A Brave Vessel: The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare'sThe Tempest (10 page)

The palmetto palm tree also provided food. The castaways noticed that the wild hogs ate the berries that grew in clumps below the sprays of leaves. They tried them themselves and found them palatable. The base from which the leaves sprouted was found to be edible as well. Each tree yielded a twenty-pound head that could be eaten raw, grilled, or boiled. “Roasting the palmetto or soft top thereof, they had a taste like fried melons, and being sod they eat like cabbages,” Strachey said.

Palmetto berries were not the only succulent treats awaiting the castaways. On exposed parts of the island the castaways found growing among the limestone boulders a cactus with an edible pear. Though one had to be careful getting past the spines of the hull, Strachey said, the reward was a center filled with maroon juice. “A kind of peas of the bigness and shape of a Katherine pear we found growing upon the rocks, full of many sharp subtle pricks (as a thistle) which we therefore called the prickle pear, the outside green but being opened of a deep murrey, full of juice like a mulberry and just of the same substance and taste. We both eat them raw and baked.”

As the voyagers gathered food, they also explored the islands. What they found was a natural fortress that was as easy to defend as it was difficult to approach. Accompanying the discovery that Bermuda was a secure sanctuary, Strachey said, was the confirmation that it was “desolate and not inhabited.” This was not a real surprise, either, given its distance from inhabited lands and its dangerous reputation. Still, in their first weeks after the shipwreck it dawned on the voyagers that they had discovered a well-stocked mid-Atlantic bastion that was theirs for the taking. An historian who wrote about the
Sea Venture
wreck in 1705 bluntly stated the main attraction of the place: “The best of it was, they found plenty of provisions in that island and no Indians to annoy them.”

Yet for all its good points, Bermuda was not quite a paradise. While there were no rival humans to compete with the
Sea Venture
castaways, there were inhabitants of another kind to annoy them. “They were long and slender-leg spiders,” Strachey said, “and whether venomous or no I know not, I believe not, since we should still find them amongst our linen in our chests and drinking cans but we never received any danger from them.” Nathaniel Butler, who would come to Bermuda a few years later, would note that the spiders were so big that they would occasionally catch sparrows in their webs. “They are here of a most pleasing and beautiful aspect, all over as it were decked with silver, gold, and pearl,” Butler said, “and their webs (woven in the summer upon trees) are found to be perfect silk.”

Within days of the wreck the voyagers planted a garden near the camp using English seeds brought in from the
Sea Venture
. Sprouts appeared, Strachey said, but the plants grew no further. “Sir George Somers in the beginning of August squared out a garden by the quarter and sowed muskmelons, peas, onions, radishes, lettuce, and many English seeds and kitchen herbs. All which in some ten days did appear above-ground.” Grubs killed the plants, he said. Butler later reported other pests. “The mosquitoes and flies also are somewhat over-busy, with a certain Indian bug called by a Spanish appellation a caca-roach, the which creeping into chests and boxes eat and defile with their dung (and hence their Spanish name) all they meet with.” Summer flies were the closest things to devils on Bermuda, according to an anonymous account by another colonist of a few years later. “Whereas it is reported that this land of the Bermudas with the islands about it (which are many, at the least a hundred) are enchanted and kept with evil and wicked spirits, it is a most idle and false report. God grant that we have brought no wicked spirits with us or that there comes none after us, for we found none so ill as ourselves,” he said. “No, nor any noisome thing or hurtful, more than a poor fly which tarries not above two or three months.”

Even with spiders, cockroaches, mosquitoes, and flies, Bermuda was turning out to be as fine a refuge as anyone on the
Sea Venture
could have imagined. What was thought to be a land of devils and brimstone turned out to be a temperate and angelic place. “My opinion sincerely of this island is,” Jourdain said, “that whereas it hath been and is still accounted the most dangerous, unfortunate, and most forlorn place of the world, it is in truth the richest, healthfulest, and pleasing land (the quantity and bigness thereof considered) and merely natural as ever man set foot upon.”

