Thomas Dover and the South Sea Company.

It is well known that Thomas Dover's career was one of the most colourful and varied of any British medical practitioner. He has been described erroneously as a "buccaneer",' a "mountebank"2 and a "pirate on the Spanish Main" :" all these labels do him ill justice and ignore the temper of his times. More accurately, he should be regarded as a "physician and merchant adventurer",' although the full extent of his ventures have not been fully revealed by his biographers. In medical circles he is now remembered as a pupil of Thomas Sydenham, and the originator of "Dover's powder", although in his own day, he was better known as the peppery "Quicksilver Doctor" and author of the best-selling remedy book The ancient physician's legacy. But medicine was only one of his claims to notice. As a ship's captain Dover made several voyages to West Africa and the Caribbean in the early days of the slave trade. Later he helped to finance, and played a leading role, in the most successful privateering voyage in British maritime history: it was during this voyage round the world that Dover rescued Alexander Selkirk whose singular adventures, it is said, provided Defoe with the germ of truth which he swelled into the great romance of Robinson Crusoe. Later he sacked and ransomed the main Peruvian port of Guayaquil; but from a historical, rather than a medical point of view, one of the most important interludes in his long life was his pioneering of British commercial interests in South America as the first President of the South Sea Company's "factory" or trading post in Buenos Aires. This hitherto unrecorded dimension of his career will be treated here in some detail as it is based on manuscript material. But to preserve biographical continuity, the rest ofhis life has also been summarized., Thomas Dover had a distinguished though rebellious family history. His greatgrandfather, William Cole, sometime President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, was expelled for his adherence to Protestantism, and thereafter lived in exile translating the Geneva Bible until Elizabeth I came to the throne. He eventually regained his college appointment, only to be dismissed for fraud. His grandfather, Robert Dover, a land-owning lawyer, had achieved local fame as the founder of the Cotswold games held annually in an arena, still known as Dover's Hill, near the old market town of Chipping Campden. JohnDover (the doctor's father) served as a captain of horse under Prince Rupert during the Civil War, and afterwards farmed in melancholy retirement at Barton-on-the-Heath, near Moreton-in-Marsh, where Thomas was born in 1662. We know little of his early life. He probably attended Chipping Campden Grammar School, and in 1680 entered Magdalen Hall, Oxford, as a commoner. It was not a * The Manor House, Sandford-on-Thames, Oxford OX4 4YN. ** Dunstone, Dorrington, Shropshire.