William Dampier was member of a respectable family of Somersetshire, in which county, at East Coker, he was born in 1652. From a lad he had a strong prepossession for the sea. At the age of seventeen he bound himself apprentice to a captain, with whom he made a voyage to Newfoundland, the hardship of which so disgusted him with sea-life, that he returned to his friends in the country. But his old taste revived, and he made a voyage to Java, and afterwards entered the royal service, was in two engagements, and then quitted it on account of ill health. Afterwards he managed an estate in Jamaica, then became a logwood cutter in Campeachy; and during these last modes of life he made acquaintance with some buccaneers. With them he made an expedition to Panama, Peru, and various places in the Pacific, plundering the Spanish settlements. In this piratical and adventurous life he continued from 1680 to 1691; and during these eleven years he and his different companions pursued their buccaneer practices on various parts of the South American coasts, in Mexico, California, in the South Seas, proceeding on to the Phillipine Isles, the coasts of China, Siam, India, the Spice Islands, the Celebes, and so far as the Isle of Timor and New Holland.

However lawless might be the life of Dampier and his comrades, who sometimes amounted to six or seven hundred men, the journal that he kept displays not only a quick and clear observation of all he saw, but a remarkable truth in his accounts of them.