William Dampier

The buccaneer who circumnavigated three times, described the trade winds, piloted the ship that took Alexander Selkirk off Juan Fernandez and wrote the best sea narrative of his age. William Clark Russell, himself a sailor and a novelist of the sea, wrote this life for the Men of Action series. He is admiring of the navigator and honest about the pirate, which most nineteenth-century accounts were not. Sixty plates by painters including William Hodges and J. M. W. Turner carry the sea, ships and far harbours of Dampier's voyages across two centuries of marine art.