DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "A Continuation of a Voyage to New Holland, Etc. in the Year 1699" by William Dampier. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
Economic warfare is not a new phenomenon. In the protectionist climate of the seventeenth century, trade embargoes, exclusions and boycotts were common. England was among the most active nations when it came to using economic clout to get its own way. It did so to force Scotland to accept an Act of Union: to submerge its independence within a United Kingdom governed from London. Instrumental in this attack upon the Scots was William Dampier, the principal subject of this book. He was an extraordinary man. A farmer’s son, he became the most traveled man of his generation. He was a pirate, a brute and a devious sociopath. But he was also a scientist and a talented writer who gave his readers accurate descriptions of previously unknown places, peoples, plants and animals. He was a daring explorer and an expert navigator who mapped coastlines and logged wind patterns and ocean currents. He led the first Royal Navy expedition to Australia, over 70 years before Captain Cook’s arrival. Dampier’s writing made him famous, but not rich. It allowed him to rub shoulders with the leading men of his day; scientists such as Robert Hooke, Edmund Halley and Hans Sloane, businessmen such as Sir John Houblon (first governor of the Bank of England) and William Paterson, politicians such as James Vernon and Charles Montagu (first Earl of Halifax), and Admiralty men such as Admiral Sir George Rooke and Samuel Pepys. And Dampier was in the pay of the English Government; an agent known to Queen Anne, in which capacity he engineered a financial disaster and political drubbing for Scotland.
Imaginative and cerebral, this volume recounts the fantastic history of the antipodes—namely Australia and New Zealand—from the Western perspective over the course of the past five millennia. Tracing the fiction underlying the fact in the tales of, among others, Marco Polo, John Mandeville, and Thomas More, this remarkable compilation explores the imagination of travelers, writers, map-makers, charlatans, and rogues who dreamed of other worlds. Delving into the Australian character and the New Zealand psyche, this account also conveys an insightful glimpse into Western history.
Jonathan Swift's moral and political satires astonished his contemporaries and still have the power to disturb, with their compelling images and unsettling turns of argument, and to delight, with their charm and inventive wit. A Preface to Swift examines the complex appeal of this fierce critic of oppression. While thematically arranged, the text follows a broadly chronological account of Swift's life to show his development as a writer from the prolific and inventive iconoclast to the mature satirist whose enduring memory of past events produced warm friendship as well as strong resentment. It considers in detail his engagement with the corruption of over-secure politicians and his opposition to the easy rationalism of free-thinking pundits. Gulliver's Travels is shown to be a coherent critique of eighteenth-century ideas of science, education and politics in which the order of the books ('the progress of the fable') is highly significant for its whole meaning. While this is a major focus, Keith Crook also discusses a wide range of Swift's other works, including his early satires, his political writings, his poems and his letters. Detailed chronological charts place his life and works in the political and cultural context, and illustrations have been chosen with commentaries to extend the reader's sense of Swift's connections with London, Ireland and his contemporaries. This will be a particularly useful introduction to students who are studying satire as a genre; the early eighteenth-century literary, scientific, philosophical and political context; the representation of women; the political relation of Ireland to England; and the position of the artist within society, especially in connection with the levers of power.
How much of the folk tales of our ancestors is rooted in fact, and what can they tell us about the future? In today's society it is the written word that holds the authority. We are more likely to trust the words found in a history textbook over the version of history retold by a friend – after all, human memory is unreliable, and how can you be sure your friend hasn't embellished the facts? But before humans were writing down their knowledge, they were passing it on in the form of stories. The Edge of Memory celebrates the predecessor of written information – the spoken word, tales from our ancestors that have been passed down, transmitting knowledge from one generation to the next. Among the most extensive and best-analysed of these stories are from native Australian cultures. These stories conveyed both practical information and recorded history, describing a lost landscape, often featuring tales of flooding and submergence. Folk traditions such as these are increasingly supported by hard science. Geologists are starting to corroborate the tales through study of climatic data, sediments and land forms; the evidence was there in the stories, but until recently, nobody was listening. In this book, Patrick Nunn unravels the importance of these tales, exploring the science behind folk history from around the world – including northwest Europe and India – and what it can tell us about environmental phenomena, from coastal drowning to volcanic eruptions. These stories of real events were handed down the generations over thousands of years, and they have broad implications for our understanding of how human societies have developed through the millennia, and ultimately how we respond collectively to changes in climate, our surroundings and the environment we live in.
