A Brave Vessel: The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare'sThe Tempest (15 page)

“The thirtieth of March being Friday we towed her out in the morning spring tide from the wharf where she was built, buoying her with four casks in her run only, which opened into the northwest,” Strachey said. “We launched her unrigged to carry her to a little round island lying west-northwest and close aboard to the backside of our island, both nearer the ponds and wells of some freshwater as also from thence to make our way to the sea the better, the channel being there sufficient and deep enough to lead her forth when her masts, sails, and all her trim should be about her.”

The
Deliverance
would remain anchored until the second vessel was ready to depart in convoy to Virginia. With a keel of forty feet and a beam of nineteen the
Deliverance
was a little under half the length of the
Sea Venture
. The new vessel was between seventy and eighty tons burden, which meant it could accommodate just over a quarter of the cargo of the larger vessel. The passenger space tween-decks was only four and a half feet high, though it rose to five at the forecastle. The great cabin at the stern had a relatively commodious six-foot ceiling and was appointed with two windows and a tiny gallery balcony aft. “The most part of her timber was cedar,” Strachey said. “Her beams were all oak of our ruined ship and some planks in her bow of oak.”

Work on the second vessel continued in the coming weeks. The casks of pitch and tar had been spent on sealing
Deliverance
, so Somers’s crew had to improvise even more creatively to caulk their pinnace. The castaways’ luck held still longer when a beachcomber found a large chunk of wax washed up on the sand. Jourdain guessed that the wax had been bound for manufacture when a ship carrying it wrecked, perhaps near Bermuda but maybe somewhere much farther away. In any case, it was heaven sent, for without it the sealing of the second ship with the homemade limestone mix alone would have been questionable at best. “God in the supplying of all our wants beyond all measure showed himself still merciful unto us,” Jourdain said.

At the end of April the second pinnace was pulled from its stocks and floated unrigged. Fewer were on hand at the main-island site to see the second vessel put to sea. Once again a name was chosen that encapsulated the Bermuda experience of the man doing the christening. Somers named the new vessel
Patience
, alluding to the personal resource he had drawn upon most in his days on the
Sea Venture
poop deck and during his mediation between the governor and the mutineers. The
Patience
was towed to the sheltered spot where the
Deliverance
was now almost rigged with sails scavenged from the
Sea Venture
. The second pinnace would be outfitted in the coming days and both would be filled with stores for the weeklong sail together to Jamestown. The
Patience
was even smaller than the
Discovery
, with a keel of twenty-nine feet and a beam of just over fifteen. The entire vessel was made of native wood and, save a single bolt, held together with wooden pegs. Somers had done much of the construction with his own hands.

 

 

The castaways, through their hard work over many months, now had before them new vessels to carry them across the Atlantic. Over the next three weeks while the
Patience
was fitted with sails and guns, the castaways packed the camp and transported loads of food and stores to the pinnaces. They would soon leave their sanctuary of nine months. Many had never left England before boarding the
Sea Venture
. Now they were veterans of sea travel—stormy travel at that—and had many months of wilderness life to their credit. Greater challenges lay ahead. At Jamestown they would be in another wilderness, but in this one they would be under constant challenge from a well-adapted native people. To Machumps, the one Powhatan who would climb aboard one of the two tiny vessels, the trepidation he felt about going to sea again was tempered by the knowledge that after a short time more on the water he would be home.

William Strachey would carry his journal of the storm aboard the
Sea Venture
. At his first opportunity he planned to use it to write a long letter to his prospective patron, the “Excellent Lady”—probably the Countess of Bedford, John Donne’s generous patron whom he hoped to make his own sponsor. Strachey’s writing abilities had not gone unnoticed on Bermuda. He was now well known to Thomas Gates, having made a special effort to serve the governor. He would ride to Jamestown on the
Deliverance
with Gates and continue his Virginia project.

In mid-May Gates ordered a memorial set up near the camp to record the presence of the castaways and leave evidence of an English claim to the island. A cedar was selected near the place George Somers had planted his garden. The top of the tree was lopped off to make it less vulnerable to toppling in the wind. A wooden cross was pegged to the tree. At the center a twelve-penny coin with a portrait of King James was attached, and near that a copper plate with an engraved message in Latin and English:

Another voyager would leave a personal message behind. Shipwright Richard Frobisher carved a message deep into the trunk of a palmetto tree. The words were in Latin, translating to, “There was built in this place a ship of seventy tons burden by Richard Frobisher, which is destined for Virginia, in order that we all might be transported from this place. In the year 1610, May 4th.”

“From this time,” Strachey said, “we only awaited a favorable westerly wind to carry us forth.” In the second week of May the winds turned and the castaways prepared to depart their refuge. At first light on May 10, Somers and some of his men went out in the rowboats and canoes to lay buoys in the narrow channel that led from the little round island to open water. Everyone climbed aboard the two pinnaces, and the sailors went to work. “About ten of the clock, that day being Thursday,” Strachey said, “we set sail.”

CHAPTER TEN

O brave new world.

—Miranda,
The Tempest

 

 

 

B
ringing the pinnaces through Somers Creek to open ocean was a slow process. Men in small craft called out directions to Christopher Newport on the
Deliverance
and George Somers on the
Patience
. To the horror of everyone, the
Deliverance
struck bottom once with an appalling
thump
. The vessel backed off the obstruction easily, however, and upon inspection the coxswain in the skiff reported no visible damage and said that the obstacle was a reef that gave way on impact. “Had it not been a soft rock, by which means she bore it before her and crushed it to pieces,” Strachey said, “God knows we might have been like enough to have returned anew and dwelt there, after ten months of carefulness and great labor, a longer time, but God was more merciful unto us.”

