A Voyage to New Holland, Etc. in the Year 1699

William Dampier was not your typical explorer. A former buccaneer turned naturalist, he brought a pirate's ruthlessness and a scientist's curiosity to his voyages across the globe. This is his own account of the 1699-1701 expedition aboard the Roebuck, when he became the first Englishman to map significant stretches of Australia's mysterious coastline , then known as New Holland. Here, with a seaman's blunt eye and a naturalist's insatiable wonder, Dampier records everything: the bizarre wildlife that seemed to belong to another world, the Aboriginal peoples he encountered, the treacherous waters that would later claim his ship. His prose crackles with the thrill of being among the first English eyes to witness a continent no European had properly documented. The result is part adventure narrative, part early scientific treatise, part ethnographic record , an extraordinary time capsule from an age when vast portions of the globe remained blank on European maps.