A Pirate of Exquisite Mind; Explorer, Naturalist, and Buccaneer: The Life of William Dampier

New York: Walker & Company, 2004. Second printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. Jan Glinski. ix, [3], 372 pages. Illustrated endpapers. Footnotes. Illustrations. Maps. Includes Acknowledgments, Prologue, Notes and Sources, Bibliography, Art Credits, and Index. Chapters cover The Adventurer; The Buccaneer; The Traveler; The Celebrity; Shark's Bay; "A Flame of Fire'; "Not a Fit Person"; 'Brandy Enough"; The Manila Galleon at Last; and Epilogue. A Pirate of Exquisite Mind restores William Dampier to his rightful place in history, as one of the pioneers who shaped our understanding of the natural world. Diana Preston is an Oxford educated historian and author. Diana often acts as a consultant to and appears in historical documentaries. Most recently she appeared in National Geographic's ‘Origins' series on which she was a consultant and script writer. With her husband Michael, Diana has co-authored ‘A Pirate of Exquisite Mind' about the 17th century buccaneer William Dampier and ‘A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time' about the building of the Taj Mahal. Alex Rutherford is the collective pen name of two writers, Diana Preston and her husband Michael Preston.[1][2] "Rutherford" is known for the six-book historical fiction series Empire of the Moghul. William Dampier (baptized 5 September 1651; died March 1715) was an English explorer, pirate, privateer, navigator, and naturalist who became the first Englishman to explore parts of what is today Australia, and the first person to circumnavigate the world three times. He has also been described as Australia's first natural historian, as well as one of the most important British explorers of the period between Francis Drake (16th century) and James Cook (18th century), he "bridged those two eras" with a mix of piratical derring-do of the former and scientific inquiry of the later. His expeditions were the among first to identify and name a number of plants, animals, foods, and cooking techniques for a European audience; being among the first English writers to use words such as avocado, barbecue, and chopsticks. In describing the preparation of avocados, he was the first European to describe the making of guacamole, named the breadfruit plant, and made frequent documentation of the taste of numerous foods foreign to the European palate such as flamingo and manatee. After impressing the Admiralty with his book A New Voyage Round the World, Dampier was given command of a Royal Navy ship and made important discoveries in western Australia, before being court-martialed for cruelty. On a later voyage he rescued Alexander Selkirk, a former crewmate who may have inspired Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Seventeenth-century pirate genius William Dampier sailed around the world three times when crossing the Pacific was a major feat, was the first explorer to visit all five continents, and reached Australia eighty years before Captain Cook. His exploits created a sensation in Europe. Swift and Defoe used his experiences in writing Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe. Darwin incorporated his concept of "sub-species" into the theory of evolution. Dampier's description of breadfruit was the impetus for Captain Bligh's voyage on the Bounty. He was so influential that today he has more than one thousand entries in the Oxford English Dictionary, including such words as chopsticks, barbecue, and kumquat. Anthropologists still use his work.