“I hope to deliver the world from a foul and general error,” Strachey wrote. “It being counted of most that they can be no habitation for men but rather given over to devils and wicked spirits, whereas indeed we find them now by experience to be as habitable and commodious as most countries of the same climate and situation, insomuch as if the entrance into them were as easy as the place itself is contenting it had long ere this been inhabited.”

 

 

Discord among the castaways also made it clear that despite their good fortune the castaways’ situation was less than perfect. On a hot summer day in August a grudge between two sailors flared into a wrestling match in the sand and fellow sailors formed a circle around the fighters. Before Governor Gates or his lieutenants arrived to stop the fight, Robert Waters picked up a shovel and struck his opponent Edward Samuel in the head, instantly killing him. When Gates determined that Samuel was dead, he ordered Waters held and Samuel’s body buried some distance from the camp. Later in the day he held a tribunal before the assembled voyagers, and after hearing testimony he condemned Waters to be hanged the next morning. The prisoner was tied to a tree under guard within sight of the camp.

Waters’s death sentence caused dissension within the
Sea Venture
company for the first time since it had formed in London twelve weeks earlier. Relations had been good during the sail, the fight with the hurricane, and the building of the Bermuda camp. Gates’s decision to condemn Waters to death, however, immediately set him at odds with the mariners of the shipwrecked company. The
Sea Venture
sailors had never expected to be subjected to military control, even the mix of civilian and military authority afforded the governor of the Virginia colony. Their anticipated role had been solely as transport specialists who served at the pleasure of the highest-ranking marine officer. Now unexpectedly marooned in a foreign land they were begrudgingly subject to Gates’s rule. That had been fine during the first two weeks, but now one of their own was condemned to die as the result of a fair fight. They couldn’t watch their shipmate hanged. In the night while Waters’s sentries slept they cut his bonds and took him to a hiding place in the forest.

Strachey learned of the escape with the rest of the camp when a sentry awoke and sounded the alarm. His loyalties and those of the other gentlemen of the company were fully with the governor. To Strachey, Waters’s flight was a grave affront to authority. The conspirators who had cut him free, he said, demonstrated “disdain that justice should be showed upon a sailor, that one of their crew should be an example to others, not taking into consideration the unmanliness of the murder nor the horror of the sin.”

Gates now faced the first open challenge to his authority as leader of the expedition. The split in the company displeased him and he knew that a killer lurking in the woods would have a corrosive effect on morale and discipline. The only way to bring the fugitive in, it seemed, was a major concession to the sailors. Certainly he wanted the matter resolved soon and in a definitive way. Gates sought the counsel of George Somers, who was well positioned to assist. As an educated and wealthy man, the gray-haired admiral had the trust of Gates despite his ties to the sailors. The two men met in a palmetto hut, and after a long talk emerged to announce a solution.

Strachey alone describes the final disposition of the case, and he does so in few words, perhaps because he was a consistent apologist for Gates and thought the outcome did not reflect well on the governor. Waters, Strachey said, “afterward by the mediation of Sir George Somers, upon many conditions, had his trial respited by our governor.” Intervention by the admiral won a sentence reduction that was startling in its leniency—clemency with the only condition being a requirement of good behavior. When Waters returned to the camp to slaps on the back from his compatriots and wary looks from the gentlemen, it was clear to all that Gates had literally allowed a man to get away with murder. Either Somers was a master defender or Gates was an unusually malleable judge. The prevailing opinion of the castaways tended to the latter view. Gates had resolved the murder case, but it came at a high cost to his reputation.

In addition to exposing the leader of the
Sea Venture
company as a vacillating commander, the Waters case served to expose a division within the ranks of the castaways. Governor Gates and Admiral Somers were forced into adversarial roles neither wanted, and the effect of that split would persist. While the negotiation over Waters’s fate was carried out in decorous terms, the talks placed the two leaders and their constituencies in blocs that cut along traditional lines of soldiers and sailors. The fistfight had pitted mariner against mariner, but its resolution had pitted Waters the sailor against Gates the soldier. Despite the outcome in the sailor’s favor, under the leadership of Gates the mariners would continue to perceive themselves as an aggrieved party and would nurse that sense of grievance as time went on.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Had I plantation of this isle.

