Lionel Wafer (1640–1705) was a Welsh explorer,

buccaneer Buccaneers were a kind of privateers or free sailors particular to the Caribbean Sea during the 17th and 18th centuries. First established on northern Hispaniola as early as 1625, their heyday was from the Restoration in 1660 until about 168 ...

and

privateer A privateer is a private person or ship that engages in maritime warfare under a commission of war. Since robbery under arms was a common aspect of seaborne trade, until the early 19th century all merchant ships carried arms. A sovereign or deleg ...

. A

ship's surgeon A naval surgeon, or less commonly ship's doctor, is the person responsible for the health of the ship's company aboard a warship. The term appears often in reference to Royal Navy's medical personnel during the Age of Sail. Ancient uses Special ...

, Wafer made several voyages to the

South Seas Today the term South Seas, or South Sea, is used in several contexts. Most commonly it refers to the portion of the Pacific Ocean south of the equator. In 1513, when Spanish conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa coined the term ''Mar del Sur'', ...

and visited

Maritime Southeast Asia Maritime Southeast Asia comprises the countries of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and East Timor. Maritime Southeast Asia is sometimes also referred to as Island Southeast Asia, Insular Southeast Asia or Oceanic Sout ...

in 1676. In 1679 he sailed again as a surgeon, soon after settling in Jamaica to practise his profession. In 1680, Wafer was recruited by buccaneer Edmund Cooke to join a privateering venture under the leadership of Captain

Bartholomew Sharp Bartholomew Sharp (c. 1650 – 29 October 1702) was an English buccaneer and privateer. His career of piracy lasted seven years (1675–1682). In the Caribbean he took several ships, and raided the Gulf of Honduras and Portobelo. He took command ...

, where he met

William Dampier William Dampier (baptised 5 September 1651; died March 1715) was an English explorer, pirate, privateer, navigator, and naturalist who became the first Englishman to explore parts of what is today Australia, and the first person to circumnav ...

at Cartagena. After being injured during an overland journey, Wafer was left behind with four others in the

Isthmus of Darien An isthmus (; ; ) is a narrow piece of land connecting two larger areas across an expanse of water by which they are otherwise separated. A tombolo is an isthmus that consists of a spit or bar, and a strait is the sea counterpart of an isthmus ...

in Panama, where he stayed with the

Cuna Indians The Guna, are an Indigenous people of Panama and Colombia. In the Guna language, they call themselves ''Dule'' or ''Tule'', meaning "people", and the name of the language is ''Dulegaya'', literally "people-mouth". The term was in the language ...

. He gathered information about their culture, including their shamanism and a short vocabulary of their language. He studied the natural history of the isthmus. The following year, Wafer left the Indians promising to return and marry the chief's sister and bring back dogs from England. He fooled the buccaneers at first as he was dressed as an Indian, wearing body-paint and ornamented with a nose-ring. It took them some time to recognise him. Wafer reunited with Dampier, and after privateering with him on the

Spanish Main During the Spanish colonization of America, the Spanish Main was the collective term for the parts of the Spanish Empire that were on the mainland of the Americas and had coastlines on the Caribbean Sea or Gulf of Mexico. The term was used to di ...

until 1688, he settled in

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania#Municipalities, largest city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the List of United States cities by population, sixth-largest city i ...

. By 1690 Wafer was back in England and in 1695 he published ''A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America'', which described his adventures. It was translated into French (1706), German (1759), and Swedish (1789). The Darien Company hired him as an adviser when it was planning its settlement on the isthmus in 1698. He died in London in 1705.

References

* ''A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America'', Lionel Wafer. Edited by L.E. Elliott Joyce (Oxford: Hakluyt Society, 1933). Excerpt from the
1729 Knapton edition

by Cindy Vallar, about Lionel Wafer's and William Dampier's common adventures.

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Wafer, Lionel 1640 births 1705 deaths 17th-century explorers British privateers Explorers of Central America Welsh explorers