A New Voyage Round the World Paperback by William Dampier

Product Details

• Publisher: Penguin Classic (2021-08-10)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 512 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780241413289
• Item Weight: 374.22 grams
• Dimensions: 7.75 x 5.04 x 1.14 cm

'A roaring tale ... remains as vivid and exciting today as it was on publication in 1697' Guardian

The pirate and adventurer William Dampier circumnavigated the globe three times, and took notes wherever he went. This is his frank, vivid account of his buccaneering sea voyages around the world, from the Caribbean to the Pacific and East Indies. Filled with accounts of raids, escapes, wrecks and storms, it also contains precise observations of people, places, animals and food (including the first English accounts of guacamole, mango chutney and chopsticks). A bestseller on publication, this unique record of the colonial age influenced Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels and consequently the whole of English literature.

Edited with an Introduction by Nicholas Thomas

About the Author

William Dampier (c.1651-1715) was a pirate and adventurer who was (albeit for chaotic and unintended reasons) the first man to voyage round the world three times. A New Voyage Round the World (1697), written from notes kept during his first long voyage, was a literary sensation (inspiring Gulliver's Travels) and the model for all the great British naturalists and explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His many wanderings took him from the Arctic to the South Pacific. He rescued Alexander Selkirk from his four years in the Juan Fernandez Islands (inspiring Robinson Crusoe). He died back in England, having had one final triumph in successfully piloting a small fleet in the Pacific to capture a treasure-crammed 'Manila Galleon', a Spanish trading ship.

Nicholas Thomas has been Director of Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge since 2006. He visited the Pacific Islands first in 1984 to research his PhD thesis on the Marquesas Islands and later worked in Fiji and New Zealand, as well as in many archives and museum collections in Europe, North America, and the Pacific. His books include Entangled Objects (1991), Oceanic Art (1995), Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook (2003), and Islanders: the Pacific in the Age of Empire (2010), which was awarded the Wolfson History Prize.