Buccaneer Ethnography: Nature, Culture, and Nation in the Journals of William Dampier

Both a piratical adventurer and a man of science and letters, at once a lawless adventurer and an observer of plants, animals, peoples, winds and tides, William Dampier was, over the course of his life, both an agent and an enemy of English commercial interests. Like many of his fellow buccaneers, he sometimes excused himself from the charge of piracy by claiming that he pillaged by commission. Yet he also fashioned himself in the journals as a Baconian eyewitness of non-European peoples and a natural world that both late seventeenth-century science and English merchants were interested in knowing better. In one sense, the fact that he could be so apparently untroubled by the contradictions in his career suggests the existence of loose constellations of power and wealth, wherein the boundaries between subject and outlaw and between high-seas criminal and merchant-capitalist remain quite fluid: the existence, that is to say, of a tolerant state that made a certain kind of free primitive accumulation possible. Yet his reformation also seems to reflect an intensification of state authority as the latter was able to reach farther into the widening world to discipline unruly subjects. As privateering became an increasingly less legitimate means of securing advantage over rival states and as piracy became less and less tolerated, the erratic identity and independent agency that buccaneers expressed in their double roles as renegade outlaws and national heroes hardened into circumstantial proof of their crimes.