find everything friendly, and John Gret talkt to them in English; but these English Men having no knowledge at all of what had happened, endeavoured to make them Slaves (as is commonly done), for upon carrying them to Jamaica they could have sold them for 10 or 12 Pound apiece. But John Gret and the rest perceiving this, leapt all overboard, and were by the others killed every one of them in the Water. The Indians on Shoar never came to the knowledge of it; if they had it would have endangered our Correspondence.”
On April 23rd the buccaneers entered the Bay of Panama, and the city, offering a fair and lovely prospect, as Dampier afterwards tells us, lay full in their view. The old town that had been sacked and burnt by Henry Morgan in 1670 lay four miles to the eastward of the new city; but amongst those now suburban ruins the cathedral rose stately and splendid, and Ringrose, enraptured by the sight, vows that the building viewed from the sea might compare in majesty with St. Paul's. The Panama at which Dampier gazed was almost new, built of brick and stone, with eight churches amongst the houses, most of them unfinished. Many of the edifices were three stories high. A strong wall circled the place, crowned with seaward-pointing cannon, and these defences were backed by a garrison of three hundred of the king's soldiers, whilst the city itself supplemented