Oceania & Pacific · Modernised and illustrated edition
A Cruising Voyage Round the World
Modernized, illustrated English edition of A Cruising Voyage Round the World by Woodes Rogers (1708-1711).
The corsair who rescued from a desert island the sailor who became the model for Robinson Crusoe.
Read more ↓- about 630 pages
- Paperback
- English
- 18th century
Countries covered: Brazil · Chile · Peru · Ecuador · Colombia · Mexico · Indonesia · South Africa · Argentina · Paraguay · Ireland · Spain · Cape Verde · Guam · St. Helena · Netherlands
About this book
On 2 August 1708, two privateers fitted out by Bristol merchants, the Duke and the Dutchess, leave Kingroad for the South Sea. Woodes Rogers commands them, with William Dampier, a veteran of two voyages round the world, as pilot.
The journal Rogers keeps day by day follows the cruise in all its hardship: councils of war, quarrels among the crew, irons and the lash, storms off Cape Horn, which the expedition rounds by sailing down to 61° 53' south. In February 1709, at Juan Fernández, a man clad in goatskins appears on the shore: Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor alone on the island for four years and four months, whose story would inspire Robinson Crusoe.
Next come the coast of Peru and its prizes, the march on Guayaquil and the negotiation of its ransom with the corregidor, the Galápagos where water is sought in vain, then the long wait off Cape San Lucas, in California, lying in ambush for the Manila galleon. Rogers will pay for it with his own flesh.
Between one fight and the next, the captain describes the countries he passes, from Brazil to Peru, from Guam to Batavia and the Cape. Three years at sea, and this first-hand account from which Defoe would draw his most famous novel.
Product details
- Publisher
- Itinerarium Éditions
- Series
- Oceania & Pacific
- The author
- Woodes Rogers
- Date of the journey
- 1708-1711
- Modern edition by
- Isabelle Perol
- Language
- English
- Format
- Paperback, 6 × 9 in (15.2 × 22.9 cm)
- Pages
- about 630
The author
Woodes Rogers
Woodes Rogers was born around 1679, probably at Poole, into a family of merchant captains, and trained in Bristol as an apprentice seaman from 1697 to 1704. A Bristol shipowner, he turned to privateering during the War of the Spanish Succession and commanded the Duke on the voyage round the world of 1708-1711, on which he rescued Alexander Selkirk, the model for Robinson Crusoe. His journal appeared in London in 1712 as A Cruising Voyage Round the World and made his name. Ruined on his return, he became governor of the Bahamas and drove the pirates out of Nassau, where he died on 15 July 1732.
All books by Woodes Rogers →The journey mapped
In the Same Place, Through the Centuries
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Amédée-François Frézier, Relation du voyage de la mer du Sud aux côtes du Chili et du Pérou (1716)
Three years after Rogers, the military engineer Frézier sets out for the South Sea disguised as a merchant captain.
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Richard Walter, A Voyage Round the World by George Anson (1748)
Thirty years later, Commodore Anson's squadron almost retraces the route of the Duke.
Read a free edition → -
Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Voyage autour du monde par la frégate du roi La Boudeuse et la flûte L'Étoile (1771)
Setting out in 1766 to hand the French settlement on the Falklands over to the Spanish, Bougainville passes through the Strait of Magellan, crosses the Pacific by way of Tahiti, Samoa, the New Hebrides and the Solomons, then…
Read a free edition → -
Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches (1839)
Aboard the Beagle from 1831 to 1836, Darwin in his turn skirts Brazil, touches the Falklands, rounds Cape Horn, stays in Chile and Peru, then spends five weeks in the Galápagos in September 1835, before returning by the Cape.
Read a free edition →
The modern editor
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