The Pirate who Stole Scotland: William Dampier and the Creation of the United Kingdom

By Leon Hopkins

Economic warfare is not a new phenomenon. In the protectionist climate of the seventeenth century, trade embargoes, exclusions and boycotts were common.

England was among the most active nations when it came to using economic clout to get its own way. It did so to force Scotland to accept an Act of Union: to submerge its independence within a United Kingdom governed from London.

Instrumental in this attack upon the Scots was William Dampier, the principal subject of this book. He was an extraordinary man. A farmer’s son, he became the most traveled man of his generation. He was a pirate, a brute and a devious sociopath. But he was also a scientist and a talented writer who gave his readers accurate descriptions of previously unknown places, peoples, plants and animals. He was a daring explorer and an expert navigator who mapped coastlines and logged wind patterns and ocean currents. He led the first Royal Navy expedition to Australia, over 70 years before Captain Cook’s arrival.

Dampier’s writing made him famous, but not rich. It allowed him to rub shoulders with the leading men of his day; scientists such as Robert Hooke, Edmund Halley and Hans Sloane, businessmen such as Sir John Houblon (first governor of the Bank of England) and William Paterson, politicians such as James Vernon and Charles Montagu (first Earl of Halifax), and Admiralty men such as Admiral Sir George Rooke and Samuel Pepys.

And Dampier was in the pay of the English Government; an agent known to Queen Anne, in which capacity he engineered a financial disaster and political drubbing for Scotland.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: Jan 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9781399093651

Leon Hopkins

Leon Hopkins is a journalist and author.After a short career in financial analysis, he joined "Accountancy Age", which he later edited. Other accountancy titles followed as did writing for, editing and publishing a variety of business and professional magazines. Leon has written for national newspapers and is author of non-fiction books on subjects ranging from auditing to letting. "The Hundredth Year" described the history of the accountancy profession in England and "An Armenian Family Torn Apart", which he translated, describes life during the Armenian Genocide. He also has a published novel to his name, "There’s Only One Henry Green".

Book preview

Introduction

The Rose and the Thistle

It is not for nothing that the national emblems of England and Scotland are the thorny rose and the spikey thistle. The two countries have always been difficult neighbours. For centuries they lived beside each other in mutual mistrust and suspicion. Hostile excursions into each other’s territory were not uncommon. There were raids, battles, recriminations and executions.

Some sort of marriage was achieved when, in 1603, the King of Scotland added the English throne to his personal domains. The two nations remained separate but James VI of Scotland was now also James I of England.

James was the son of Mary Queen of Scots. Three times married and twice a queen (her first husband was Francis II of France), Mary had been held under house arrest in England for nineteen years. Her imprisonment ended when she was executed for supposedly plotting to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I.

James did not hold a grudge. He apparently preferred life in London to his former home in cold and damp Edinburgh.

Synchronised monarchy did not last too long. Its end was brought about by the English Civil War, which saw Charles II, son of the executed Charles I and grandson of James, declared King of Scotland.

Oliver Cromwell, now Lord Protector of England, invaded Caledonia. The man who never lost a battle found little difficulty in overcoming the Scots. He also achieved more in uniting their fractious country than most native-born rulers. Nine years later, in 1660, normal service was resumed, with Charles II assuming the thrones of both Scotland and England.

For a short and troubled period after Charles’ death, his brother James VII (Scotland) and II (England) was also the monarch of both countries. And after some initial squabbling and delay, King William and Queen Mary won a points victory to follow in his footsteps. William had effectively invaded England (by invitation) and ousted the unpopular James.

William, who took the lead in the joint monarchies he shared with his wife, was no pushover. As much a general as a king, he welcomed having Scotland as a buffer to his northern borders. Equally, he questioned Scotland’s loyalty, not least because of its strong and long-standing closeness to his enemy, France, a country where James had found refuge. (James’ hopes of recovering his kingdom were finally ended when William won the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland, defeating Scotland’s Celtic cousins).

William wanted to solidify Scotland’s allegiance to England, and he decided an Act of Union would do the trick. It had been tried before but never achieved. Most Scots, proud of their independence, were against the idea. But somehow, 104 years after James became King of England, England effectively became ruler of Scotland.

