HMS Roebuck was a fifth-rate warship in the Royal Navy which, under the command of William Dampier, carried the first British scientific expedition to Australia in 1699. The wreck of the ship has since been located by a team from the Western Australian Maritime Museum at a site on the coast of Ascension Island where it foundered more than 300 years ago.
Arrival of Roebuck in Shark Bay, from a painting by John Charles Allcot (1925)
William Dampier, Roebuck's captain, tasked with surveying the coast of New Holland, by Thomas Murray. National Portrait Gallery, London.
Ascension Island, as Dampier would have seen it, approaching from the south in Roebuck
Clarence Bay, Ascension Island, where the wreck of Roebuck was discovered in 2001
William Dampier was an English explorer, pirate, privateer, navigator, and naturalist who became the first Englishman to explore parts of what is today Australia, and the first person to circumnavigate the world three times. He has also been described as Australia's first natural historian, as well as one of the most important British explorers of the period between Sir Francis Drake and Captain James Cook ; he "bridged those two eras" with a mix of piratical derring-do of the former and scientific inquiry of the latter. His expeditions were among the first to identify and name a number of plants, animals, foods, and cooking techniques for a European audience, being among the first English writers to use words such as avocado, barbecue, and chopsticks. In describing the preparation of avocados, he was the first European to describe the making of guacamole, named the breadfruit plant, and made frequent documentation of the taste of numerous foods foreign to the European palate at the time, such as flamingo and manatee.
Portrait of Dampier holding his book, a painting by Thomas Murray (c. 1697–1698)
Giolo (Jeoly) of Miangas, who became a slave in Mindanao, and bought by William Dampier together with Jeoly's mother, who died at sea. Jeoly was exhibited in London in 1691 to large crowds as a sideshow, until he died of smallpox three months later.
Australian plant life from Dampier's A Voyage to New Holland, published in 1703.
Engraving of Dampier's encounter with the storm off Aceh, in modern-day Indonesia, by Caspar Luyken.
