“Bloody, mad, swaring, flashy fellows”: William Dampier and the Blueprinting of Violence

John Beaglehole in his introduction to this first voyage of James Cook (1768–1771) calls it an “old story.” He is here referring to the voyages of exploration and prospection undertaken by nations of the Northern Hemisphere to discover what was on the other side of the globe, beyond the Asian, African and European land masses which were known to the ancient geographers. For Claudius Ptomely, for example, the second-century Egyptian astronomer, the known lands veered to the east, and joined the southern part of Africa. Thus, there was no Pacific Ocean as we know it today, but a landlocked Indian Ocean—the Magnus Sinus—the Great Gulf. The land to the south of the Tropic of Capricorn was Terra Incognita, unknown land. There was though some speculation about gaps in the land to the east or the south, leading or not, to another ocean or sea. This conjectural geography was to characterize thinking about the shape of the world in the centuries to come, as the southern continental edge was pushed back during the successive ages of exploration. At the end of the fifteenth century, Columbus’s discoveries of the Caribbean Islands and the South American landmass led geographers to suggest a new, augmented vision of the world, representing the Americas as not joined to Asia, with an ocean in between, the Pacific (unnamed), perhaps that mentioned by Marco Polo during his thirteenth-century travels! Nevertheless, cartographical practice in the coming years continued to represent the two (the American continent and Asia) as joined. Bartholomew Diaz and Vasco da Gama in 1497 both rounded the Cape of Good Hope, allowing for sea space between the tip of Africa and the purely hypothetical coast of Ptolemy’s southern Terra Incognita to take cartographical form. The Tordesillas Treaty in 1494 had divided the world into two, as Europeans took to the seas with a vengeance from this point in time onwards, expanding Ptolemy’s map further as fresh cartographical perspectives emerged. Balboa in 1513 was the first to sight the Pacific Ocean from the coast of present-day America. He crossed the central American isthmus at Darien, and on viewing the expanse of water on the other side, he called it the South Sea. This cartographical context led to the Magellan voyage, the Portuguese navigator convincing Spain that there must be a western route to the east. His revolutionizing five-ship expedition of 1519 ventured into the unknown South-Atlantic waters and Magellan threaded his way through dangerous straits, today the Magellan Straits, and emerged into the relative calm of the ocean, Mar Pacifico, more vast than the mind of man could conceive. Crossing the ocean, encountering death and facing deprivation and disease, Magellan was killed in the present-day Philippines, but one of his ships struggled home, reaching Seville in 1522. The account of the voyage was published by Antonio Pigafetta and came to be identified as Magellan’s. An ocean existed, Asia and the Americas were distinct geographical entities, the South Sea, unimaginably vast, had been crossed, a circumnavigation effected. The southern boundary of the South Sea remained though a mystery despite the rolling back of Ptolemy’s limits with Terra Incognita conceived of as even further south. Magellan was followed by other navigators, and over the decades what Beaglehole calls a highway gradually came to be established across the ocean, to and from Acapulco. Figures like Cortes in Mexico commissioned the early, and disastrous voyages, in search of lands and secure routes. The Galapagos islands were discovered in 1535, the Mare Pacificum started to appear on maps in the 1540s. Sebastian Munster’s Geographia Universalis (1540) contained a map (XXVII) which was one of the first in which the name appeared in print. When taken together with his map of Asia and Europe (map XIX), there appeared for the first time an image of the Pacific Ocean as a continuous whole.