The country had been bankrupted and had no choice but to seek financial security by tethering itself to England. Its Parliament agreed to the union. A major cause of the country’s financial plight was the failure of its ill-fated ‘Darien adventure’. This had seemed a good idea at the time; a bold attempt to free the country from England forever. Scotland believed it could do this by becoming possessor of a strategically-placed free port, ‘a door to the seas’, and ‘an emporium of the world’. The scheme’s leading promoter, William Patterson, promised that trade would create wealth, and wealth would create more wealth. Most of Scotland was mesmerised by his prospectus and invested in the project. Its subscription book contained the names of lords and lairds, widows and corporations, clerics, politicians, lawyers and soldiers.

The venture was a disastrous failure, costing many lives and much money. In all, close to half the nation’s wealth was lost. How could this happen? Was the Darien adventure just a very bad idea from the start, or were the quarrelsome Scots simply spectacularly bad at organising such things? Or, as suggested in this book, were outside forces at play?

There is no doubt that the English Government made concerted efforts to make sure the Darien project failed. This may have been a matter of jealousy – not wanting the Scots to be seen to have seized an opportunity that their neighbour had failed to see. Equally, the English may have deliberately goaded the Scots into attempting the impossible. The aim would have been exactly as turned out; to force Scotland into submission.

If there was such a plan, a likely candidate for its instigation is the Government adviser William Dampier. Dampier was a pirate – it says so at the foot of his portrait that hangs in London’s National Portrait Gallery, just off Trafalgar Square. In fact, he was much more. He was a master navigator, born naturalist and successful author. He was interested in everything and had theories about most. He was certainly the most travelled man of his age.

Born in 1651, the year after the English Civil War was effectively ended by the Battle of Worcester, he was the son of a Somerset tenant farmer. When orphaned, he opted for a life at sea. By his early twenties, he had already made return trips to Nova Scotia, Java and the West Indies – and this at a time when ships were lucky to complete any long voyage with more than half their crew still breathing.

In the following years, Dampier sailed around the world three times. He also led an expedition to Australia – this in the century before Captain Cook’s ‘discovery’ – doubling back by the same route.

There is no doubt Dampier was a brutal man in a brutal age. He certainly did not overflow with compassion. Yet he was more aware of, and sensitive to, his environment than most. He had character flaws. He was persuasive in selling his wild ventures to merchant adventurers and ship owners, but failed to gain the confidence and respect of many of those under his command. He was arrogant and wilful and did not suffer fools lightly. He was unreliable and fickle, frequently changing his mind. And he had a temper.

When Dampier married, he told his new wife he would take a short trip to Jamaica to make their fortune. He was away twelve years. During this time he crossed the Isthmus of Panama twice, plundered the Spanish-owned west coast of South America, sailed the Pacific, visited India, China and Thailand, and completed his first circumnavigation of the globe – albeit in a combination of different vessels. All the while he kept a journal detailing his adventures, sometimes protected inside a large bamboo cane whose ends he sealed and resealed with wax.

On his return home, he turned his notes into a best-selling book. Feted for his achievements, he knew everybody. He was at home with privateers and buccaneers, murders, swindlers and thugs. He met with royalty, dined with Admiralty officials, worked for bankers, was consulted by Government committees, and parlayed with philosophers, writers and scientists, barons and earls.

For a man of action, he was remarkably cautious. He would gladly take a ship or a town where there was little or no opposition, but he often broke off engagements where others would have pressed on in pursuit of great prizes. He preferred to use cunning and trickery to achieve his ends.

Dampier certainly played a major role in persuading the Scots to pursue their Darien dream. There is circumstantial evidence to suggest he did much more.

PART ONE

A SAILOR I SHALL BE

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life

– John Masefield

Chapter 1

Freedom of the Seas

William Dampier, the pirate who stole Scotland, went to sea when he was seventeen.

It was his own choice, and it was a strange one for somebody who had been brought up on a farm. That was Dampier for you. He was somebody who knew his own mind and didn’t care too much for the opinions of others. He wanted his freedom, and he found it in the sea.