The slow wending through the reefs lasted through the night and into May 11, at which point the vessels made deep water at last. Having left Bermuda in a southeasterly direction, the pinnaces would now round the island to the south and head to Virginia. Left behind was a cemetery of graves. “We buried five of our company, Jeffery Briars, Richard Lewis, William Hitchman, and my goddaughter Bermuda Rolfe, and one untimely Edward Samuel,” Strachey said. Two others who were lost were not included in his list. Henry Paine who had been executed for treason was apparently no longer considered one of “our company.” Strachey also left unexplained the disappearance of Namontack. The Powhatan man was simply gone, and his companion Machumps was leaving Bermuda under suspicion but unprosecuted. Two living men were left behind as well. Robert Waters and his confederate Christopher Carter watched the vessels slowly depart through the reefs. Strachey saw an ironic justice in Waters’s staying behind, as if he had been left to tend the grave of the man he had killed—“the body of the murdered and murderer so dwelling, as prescribed now, together.”

Once out of the shallows the crossing from Bermuda to Virginia was an unexpectedly easy one. The swifter
Deliverance
carrying Gates and Strachey had to trim sail to allow the
Patience
to keep pace. Twice Newport lost sight of Somers and then found him again. On May 17, only a week after leaving Bermuda, the sailors began to see floating leaves and knew that land was close. The vessels were making a respectable sixty-three nautical miles a day. The deep-sea (or dipsey) line measured thirty-seven fathoms on May 18, then nineteen the next day. Strachey reported that two days later the scent of a verdant jungle reached the pinnaces. “The twentieth about midnight we had a marvelous sweet smell from the shore (as from the coast of Spain short of the straits), strong and pleasant, which did not a little glad us.” Perhaps, too, on the midnight approach the foam at the bow of the vessels reflected the glow of the moon. “A well-bowed ship so swiftly presses the water,” John Smith said of such midnight runs, “as that it foams and in the dark night sparkles like fire.”

“In the morning by daybreak (so soon as one might well see from the foretop) one of the sailors cried land,” Strachey said. The well-navigated pinnaces reached the coast as intended at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. Arriving at low tide, the vessels could not fight the current of the rivers flowing out of the bay and so anchored on the morning of May 21 to await the reversal of tide. “About seven of the clock we cast forth an anchor because the tide (by reason of the freshet that set into the bay) made a strong ebb there and the wind was but easy so as not able to stem the tide we proposed to lie at an anchor until the next flood, but the wind coming southwest a loom gale about eleven we set sail again and having got over the bar bore in for the cape.”

As the
Deliverance
and
Patience
came up to Jamestown’s coastal Algernon Fort at Point Comfort, a peninsula thirty-five miles downstream from the colony, the expedition had its first contact with other humans in almost a year. “The one and twentieth being Monday in the morning,” Strachey said, “we came up within two miles of Point Comfort, when the captain of the fort discharged a warning piece at us, whereupon we came to an anchor and sent off our longboat [or rather skiff] to the fort to certify who we were.” As the skiff pulled away from the pinnaces, the passengers and mariners at the rails prepared themselves for reentry into a version of the world they had left behind almost a year earlier on the Plymouth quay. The
Sea Venture
survivors were about to resume their lives in English society—a wilderness form of that world, to be sure, but one that was in contact with the home country. Bermuda was past and some version of a more familiar life lay before them.

Riding before the aromatic Virginia shore, the men and women on the pinnaces had their first look at America. A front of black clouds moved across the bay. Unlike the hurricane that wrecked the
Sea Venture
, this squall could be watched from a sheltered spot on deck in perfect safety. The thunderstorm was a reminder that hazards awaited them in Jamestown. There was time to think about their future in Virginia as rain lashed the vessels. “Being Monday about noon,” Strachey said, “where riding before an Indian town called Kecoughtan, a mighty storm of thunder, lightning, and rain gave us a shrewd and fearful welcome.”

 

The
Sea Venture
castaways had no knowledge that a fort stood at Point Comfort. The advance party from the Bermuda pinnaces approached cautiously to be sure the colony had not fallen to an enemy. George Percy, the acting governor of the English settlement, happened to be at the garrison at the time. The unrecognized sails had been spotted the evening before as they came up the bay. Just as Gates was wary that he might be approaching a colony held by a hostile force, Percy, too, worried that an enemy might be preparing an assault. Jamestown had no reason to expect a visit from two small sailing vessels of unknown origin.

“We espied two pinnaces coming into the bay,” Percy said, “not knowing as yet what they were, but keeping a court of guard and watch all that night. The next morning we espied a boat coming off from one of the pinnaces, so standing upon our guard we hailed them, and understood that Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers were come in these pinnaces which by their great industry they had builded in the Bermudas with the remainder of their wrecked ship and other wood they found in the country. Upon which news we received no small joy, requesting them in the boat to come ashore, the which they refused and returned abroad again for Sir Thomas Gates.”

As the skiff rowed away the men of the fort absorbed the astounding news of the redemption of the
Sea Venture
voyagers. The colonists of Jamestown had long ago concluded that the flagship had broken up or capsized in the hurricane the previous July and that the hundred and fifty-three people aboard were lost. Now, nearly a year later, they reappeared as if by magic. What’s more, among the returning lost souls was the governor of Virginia. This not only produced amazement in the colonists of the fort; it also prompted the soldiers to glance at Percy and wonder who would now be in charge of Jamestown. Those coming from Bermuda had dramatic intelligence to take in, as well. The first bit of welcome news was that all but one of the vessels of their original fleet survived the hurricane. Only the ketch the
Sea Venture
towed at its stern had not made it through the storm. The news of the survival of the rest of the fleet reached the
Deliverance
and the
Patience
with the oarsmen of the returning advance boat, and Gates and his entourage were rowed to the fort in a buoyant mood—a fine humor that would be short-lived.