Memo+27+Describing+People+To+Make+an+Analytic+Point

Description of a Person: William Dampier

Having circumnavigated the world three times and spent his entire life alternating between the occupations of pirate and privateer, or both, it really depended on who you were talking to, William Dampier provided a great deal of inspiration for some of the most well known stories of the time, including Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe. Looking at the surviving portraits of Dampier, one would never guess that this aristocratic looking young man, depicted wearing a cravat and suit jacket with a leather bound book under his arm, was, in fact, a known buccaneer. Well documented accounts of his boozing and pillaging along the coast of Peru and throughout the Caribbean exist, and although Dampier, the second child of a farmer, was orphaned at a young age, this is not the type of behavior one would expect from an individual who had received the benefits of an t education and who showed skill in arithmetic and Latin. As a youth Dampier was apprenticed to a ships master at Weymouth, where he learned of sailing and navigation. We can therefore suppose that before turning pirate, Dampier had already learned the finer points of navigation, was familiar with mathematics and Latin, and had a decent education. Yet, Dampier was never a great pirate, he is certainly not as well known as Henry Morgan, Edward Teach, and William Kidd, to name a few. He was simply one of the many British men to move back and forth between privateering and piracy in the seventeenth century. Is William Dampier an exceptional case of a educated individual turned pirate? Or is he in fact a fair example of the types of individuals swayed to piracy?