About this Text
A New Voyage Round the World by William Dampier is part of the trend of autobiographical travel narratives. Dampier moves across the globe, departing from England and making his way down to South America. He spends much of his time in this part of the world, visiting places like Panama, Chile, and Mexico. He eventually moves on and visits the East Indies and the Philippines. Finally, he ends back in Europe (Dampier, 1697).
Dampier has been called “the most popular and influential travel account of the first half of the eighteenth century” (Thell, 2013, 29). He recounts 12 years of voyages, many of which were spent with his fleet of privateer colleagues, but near the end he branched off and finished on his own. When Dampier is not telling his travel story, he is providing the reader with his observations about the places, plants, animals, and peoples he meets. In current scholarship, there has not been a strong connection made between Robinson Crusoe and A New Voyage Round the World. Some critics, such as Jane H. Jack, note that they are both interesting in different ways (1961), but this does not amount to a substantial comparison between the two texts.
The edition that was used in the mapping process of this project was from A Project Gutenberg of Australia. Although this is by no means the authoritative edition of the novel, I needed a clean txt file in order to perform the computations.
