William Dampier (c.1651-1715) was a pirate and adventurer who was (albeit for chaotic and unintended reasons) the first man to voyage round the world three times.

A New Voyage Round the World (1697), written from notes kept during his first long voyage, was a literary sensation (inspiring Gulliver's Travels) and the model for all the great British naturalists and explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His many wanderings took him from the Arctic to the South Pacific.

He rescued Alexander Selkirk from his four years in the Juan Fernandez Islands (inspiring Robinson Crusoe). He died back in England, having had one final triumph in successfully piloting a small fleet in the Pacific to capture a treasure-crammed 'Manila Galleon', a Spanish trading ship.

Nicholas Thomas, director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge since 2006, is an anthropologist and historian.

He visited the Pacific Islands first in 1984 to research his PhD thesis on the Marquesas Islands and later worked in Fiji and New Zealand, as well as in many archives and museum collections in Europe, North America, and the Pacific itself.

His books include Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook (2003) and Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire (2010), which was awarded the Wolfson History Prize.