The Woodes Rogers voyage was exceptional; as Campbell wrote thirty years later, ‘there never was any Voyage of this nature so happily adjusted, so well provided for in all respects, or in which Accidents, that usually happen in Privateers, were so effectually guarded against’. It was conceived by Bristol merchants, ship owners and shipbuilders, some with dissenting sympathies, and carried through with a mercantile zeal for proper procedure and accounting. It brought back a Manila galleon – a feat unequalled before or since – accumulated more prize than any previous such expedition except that of Drake, and it did so without the loss of one of its ships. Its crew losses were also modest in comparison with the other cruising voyages and with those of Drake or Anson. Finally, despite much argument and recourse to law on the part of the owners, officers and crew and despite a very long delay, an equitable distribution of the prize was achieved.

Origins

The expedition set out from Bristol in August 1708 under the leadership of Woodes Rogers, the ‘Commander-in-Chief’ (the title may have been his own coinage for there is no mention of it in the owners’ orders). Rogers was from a respectable seafaring family hailing from Poole in Dorset. G.E. Manwaring, in his introduction to the 1928 edition of A Cruising Voyage, suggests that Rogers may have been the ‘worthy friend … Captain Rogers’ who had supplied Dampier with an account of the trade winds from the Cape of Good Hope to the Red Sea. The dates make this unlikely (Rogers was 20 at the time Dampier's Discourse of Trade Winds was published in 1699) and there were a number of other seafaring Rogers (including Woodes's father, also called Woodes) to whom these comments might have referred. Francis Rogers, a major shareholder and ship's husband for the expedition, had business connections with Woodes – Woodes senior had been joint owner with Francis of the ‘Delavall privateer’ in 1693 – but there is no evidence that he was a relation.