Dampier had been born in 1651 in East Coker, a village in Somerset in the south-west of England. It lies in the south of the county, close to the border with Dorset, and midway between the Bristol Channel to the north and the English Channel to the south. The nearest town is Yeovil, about three miles away. Weymouth, on the south coast, is about thirty miles. Bristol, to the north east, is about eighty miles.

Somerset is and was an agricultural county and Dampier’s father, George, was a tenant farmer, renting land from the local lord of the manor, Colonel William Helyar. Being a tenant didn’t mean that George wasn’t well-to-do. According to the local Parish Council, village tradition has it that William Dampier was born in Hymerford House, a substantial property. The family would doubtless have had farm-worker employees and household servants. In other words, William was born into a world of some privilege and was not the simple seaman he later made himself out to be.

He had an older brother, George, with whom he seems to have been on good terms throughout his life; eventually leaving him something in his will. There were other children too, although of these only Thomasina and Josias survived their first few years.

William’s childhood was certainly not all plain sailing. In 1658, William’s father died. He was only forty. Seven years later, at a time when bubonic plague was sweeping the country, his mother also died. William was fourteen years old.

Being the second son of a single-parent family, and later an orphan, did not have the disastrous impact on William’s childhood that might have been expected. He apparently had benefactors and guardians, probably Squire Helyar among them.

In a time when few children went to school, William received a reasonable education. King’s School in Bruton, a Somerset town about fifteen miles from East Coker, claims him as a pupil. The school says it has no absolute proof that he went there but it is known that he attended a ‘Latin School’, and that at the time William was being educated, King’s was one of only a very few in the region.

Whichever school he went to, he certainly gained a sound grounding in English, Latin and Mathematics; sound enough to be able to use Latin to communicate with people he met on his travels, and proficient enough in maths to be able to complete intricate calculations when navigating his way around the world.

He was bright too. The Dampier farm, like others in the village, did not comprise a cohesive tract but was instead split into separate parcels of land spread about the village. William boasted that even as a young child he knew which fields were most suitable for which crops. These crops may well have included hemp and flax sold to local textile makers for their ‘Coker Canvas’, much favoured in the making of sails. Colonel Helyar seems to have had his own textile-making business interests.

Apart from this tenuous connection, Dampier does not appear to have had any reasons to go to sea other than a determination to travel the world. He was a curious child who was to become a curious man. He was also very much a man of his times. This was a period of change, of conflict and the pre-dawn of the Age of Enlightenment.

Civil war between supporters of Parliament and of the Crown had raged for the nine years prior to William’s birth. It had three distinct three stages, the second ending with the execution of Charles I in 1649. This followed his conviction for treason on the grounds that he had wilfully exercised ‘unlimited and tyrannical power’ in disregard to the rights and liberties of his subjects. The third and final stage of the war ended when Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army crushed the (mainly Scottish) Royalist army at the Battle of Worcester; an event that almost coincided with William’s birth in September 1651. Charles II (of Scotland, years later to become Charles II of Scotland and England) avoided capture and eventually made his escape to France.

Worcester is in the Midlands, but the West Country, including East Coker, had certainly been affected by the war. In 1642, the then Lord of the Manor, the Reverend William Helyar, had been arrested by parliamentary troops and held hostage until he agreed to pay £800 in what amounted to protection money. Later, a detachment of royalist soldiers, mostly local men, were for a while billeted in nearby West Coker.

William Helyar, who had risen from vicar to Archdeacon of Barnstable and had been one-time chaplain to Queen Elizabeth I, purchased Coker Court and its estates in 1616. Unfortunately for him, his £800 did not protect him against the ravages of the plague that swept through East Coker three years after his arrest, killing seventy villagers including the Archdeacon, his son, Reverend Henry Helyar and Henry’s wife Christian (the family were deep into the god business with ‘reverends’ popping up everywhere among the parents of wives, brothers, children and other assorted relatives).

This meant that it was Henry’s eldest son, Colonel William Helyar, who inherited his estates and became Dampier senior’s landlord. The colonel’s other five brothers received a few hundred pounds each, graduated according to age. The youngest and darling of the family, Cary, inherited £150.

