Existing comment:
Woodes Rogers
Woodes Rogers was an English privateer, although the Spanish considered him a "pirate". Between the years 1708 and 1711, he -- along with William Dampier as navigator -- circumnavigated the world, harassing Spanish shipping.
So successful was this voyage that Rogers wrote of it in his 1712 volume titled "A Cruising Voyage Round the World: First to the South Seas, Thence to the East Indies, and Homeward by the Cape of Good Hope... Containing a Journal of All the Remarkable Transactions... An Account of Alexander Selkirk's Living Alone Four Years and Four Months on an Island." The book, which chronicled the rescue of Alexander Selkirk, became the inspirational source for Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe".
The irony in Rogers' life was that he became Governor of the Bahamas in 1718. Muck like the infamous buccaneer Henry Morgan -- who became governor of Jamaica -- he was commissioned to break up the pirate nests in and around the Bahamian archipelago. |