William Dampier--the surname, like so many in England, is of French origin--was born, the son of a farmer, at East Coker, near Yeovil, in the south of Somersetshire. His attention no doubt was directed to a seafaring life by the constant intercourse which at that time went on between Yeovil and Weymouth; and when Dampier was about seventeen years old, at his own desire he was apprenticed to the master of a ship at Weymouth, with whom he made a voyage to Newfoundland. But the cold experienced in this voyage so disgusted him that he managed to get his indentures cancelled, and in 1671 engaged himself as an able seaman on a great vessel of the East India Company which was leaving England for Java. He soon returned from the Malay Archipelago, however, and enlisted on board a ship of the British navy, in which he took a small part in the naval war with Holland. Then he was sent out to Jamaica as a plantation manager by the lord of the manor of East Coker (the village in which he was born). Except for a brief visit to England in 1678, when his marriage took place, he lived chiefly in the West Indies and on the coast of Central America. He had soon left the work on a plantation to join the buccaneers, or English, French, and Dutch pirates, who were attempting to break down the supremacy of Spain in the waters of the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico. With a party of these buccaneers he established himself on the coast of Yucatan to cut log-wood, and after his return to and residence in England between 1675-9 he came back to the neighbourhood of what is now British Honduras. Together with a party of buccaneers he crossed the Isthmus of Panama, and, reaching the Pacific littoral, embarked in Indian canoes. And in these they ranged up and down the coast of Central and South America, attacking Spanish towns and shipping. Apparently they must have captured from the Spaniards something more serviceable for ocean traffic than Indian dug-out canoes, because in 1680 they voyaged across the Pacific as far as the lonely island of Juan Fernandez, on which Alexander Selkirk was afterwards stranded by an English buccaneering captain. Some of his adventures in this direction will be described in another volume of the present series dealing with that region. The success of these bold pirates in capturing Spanish treasure ships and seizing Spanish towns on the coasts of Mexico and Peru, and holding them to ransom, was so great that they decided to return in force and renew their operations to the west coast of South America. Thus with bigger ships they passed through the Straits of Magellan and navigated the Pacific Ocean unopposed.