In April 1680, some three hundred English buccaneers crossed the isthmus of Darien, assaulted Panama City, hijacked the four-hundred-ton man-of-war Trinidad, and proceeded to harry Spanish commerce along the west coast of South America. Sacking the embryonic settlements and taking any vessel that hove into view, the self-described “Pack of merry Boys” snapped up prisoners, slaves, and chests of silver coin.
On July 29, 1681, just below the Equator off Peru’s north coast, the pirates captured a small mail boat out of Callao bound for Panama. On board were 40 not wholly courageous crewmen, an 18-year-old girl—“the beautifullest Creature that my Eyes beheld in the South Seas”—and a remarkable document that “describes all the ports, roads, harbours, bayes, sands, rocks, and riseing of the land & instructions how to work a ship into any port or harbour.…” This was, of course, a derrotero, or book of charts and sailing directions, known in England until the early eighteenth century as a “waggoner” after the Dutch cartographer Lucas Janszoon Waghenaer. The Spaniards, we are told, tried to throw the book overboard, and then, when it was wrested from them, burst into tears. The 18-year-old beauty has vanished from history, but the document has survived and is now available in this handsome volume, expertly edited and presented by Derek Howse and Norman Thrower.
There are several accounts of the 1680 Darien adventure; one was published in 1685 as part of Exquemelin’s Bucaniers of America. The editors pieced together the others into an introductory narrative for this volume that sets the stage for the waggoner itself. This consists of 106 sketches of sections of the Pacific coastline from Cape Mendocino, on what was believed to be the island of California, down to Cape Horn, together with facing-page commentary and description by one of the original pirates, Basil Ringrose. Ringrose’s sketches are apparently direct copies of the captured derrotero, while his commentary draws on his own experience as appropriate and translates and interprets Spanish accounts for those places, such as the California and Mexican coasts, he had not visited.
We might ask two questions of this remarkable document and its present reproduction. The editors anticipate the first: what effect did Ringrose’s waggoner have on the English charting of the Americas? Because very few English ships entered the eastern Pacific over the subsequent 50 years, there was little demand for charts—and consequently no evidence that Ringrose’s original copy, nor the several others laboriously made by a Mr. Hack, were ever put to any practical use. Second, does the present reproduction have any value for historians today? The books publicity claims that Ringrose’s waggoner is a “rich source of geographical information with observations on navigational, physical, biological, and cultural features as well as on ethnography, customs, and folklore.” No doubt it is an intriguing artifact of early navigation and geographical observation. But apart from a few off-the-cuff remarks about “friendly Indians” here and there (in one case, near Point Reyes in northern California) and a certain barely concealed envy of all the slaves Ringrose imagines the Spaniards to have, the promised information about “ethnography, customs, and folklore” is scant. Nothing goes beyond the many reports by the Spaniards, who, after all, had already been around these parts for 150 years.
Ringrose makes several quaint remarks about the imperial rivals (especially in those places he never actually saw), cast in seventeenth-century cold war rhetoric. Near Acapulco, he imagines, are “severall nations of Indians who want but Encouragement to cast off the yoake of there tiranicall masters … who have so bauked these poor Innocent people that they dare not think of fredome for fear of greater Thraldome.” Writing about Nicaragua (while in London), Ringrose hopes that word of the Spaniards’ “Insupportable crueltyes to these poor natives … will reach the almightyes ear who will open the heart of a more Christian prince to deliver this people and drive away these Catterpillars [!] from there superbous seats of Lazyness” (pp. 66, 94).
In addition to the introduction, the editors have included a learned note on “geographic and navigational matters” and an appendix containing the 1682 indictment brought in the High Court of the Admiralty against the buccaneer leaders for piracy and murder. This was done at the insistence of the Spanish ambassador in London, who may have been pained by slander as well. Ringrose did not stand trial; his companions were acquitted.
