The ill-starred voyage of the first Englishman ever to sail to Australia.
This video accompanies our podcast episode, in which Dr Sam Willis talks to historian and archaeologist Dr Mac MCarthy - the man who actually tracked down and found the wreck of the Roebuck. This is part of a multi-episode series on the maritime history of Australia in the Mainer's Mirror Podcast.
On Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast...
At the Society for Nautical Research: snr.org.uk/the-mariners-mirro...
On the 23rd of February 1701, an English explorer, pirate and buccaneer named William Dampier ordered the crew of his wrecked ship, HMS Roebuck, to cut up her sails to make tents. The following morning he went ashore a small, remote mid-Atlantic island, where he and his crew would be marooned for the next 5 weeks. This was the unfortunate end to the ill-fated voyage of the first Englishman ever to explore the vast, uncharted land that would later be known as Australia.
In 1697 a book titled A New Voyage Around the World was published in England, and it quickly became a sensation. The popularity of William Dampier’s account of his circumnavigation attracted the attention of the Admiralty, who gave him command of the fifth rate, 26 gun warship HMS Roebuck. He was commissioned by King William III to explore the as yet uncharted east coast of New Holland, which was the name given by the Dutch to what is now known as Australia.
Dampier set out on the 14th of January 1699, and his mission went wayward even as it began: he had intended to travel westward round Cape Horn to New Holland, but he ended up leaving too late in the year to make that trip. So instead he decided to take the Brouwer route, the Dutch route to the Indies, travelling eastward via the Cape of Good Hope and across the narrower longitudes far south of the Equator - but he diverged from that route due to an ebullition of bad blood that would come back to haunt him. Before he had even set sail Dampier had fallen out with his First Lieutenant, George Fisher.
By the time they were part way across the Atlantic Dampier had had Fisher caned, clapped in irons and confined to quarters. The crew had partly sided with Fisher, and partly with Dampier, so to avoid a possible mutiny he had the Roebuck call in at Bahia, Brazil, and sent Fisher ashore to be imprisoned. Having regained control of the ship, Dampier headed east, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and made landfall on the 6th of August 1699 in western New Holland at a place he named Sharks Bay, a name it more-or-less bears today.
Here Dampier collected and described many specimens of the plant and animal life he found, ordering an artistically gifted member of his crew, believed to be his clerk James Brand, to produce drawings of them - thus earning himself the title of Australia’s first English naturalist. He took the Roebuck north and west along the coast, collecting specimens as he went, charting what colonists later named the Dampier Archipelago, an island group that had been continuously inhabited for over 50,000 years by the Yaburara people among others, 150 of whom would later be killed in the infamous Flying Foam massacre by colonists, before heading north towards Timor. From there he rounded New Guinea to the north, and charted the southern coasts of New Hanover, New Ireland and New Britain, then charted what was later named the Dampier Strait, stopping now and then to collect giant clams and other specimens.
By the time he got to Crown Island the condition of the Roebuck was deteriorating alarmingly. Suffering from sickness himself, and mistrusting his crew - ‘...my people being very negligent when I was not upon deck myself...’- Dampier was forced to abandon the exploration of the east coast of New Holland, the original purpose of his voyage and commission, and headed for Batavia on the island of Java, which is now Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. At the turn of the 18th century Batavia was a thriving seaport, and the headquarters of the Dutch East India Company in the Indies. Despite all the goods, services and provisions available in the booming trading hub, the mischance that had dogged Dampier’s voyage found him again, and he was unable to properly repair his ship.
On the 17th of October 1700 the leaking Roebuck limped from Batavia toward the Cape of Good Hope, where she anchored from late December till the 11th of January - on the 2nd of February she anchored at St Helena for 11 days, and then, finally, staggered on to Ascension Island, where on the 22nd of February Dampier deemed ‘that it was now impossible to save the ship’, and 2 days later the Roebuck was run aground in her final resting place.