Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Pirate Who Stole Scotland: William Dampier and the Creation of the United Kingdom

The Pirate Who Stole Scotland: William Dampier and the Creation of the United Kingdom

Hopkins, Leon

Hardcover

Historical FiguresBritish History

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1399093649
ISBN13: 9781399093644
Publisher: Pen & Sword History
Published: Jan 19 2023
Pages: 256
Weight: 1.23
Height: 0.99 Width: 6.47 Depth: 9.45
Language: English
...Leon Hopkin's admirable book exhumes a fascinating, largely forgotten story. It is an excellent contribution to maritime history literature. -- The Northern Mariner

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.

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