Pirate Botanist Returns! English buccaneer, hydrographer & navigator, William Dampier, circa 1690

The Pirate Botanist Returns!
January 19, 2012
by Robert Krulwich
The English buccaneer, hydrographer and navigator, William Dampier, circa 1690.

He was, as you can see here, a large nosed, lean, keen-eyed man whose image still hangs in Great Britain's national portrait gallery, alongside kings, writers, warriors and other great personages. Which is odd, because he was a pirate.

Not a gentleman pirate. William Dampier was a doubloon-stealing, knife-flashing, boat-nabbing outlaw who preyed on Spanish frigates, who pillaged, robbed and behaved very, very badly.

But he was also a great naturalist, one of the 17th century's best; a man who collected plants and animals and wrote about them during short breaks between piratical adventures.

The pirate who loved plants. That's like learning Tony Soprano had a side business collecting beetles. But in the 17th century, finding plants and animals new to Europeans was a rough, ferociously competitive business. There were fortunes to be made, money enough to attract outlaws, slavers, men who crisscrossed the world for years at a time.

And because the work was so dangerous, they didn't always come back. A.M. Martin, in an article called "The Perils of Plant Collecting," lists these notable plant hunter-explorers and how they died. It isn't pretty.

William Dampier
Illustration by Ben Arthur
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/01/18/145402318/the-pirate-botanist-returns