William Helyar was a colonel by virtue of having, when little more than a child, raised a regiment of horse to fight for Charles I (it was soldiers from this regiment who were billeted in West Coker).¹ In 1646, the recently orphaned Helyar, by now fifteen or sixteen, was wounded and then captured. His regiment was disbanded and he retreated back to his newly inherited Coker Court.

For a while he was in danger of losing this too: until Parliament voted to grant him a pardon for his ‘delinquency’ on payment of a fine of £1,522, 16 shillings, this sum being a tenth of his estimated wealth (equivalent to somewhere between £1.5m and £3.5m in 2021 values).²

What followed Cromwell’s eventual victory was a period of puritanical denial, followed by one of royal excess. William Dampier was just sixteen when Charles II was able to reclaim the throne. Charles must have realised it would not be advisable to declare this had anything to do with divine rights, although he was certainly not too cautious to indulge his whims to the full.

At least his reckless extravagancies and open dalliances had the side effect of opening his subjects’ minds to the possibilities that lay ahead. Advances were being made in mathematics and science, building technology, medicine, finance and many other areas. New discoveries were being made and new lands opened up.

In London, Christopher Wren gave his first lecture to fellow ‘natural philosophers’ at what was soon to become the Royal Society; a meeting place for luminaries from many disciplines including, many years later, William Dampier himself.

William had caught the mood of the times. He knew that he wanted to travel, to see and perhaps to discover new lands, meet new peoples, to observe all that the world had to offer. By the time he was seventeen, he had persuaded his benefactors and guardians that this was what he should do. He was apprenticed to a ‘ship master’ in Weymouth. Being ‘apprenticed’ meant that somebody (perhaps George who would have inherited what there was of the family’s wealth, or perhaps Squire Helyar) was paying for him to ‘learn the ropes’.

Most of those intent on a career at sea would have started much earlier, perhaps as young as ten or twelve. There was a lot to learn. For a start, there were indeed hundreds of different ropes, used for different purposes and each having its own name. There were sheets and warps, hawsers and halyards, shrouds and painters, braces, foot ropes and reefing lines. Pulling on one when told to pull on another might cause disaster.

Then there was the question of navigation, of tides, of ship maintenance including careening and mast stepping, of stowage and of sail handling and repair. Sailors must learn the points of the compass, know something of astronomy and the night sky, be able to recognise different flags, know how to steer a course, and to be proficient in the use of backstaffs and other instruments allowing latitude and speed through the water to be assessed. It all took time, and most was learned ‘on the job’, while risking life and limb to reach some distant port, meanwhile enduring whatever weather happened to sweep by.

Notwithstanding, Dampier was soon off, first to France, then to the chillier waters of Newfoundland. Next, he sailed to Java via the Cape of Good Hope aboard the East Indiaman John and Martha, a ship of 300 tons that made two voyages for the East India company between 1668 and 1670. Dampier’s formal training meant he was always going to be a valued member of any ship’s crew and always more than an ordinary seaman confined to quarters ‘before the mast’.

Aged twenty, Dampier joined the king’s Navy. How or why isn’t known and he didn’t say. It may have been patriotism. He had chauvinistic views when it came to other European nations, and England was now at war with the Netherlands. Dampier joined the crew of the Royal Prince, a three-deck 100-gun first-rated ship built only two years previously. She was Sir Edward Spragge’s flagship at the ensuing Battles of Schooneveld and Texel. Dampier was present at the first but not the second. By a stroke of good fortune in disguise, he had been taken ill and was shipped off to Harwich to recover.

During the battle, the Royal Prince suffered severe damage and loss of life. Spragge was among those killed. While trying to transfer to an alternative ship, his small boat had been hit by cannon fire, leaving the admiral clinging to the wreckage. Afterwards, it was not possible to say if he had died of his injuries or through drowning.

Ironically, when the Royal Prince was rebuilt nineteen years later, it was also renamed. The Royal Prince became the Royal William, named in honour of William Prince of Orange who had been on the opposing side (although not a participant) at the time of the Battle of Texel, but who by then was King of England (and Scotland).