—Gonzalo,
The Tempest

O
n hot August nights as the fire in the center of the castaways’ camp turned to embers, the
Sea Venture
survivors may have heard what sounded like sprites in the dark. When all was quiet, the distinct calls of thousands of birds could be heard as they flew over the camp. Warblers, thrushes, swallows, plovers, and sandpipers were among the migrants passing over the island each night on long flights from the continent to lands far to the south. Some would rest on Bermuda, and during the day the castaways would occasionally see a flash of color in the brush. Among the migrants, too, were dragonflies that came from the Virginia coast to winter on the mid-Atlantic isle.

As William Strachey had during the weeks on the
Sea Venture
, he spent most of his time on Bermuda among the elite voyagers of the company—Thomas Gates, Reverend Richard Buck, Captain Newport, and Mistress Horton. Within this group Strachey joined in quietly disparaging the laborers and artisans of the company. The lesser sort, he said, were guilty of overharvesting palmetto trees for their berries and cabbagelike heads, even in places where there was no need to clear the land. “Many an ancient burger was therefore heaved at and fell not for his place but for his head, for our common people whose bellies never had ears made it no breach of charity in their hot bloods and tall stomachs to murder thousands of them.”

Many of those whose “bellies never had ears” suffered diarrhea when they gorged on palmetto berries. Luckily, the castaways discovered that another native Bermuda plant offered a cure for the malady they called the flux. The bay grape bears clusters of edible berries among red-veined leaves. Strachey described the grape as “a round blue berry, much eaten by our own people—of a styptic quality and rough taste on the tongue like a sloe—to stay or bind the flux.”

There was another use of the bounty of the palmetto tree that made trips to the privy a little easier to take, though perhaps no less frequent. The castaways missed having alcoholic drinks, and some of the more creative among them tried fermenting the produce of the island as a substitute. The palmetto tree yields a sap that when mixed with water makes a sugary drink. When fermented, it turns to a liquor that was a tolerable alternative to English beer. The settlers took to calling the palmetto drink “bibby” and indulged in it often.

The castaways made a second spirituous liquor from berries of another Bermuda tree. Cedars grew in large groves in the valleys, Strachey said, “the berries whereof our men seething, straining, and letting stand some three or four days made a kind of pleasant drink. These berries are of the same bigness and color of currants, full of little stones and very restringent or hard building.” The berries were eaten raw as well. Jourdain added, “There are an infinite number of cedar trees (the fairest I think in the world) and those bring forth a very sweet berry and wholesome to eat.”

Many other useful plants grew on the island, not all of them native. The Spanish had planted at least three crops that still grew in patches. Jourdain reported that the
Sea Venture
voyagers discovered good quality tobacco, and, while they are not mentioned in the chronicles, olives and pawpaws had been growing on the island for more than a decade. Jourdain also found another potential crop—native mulberries and a new variety of silkworm feeding on the leaves that he hoped might produce threads that could be made into cloth. The find was notable because English explorers were eager to develop a silk industry to replace expensive imports from Asia.

With the addition of plant foods the Bermuda larder was becoming ever more ample, though summer temperatures in the low eighties meant only a small supply of meat could be stored. The
Sea Venture
castaways had only limited opportunity to use the traditional preservation technique of salting. Among the casks rescued from the ship were two or three of brine that could be boiled down to make salt. Gates ordered a salt-boiling operation set up under a palmetto-leaf roof, and, according to Strachey, “kept three or four pots boiling and two or three men attending nothing else in a house (some little distance from his bay).” When the brine in the casks ran out, seawater was used, though because it had a lower salt content it required more boiling and more firewood—a full cord to produce 4.5 bushels of salt. The salt-house fire, a continuously burning signal fire on the beach, and the campfire made woodcutting and log carrying a steady occupation in the
Sea Venture
camp.