Navigator depicted as missing the mark

Poor old William Dampier is better known in Australia than here, although not necessarily for the right reasons.

He was the first man to circumnavigate the planet three times, inspiring Captain Cook and Admiral Nelson with his seamanship.

He also made a useful contribution by adding New Britain to Europe's maps of the Pacific, and his scientific contributions influenced the work of Charles Darwin and Alexander von Humbolt, as well as the writer Jonathan Swift.

But, if remembered at all nowadays, Dampier is recalled for his famous description of Aborigines as "the miserablest People in the World", almost always mentioned in unfavourable comparison to Captain James Cook's "these people may truly be said to be in the pure state of nature, and may appear to some to be the most wretched upon the earth; but in reality they are far happier than ...we Europeans".

In fact, Dampier might be described as the "Captain No". As Adrian Mitchell says, "the whole of Dampier's encounter with New Holland is characterised by negatives - by remoteness, by vacancy, by insufficiency; by indefinition".

Dampier's famous Roebuck expedition of 1699 haunted him for the rest of his life. He had left behind his privateering roots and risen to the distinction of a captain of the Royal Navy. But the ship ran aground, and although many of his charts, notes and specimens were saved, he was court-martialled for cruelty to a crewman. Like the later Bligh, Dampier had a sharp tongue and was sensitive about his status and rights to places such as the quarterdeck.

Inspired by scholar Greg Dening's treatment of shipboard spaces as places of theatre and conflict, Mitchell analyses the exchanges that led to Dampier's dumping by the navy.

Dampier rounded the world twice more, but as a privateer, always overshadowed by his past. In Mitchell's view he was "left an elderly navigator who did not always recognise his sea-marks and occasionally found himself out in his calculations, uncertain of his place and, perhaps, of his inner soundings".

This is a scholarly work. It is fully annotated and thoroughly indexed.

Although written in a more reader-friendly way than many works of textual analysis, its bulk (550 pages, 300 of which publish Dampier's journal for the first time) and content may appeal more to the specialist reader.

• Gavin McLean is a Wellington historian.