When we think about 17^th and 18th-century pirates, we think about dynamics of accumulation: Plundered ships, colonial violence, commercial aggression, ruthless acquisition. Historians have emphasized the role that piracy played in British expansion in the early eighteenth century, as privateers pursued colonial interests abroad (establishing new trade routes and accosting Spain, for instance). However, pirate literature itself often tells a different story of ominous depletion rather than spectacular gain: death, disappearance, exhaustion, chaos, disappointment, loss.

Dampier’s popular New Voyage (1697) inadvertently diagnoses the entropic nature of this “roving way of life”. Despite his ruthless pragmatism, attempts at commercial and colonial acquisition—both actual and projected—across his nearly 600-page account range from unpleasant to disastrous: we find only a series of macabre futures played out across the Pacific. This catalogue of depletion has an elegiac quality, while also revealing anxieties about the sustainability of commercial and colonial aggregation. In this way, New Voyage constitutes a surprisingly portentous ballast to triumphalist voyage accounts of the period. Indeed, we might take an interpretive cue from Jonathan Swift, whose Travels into Several Remote Nations (1726) reveals the dangers of reading voyage literature—almost always pirate literature—as legitimate history and as ‘natural’ pathway to British modernity.

Anne M. Thell is an Associate Professor of English at the National University of Singapore. Her recent books include the Broadview edition of Cavendish’s Grounds of Natural Philosophy (2020) and Minds in Motion: Imagining Empiricism in Eighteenth-Century British Travel Literature (2017; 2021). She specializes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, with particular interest in the history of science and philosophy, early fiction, early aesthetic discourse, and travel literature. She is now at work on a new book, provisionally titled Cavendish, Romantic: On Writing out of Time.