Early Life
Born in East Coker, Somerset and educated at King's School, Bruton, Dampier sailed on two merchant voyages to Newfoundland and Java, before joining the Royal Navy in 1673, taking part in the two battles of Schooneveld in June of that year. His service was cut short by a catastrophic illness, and he returned to England for several months of recuperation. For the next several years he tried his hand at various careers, including plantation managing (in Jamaica) and logging (in Mexico), before he joined another sailing expedition.
Read more about this topic: William Dampier
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever- present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.”
—Muriel Spark (b. 1918)