The three Anglo-Dutch wars did not cover England with glory. They were a series of essentially trade-induced attempts to rein in the ambitious Dutch who, from their lowlands base, were becoming a world-beating naval power. They were achieving the makings of an empire, with spice islands in the Banda Sea yielding much prized nutmeg, cloves and pepper, other East Indies possessions, valuable trading links with Japan, and African and Caribbean possessions.

What made these wars even more deplorable were the shenanigans of the dissolute Charles II, whose actions were not too far removed from those that got his father’s head lopped off.

Protestant England had at first been a supporter of Holland against the aggressive, and Catholic, French. But Charles was high-maintenance and was finding it troublesome to persuade Parliament to fund his ‘merry’ lifestyle. His solution was to conclude a secret, and traitorous treaty with France. The basics of the secret part of the Treaty of Dover were that Charles would receive funding of £200,000 a year from France. In return, he agreed to support France in its quarrel with the Dutch. Further, much further, was a commitment from Charles to declare himself a Catholic at some time in the future (for which there would be a separate payment) and to lead his country down the same route. There was even more. Should there be public unrest when the matter of religion was raised, France would help Charles quell any uprising.

That Dampier had any inkling of what was really going on is unlikely. If he did, the information would have been salted away in his lively mind, filed under ‘money buys power and lack of it leads even the most powerful to agree unpalatable actions’.

Whatever was wrong with Dampier when he was removed from the Royal Prince, it must have been serious because he took a number of months to recover. After ‘languishing’ in Harwich, he retreated back to East Coker and to his brother to complete his recuperation. At some point during his stay there, he was summoned by Colonel Helyar to Coker Court and given a job offer.

The colonel must have struck a daunting figure to the twenty-two-year-old Dampier. Helyar was just over fifty years old at the time and an establishment figure. He had been High Sheriff of Somerset in 1660. He was rich and powerful and lived in a house teeming with family and servants.

Like George Dampier, Helyar had a younger brother, Cary Helyar. And like William, Cary had gone off to see the world and to seek his fortune. His chief asset seems to have been his charm. He was good at making friends, gaining trust and cutting deals. His second most important asset was access to his brother’s wealth. He worked in partnership with the colonel, Cary doing the dirty work and Squire Helyar providing the finance. The elder Helyar indulged his brother but his love for him must have been tested by his frequent demands on the bank of big brother.

Some of Cary’s earlier deals, in the 1660s, seem to have bordered on the illegal, involving trips to Madrid. Soon he was homing in on Spain’s American colonies, trading in all manner of goods, including sugar, cocoa, logwood, and slaves. In late 1664, then aged thirty-four, he decided to base himself in Jamaica.³ He soon made friends with members of the Modyford family and listened to their ideas. Sir Thomas Modyford, the Governor of Jamaica, had arrived there in the same year as Cary. Previously he had been a successful planter in Barbados and was an advocate of farming, Caribbean style. He was particularly interested in chocolate. Once planted, cocoa trees needed little tending. Only a few slaves would be needed and the trees would go on producing crops for years. All the plantation owner had to do was to sit back and count the profits. That was his theory.

Like William Dampier, Cary was able to come up with any number of sure-fire money-making schemes that for one reason or another never seemed to work entirely to his financial advantage. But listening to the Modyfords, Cary was sure it would be different this time. He went into the plantation business and started planting cocoa trees.

The land he bought and named ‘Bybrook’ was at Sixteen Mile Walk, close to the Modyfords’ own plantations. It comprised a substantial plot of land. In 1669 he bought (for £20, 10 shillings), 160 acres, and in the same year a further 120 acres comprising ‘meadow or pasture and woodland’. He also bought a further twenty-six acres at Sixteen Mile Walk and a house and land in the town of St Jago de la Vega (Spanish Town, the then capital of Jamaica), intended for a house. In 1671 he purchased 1,000 more acres of ‘meadow, or pasture and woodland’, in ‘St Maries parish’ (St Mary’s parish), and 320 acres at Salvadores Cockpitts in Bybrook’s home parish of St Katherine’s.⁴ All was funded by Colonel Helyar. The persuasive Cary Helyar had talked his brother, the colonel, into becoming a partner in this venture also.

