A New Voyage Round the World by William Dampier is perhaps the first global cruising guide.
First published in 1697, a modern edition is now available. It's 454 pages, taking on a voyage of 17th-century scientific exploration and piracy.
Dampier was an English privateer, botanist, scientist, and explorer. A prolific journal keeper with a keen eye for observation, he circled the world's oceans three times, describing nearly everything in his wake.
More of a writer than a fighter, Dampier helped give birth to English narrative fiction, inspiring both Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
An early scientific travel writer, Dampier was the first to describe the wildlife and flora of the Galapagos Islands.
Darwin referred to Dampier's journals 150 years later when he made his famous visit.
Dampier also became one of England's most regarded explorers and navigators, visiting Australia nearly 80 years before Cook's famous voyage.
William Dampier did all of this while mixing in a good dose of piracy and government-sanctioned privateering. His description of daily life and action aboard an array of pirate vessels gives a spicy balance to the scientific side of his writings.
I particularly enjoy reading about Dampier's voyages with a modern map at hand, where I can chart latitudes and discover the actual locations he visited.
For example, in chapter 4, Dampier reports that he is on course for John Fernando's Isle. He says the island is in latitude 34° 45' and about 120 leagues from the main. This is the present-day location of Robinson Crusoe Island, it lies in the Juan Fernández Archipelago off the coast of Chile at the latitude noted by Dampier.
He follows with a wonderful description of a Mosquito Indian given the name Will by the English and accidentally marooned on the island three years earlier. Will dresses and survives much as Defoe's fictional character, and when Dampier's two-ship fleet arrives, Will's brother is aboard - his name is Robin.
A New Voyage Round the World contains many more locations that we can chart on today's maps. The book is rich in firsthand observations that have contributed to literature, science, and exploration.
Here's an excerpt where Dampier captures the power of a storm at sea: "The rain poured down as through a sieve. It thundered and lightened prodigiously, and the sea seemed all of a fire about us, for every sea that broke sparkled like lightning. The violent wind raised the sea presently to a great height, and it ran very short, began to break in on our deck. One sea struck away the rails of our head, and our sheet anchor, which was stowed with one fluke or bending of the iron over the ship's gunwale and lashed very well down to the side, was violently washed off and had like to have struck a hole in our bow as it lay beating against it. Then we were forced to put right before the wind to stow our anchor again, which we did with much ado. But afterwards we durst not adventure to bring our ship to the wind again for fear of foundering, for the turning of the ship either to or fro from the wind is dangerous in such violent storms. The fierceness of the weather continued till 4:00 that morning, in which time we did cut away two canoes that were towing. After 4:00 the thunder and the rain abated, and then we saw a corpus sant on our main topmast head, on the very top of the truck of the spindle. This sight rejoiced our men exceedingly, for the height of the storm is commonly over when the corpus sant is seen aloft."
Thinking about cruising around the world? You may want to start your preparations by reading William Dampier's A New Voyage Round the World.