The centuries between Drake and Cook were the centuries from privateers to navy. Midways, William Dampier visited Australia twice, once buccanneer in the Cygnet and once commander of the HMS Roebuck, where he made landfall on 6 August 1699.
Dampier made money from his travel by writing, an effort noted by Dean Swift at the outset of Gulliver’s Travels. His writing gives him over one thousand references in the Oxford English Dictionary. Here are three “Dampier firsts”:
First OED entry for chopsticks, “At their ordinary eating… they use two small round sticks about the length and bigness of a Tobacco-pipe. They hold them both in the right hand, one between the fore-finger and thumb; the other between the middle-finger and the fore-finger… They are called by the English Seamen Chopsticks.”
First OED entry for barbecue, “And lay there all night, upon our Barbecu’s, or frames of Sticks, raised about 3 foot from the Ground.”
First OED entry for typhoon, kind of. The word “typhoon” has two origins. One from Urdu and ultimately drawing on the Arabic word meaning “to turn around”, which has been used particularly for Indian tempests. And one from Chinese, being “big wind”, used to descript the cyclonic tempests of the China seas. The English use of the first dated from 1588, while in 1699, Dampier was the first to describe the second.
Dampier also provided the first English-language recipe for guacamole. In Panama, he observed fruit “as big as a large lemon … [having] skin [of] black bark, and pretty smooth” which when ripened was “mixed with sugar and lime juice and beaten together [on] a plate.”
