QUARANTINE BLOG # 152

TEMPEST IN THE ATLANTIC

Today we’ll conclude the story of the founding of Bermuda and the shipwreck of 153 passengers and crew aboard the Sea Venture.  Next Saturday, we’ll tour Old San Juan.

In 1609 William Strachey was a 32 year old, struggling writer in London. A break came when the Virginia Company of London was preparing to launch the Third Supply expedition to their Jamestown colony.  Strachey was appointed chronicler of the New World.

Seven vessels sailed from London to Jamestown. Three men would lead the expedition.  Thomas Gates was the newly appointed governor; George Somers was the fleet admiral; and Christopher Newport was the captain of the Sea Venture. 

Sunday, July 23, 1609, the wind began to pick up, but the little fleet was still together, but the end of the serene sail of the Sea Venture came on the next evening.  A week from Jamestown, rising wind had the sailors working to tie down everything on the ship in preparation for a storm.

The fleet was about to face a kind of storm that few English mariners had seen but many had heard about since Europeans began crossing the Atlantic – a hurricane.  Within an hour the fleet was scattered and each vessel was on its own.

On Tuesday morning July 25, the sailors discovered that the Sea Venture was leaking.  Captain Newport immediately ordered pumping and bailing to begin, while sailors used the most readily available time-tested method – stuffing strips of dried beef into the seams.  Once moistened with seawater the beef expanded and formed an adequate temporary caulking.  But the leaks never stopped.  One hundred men pumped and bailed night and day to keep the ship afloat.

Dawn on Friday July 28, the storm still raged around them after four days.  The flood in the hold continued to gain on the bailers and pumpers.  Strachey wrote in his journal, “It being now the fourth morning, there had been a general determination to have shut up hatches and commending our sinful souls to God, committed the ship to the mercy of the sea.”

Fleet Admiral Somers continued to scan the ocean.  At the crest of a swell he detected a flutter on the horizon.  Above the waves, he saw the tops of palm trees moving in the wind.  The land was almost certainly Bermuda, an island discovered by Spaniard Juan Bermudez in 1505.

Somers knew that the only way to save his passengers was to run toward the land and ground the ship.  If the Sea Venture was pushed on its side, it would break apart in the surf, and most of the exhausted voyagers would drown.  The ship came aground three-quarters of a mile off shore in the only place on the entire coast that was deep enough to allow a large vessel to approach so close!

The sailors quickly put the longboat and a skiff over the side, and filled to capacity, pulled for land.  Five trips later, everyone was on shore.  No one on the Sea Venture had died or even suffered a serious injury.  They were safe.  And no one in the world knew they were there.

The morning of Saturday, July 29, 1609, was the first day on land after four terror-filled days in the hurricane.  If the other ships of the Third Supply had survived the hurricane, they now thought the Sea Venture was at the bottom of the sea.

One month after coming ashore, the voyagers of the Sea Venture began preparations for their own rescue.  Woodcutters selected manageable cedars growing on the island for lumber, gathered wood salvaged from their ship, and began building two boats.

The easy of life on Bermuda allowed at least two people to seek for normalcy.  Thomas Powell, who was George Somers’s cook, began to court one of the few single women on the island, Elizabeth Persons.  Rev. Richard Buck officiated at their wedding.

And on February 11, 1610, Jane and John Rolfe celebrated the birth of their first child.  She was named “Bermuda.”

Two rescue vessels were completed.  The Deliverance was 40 feet long; the Patience was even smaller than the Discovery, 29.  The castaways would soon leave their sanctuary of nine months.  “About ten of the clock, that day being Thursday,” William Strachey wrote in his journal, “we set sail.”  It was May 10, 1610.

Full size replica of the Deliverance in St. George Bermuda.

On May 21 the expedition reached Jamestown.  By William Strachey’s estimate, if the Bermuda castaways had arrived “but four days” later with the preserved food they brought from Bermuda, the 60 Jamestown survivors “had doubtless starved.”

The forces of nature had been working against the success of the colony from the start.  In 1607, the year the first settlers arrived, Virginia began its driest seven-year span in 770 years.  The lack of rain devastated the food and water resources of the settlers and the native Powhatans.  An invading population that could not grow food met a resident people whose crops were failing them.  Jamestown would not be successful until they began to grow tobacco.

To finish our tale of the voyage of Sea Venture let us bring to conclusion, the stories of two of the principals.

Admiral Sir George Somers volunteered to go back to Bermuda to restock Jamestown with food.  Back on Bermuda, he decided to break ties with Jamestown, and finance his own colony, but to honor his word, he and his crew spent six weeks hunting food to take back to Jamestown.  The hunt halted when Somers was taken ill, dying on November 9.

Having seen the desperate straits of Jamestown firsthand, none of the men who had accompanied Somers wanted to return there.  In the spring of 1611 the Patience departed for England.  On April 28,1612, Bermuda’s first appointed governor, Richard Moore, set sail from England with sixty settlers, including his wife and children.  They would be Bermuda’s first official colonists.

William Strachey returned to England from Jamestown in 1611.  In November of that year, all of London was talking about a new play by William Shakespeare.  Watching The Tempest in the Blackfriars Theater, parts of the play were strangely familiar to Strachey.  The opening scene was an eerie reminder of a rain-whipped night two years before.

Strachey had sent his journal ahead to England to his patroness, hoping for publication.  Watching Shakespeare’s characters on stage, it was almost as if the playwright had read his letter and recast his words in the popular play.  William Shakespeare had done just that.  The greatest writer of the English language was a literary pickpocket.

In the years that followed the Sea Venture was lost below the waves. The ship lay untouched until a descendant of a Sea Venture passenger found the historic wreck in 1958.  Artifacts were raised that had not been touched since a tempest-tossed ship ran for the Bermuda shore on July 28, 1609.

In Jamestown, one of the most  archaeological startling finds was a brass signet ring embossed with an eagle.  It had slipped from the hand of William Strachey and into the dust of Virginia.

As Prospero said in The Tempest, “Our revels now are ended.”

👉  Psalm 107:23-31 (King James Version)

They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.

For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof.

They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble.

They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wit's end.

Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distresses.

He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still.

Then are they glad because they be quiet; so he bringeth them unto their desired haven.

Oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness, and for his wonderful works to the children of men!

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