By 1670 Cary had six acres of cocoa trees planted and was watching them mature. That was the year the blight appeared. Modyford took the hint and moved into sugar production, a venture that required many more slaves. By 1672 Cary’s cocoa trees were all dead and he, too, was moving into sugar. He had already written to his brother asking him for equipment and all the people he could send. The colonel duly complied as best he could.

Modyford, meanwhile had been sacked as governor and sent home to England to new quarters in the Tower of London. Cary asked his brother to visit him there to help raise his spirits. The colonel duly complied.

He also sent a steady stream of people to Jamaica to work on his and Cary’s plantation. Most were from East Coker, or thereabouts, some were relatives or were otherwise connected to the Helyar family. One such was William Whaley, the squire’s godson, who was sent out in 1671 and subsequently became Bybrook’s bookkeeper and then manager.⁵

All had been going to plan. Bybrook was not yet in profit, but it seemed just a matter of time before it would be. More people were on the way. Cary had started building himself a house and got married. And then he died. He was thirty-nine years old.

Cary left the house to his new wife, Priscilla, and his share of the plantation to Whaley. But the business was so much in debt that Cary’s older brother became the owner anyway.

When Dampier was summoned to Coker Court, the colonel must have still been grieving his brother’s death. And he had some problems to solve. Living as he was in East Coker, and correspondence taking weeks if not months to reach its destination, controlling the business was difficult. William Whaley might have been his godson, but Helyar may not have known him too well, nor trusted him too much. He needed more ‘eyes and ears’ on the ground and yet more people in his fields.

Just as the only form of communication available was by post, ‘snail mail’, so there was no form of mechanical power available to work the fields. Everything that was cut, crushed, boiled, skimmed, dried or bagged had to be done so using wind, water or muscle power.

At the time Colonel Helyar made his job offer to Dampier, the plantation had a complement of between fifteen and twenty white employees, mostly tradespeople but also some weavers (perhaps of Coker Canvas) and fifty to sixty negro slaves. Of the tradespeople, potters were much in demand for the production of sugar pots, as were carpenters and coopers.

All this would have been explained to a slightly daunted Dampier. He took it to mean that the squire wanted to send him to Jamaica to look after his personal interests. Dampier accepted the challenge. It didn’t turn out the way Dampier expected, although going to Jamaica did change the course of his life.

Chapter 2

Jamaica and Beyond

Dampier arrived in Jamaica sometime in 1674. He was soon at loggerheads with William Whaley.

Whaley had been the bookkeeper at the Bybrook plantation to which Dampier had been sent, and he would certainly have known its parlous financial situation. On inheriting Cary Helyar’s half share in the business, he must have hoped that Colonel Helyar would be as generous to him as he had been to his own brother. He clearly wasn’t, and Whaley had been obliged to hand over his share of the business, along with its many debts, including those to the colonel himself, and to Cary’s widow, Priscilla.

From plantation owner, Whaley had been reduced to plantation manager, albeit with a promise of a half share of profits once all debts had been paid off (if ever that should happen). And now, here was the bumptious upstart William Dampier, who knew nothing of sugar growing, coming in and saying he had free licence to take over the book-keeping and look after the colonel’s interests. It wasn’t fair and Whaley was not going to have it.

Dampier, on the other hand, had arrived full of hope ‘by reason of the fair promises you made me in England which I thought had been already verified, or at least not to be doubted’, he wrote to Colonel Helyar in England.

At first Dampier had been ‘well received by Mr Whaley, so welcomed, so gracious in his eyes, that I thought myself most happy’. But, he said, ‘this was too sweet to hold’.¹

He complained that, from then on, he had been underpaid and ill-treated.

As soon as Whaley had him ‘under his lash’ he had ‘thought of nothing but to abuse me’, said Dampier. He implied Whaley was lazy and wont to make merry in town where he had an ‘ill name’. He also suggested, in a circuitous way, that Whaley was not entirely straight and was putting things in his own name. Dampier may have been right.

Soon he had had enough and was telling Whaley he wanted to leave. Whaley agreed because, according to Dampier, he thought the bumptious upstart would not be able to find any alternative to staying on. He did. He went back to sea.

Despite what Dampier said, Whaley was probably pleased to be shot of the prying and