A Brave Vessel: The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare'sThe Tempest (28 page)

Matthew Somers headed for his uncle’s homeport of Lyme Regis in Dorset, far from London and thus insulated from the criticism of the Virginia Company. The timing of the arrival of the
Patience
served the returning colonists well. Word of their return reached London at about the time that the convoy under Thomas Gates departed for Jamestown in the late spring of 1611, and so the perception was that Jamestown would soon be well supplied. They had been correct, too, that most of the discussion surrounding their return would be about the possibility of settling Bermuda rather than about their decision not to return to Virginia.

The body of George Somers was interred in the village of Whitchurch Canonicorum on June 4. John Smith later described the service. “His body by his friends was honorably buried, with many volleys of shot and the rights of a soldier,” Smith said. “And upon his tomb was bestowed this epitaph:

The next month the admiral’s estate was divided among his heirs. After bequests to the poor of Lyme Regis and to servant George Bird, the property of the childless knight was divided between his widow, Joan, and his nephews and nieces. Soon after his funeral, the Reverend William Crashaw published an appreciation of the departed mariner, recalling “Sir George Somers, that famous seaman, our worthy admiral, that true and constant friend to Virginia, who in his old age left a pleasant seat in Dorsetshire, a good living, and an easy life to live and die for the good of Virginia.”

In 1612, Bermuda was renamed the “Somers Islands” in honor of the deceased admiral. The name persisted for a while, often spelled as Summer Isles to emphasize the mild climate, but it never supplanted the name Bermuda. In 1619, Governor Nathaniel Butler ordered a memorial stone installed over the island burial place of Somers’s heart. In the inscription he took the liberty of adding a year to the death date, apparently for rhyming purposes:

Back in England Matthew Somers engaged his aunt in a long legal battle over his uncle’s estate, which ended only with Joan Somers’s death in 1618. Matthew continued his litigious ways in later years—a counterclaim in a future lawsuit alleged that he pursued a “riotous and disorderly course of living.”

 

Soon after returning to Jamestown, Thomas Gates sent his now-motherless daughters home with Christopher Newport on the
Starre
. “He hath sent his daughters back again,” a London official wrote to a colleague in December 1611, “which I doubt not is a piece of prognostication that himself means not to tarry long after.” That assumption proved incorrect, however, and Gates remained in Jamestown for three more years. While Thomas Dale ruthlessly drove his men to build Henrico and Bermuda Hundred, Gates used a lighter hand to develop the original settlement of Jamestown. Among his accomplishments was the construction of a governor’s house with a hearth made of Bermuda limestone from the ballast of the
Deliverance
or the
Patience
. Gates finally returned to England in April 1614. When war between Spain and the Netherlands resumed in 1621 he returned to his command in the Low Countries, dying of fever at Schenck in September 1622.

Joan Pierce, who saw her husband William come back from the dead when the
Sea Venture
survivors arrived in Jamestown, prospered in Virginia. Her husband became a wealthy planter, and together they enjoyed the success all Virginia-bound colonists had hoped to achieve. John Smith reported in 1629 that on a visit to London, Joan Pierce told of her prosperity in the wilderness. “Mistress Pierce, an honest industrious woman, hath been there near twenty years and now returned saith she hath a garden at Jamestown containing three or four acres where in one year she hath gathered near a hundred bushels of excellent figs and that of her own provision she can keep a better house in Virginia than here in London for three or four hundred pounds a year, yet went thither with little or nothing.” The Pierces’ daughter, Joan, married John Rolfe after the death of his second wife, Wahonsonacock’s famous daughter, Pocahontas.

The brief Spanish incursion at Point Comfort in 1611 was a monumental event in the life of English pilot John Clark, who was taken away on the Spanish ship. Clark was kept prisoner in Cuba and Spain until he was exchanged for his counterpart, Diego de Molina, in 1616. Four years after gaining his freedom he sailed to the New World on the
Mayflower
. Also on board the Pilgrims’ ship was Stephen Hopkins, the Bermuda rebel who returned to England soon after reaching Jamestown. Since Clark was a mariner, he returned to England with the
Mayflower
, whereas Hopkins and his family remained in Plymouth to live and die and eventually be revered as Pilgrim founders.

W
hile the seventeenth century passed and the people associated with the
Sea Venture
died off,
The Tempest
of William Shakespeare endured. Characters of the play were given permanent places in the literary universe when in 1851 an astronomer named a newly discovered moon of Uranus after the sprite Ariel. In 1948 a sister moon of the same planet became Miranda. Then when improved telescopes yielded a spate of new discoveries between 1997 and 2001, Uranus was given moons named Caliban, Sycorax, Prospero, Setebos, Stephano, Trinculo, Francisco, and Ferdinand. For all time a celestial blue giant will be circled with the characters of Shakespeare’s otherworldly play.

As
The Tempest
underwent a transformation from popular entertainment to literary masterpiece, scholars began to interpret the work as the playwright’s commentary on the colonial experience. In 1797 an observer first suggested that Shakespeare drew on Virginia travel narratives in writing the
Tempest
. In 1808, Silvester Jourdain was identified as a source, then much later, in 1892, William Strachey’s letter home was proposed to be one as well. In the twentieth century
The Tempest
became firmly established as Shakespeare’s New World play.

Ironically, a direct descendant of William Strachey attempted unsuccessfully to ensure that the play was not placed among the transcendent works of the English language. Literary critic Lytton Strachey’s 1906 article “Shakespeare’s Final Period” declared
The Tempest
a mediocre work. Fourteen years earlier the work of the critic’s ancestor was suggested as a progenitor of the play, though whether Lytton Strachey knew of William Strachey’s apparent influence on the work he was assessing is unknown.

The reading of Shakespeare’s last play as a commentary on Britain’s colonial aspirations reached a peak in the 1960s and 1970s when the attention of critics focused on Caliban as the indigenous person and Prospero as the European oppressor. Leo Marx in his 1964 book
The Machine in the Garden
crystallized the concept of the
Tempest
as “a prologue to American literature.” During the final twenty years of the century a new line of inquiry reemphasized the play’s classical roots. Critics began to argue that the colonial interpretation imposes a modern viewpoint on to a historical text, rendering Prospero’s island “a kaleidoscope” or “a complex Rorschach blot that exposes its observers’ habitual presuppositions.” Yet in the twenty-first century the colonial reading remains firmly embedded in
Tempest
scholarship and in the costumes and manners of
Tempest
characters onstage.

Also in the twentieth century a controversy about Shakespeare’s identity found new life. The lack of copious documentation of the playwright’s life long ago led to the suggestion that someone other than William Shakespeare authored the plays attributed to him. The leading candidate as an alternate author is Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford. Proponents of that theory, however, must overcome the obstacle that de Vere died in 1604, five years before the
Sea Venture
wrecked on Bermuda. Consequently, advocates of de Vere are in the position of either denying that
The Tempest
was inspired by the Bermuda chronicles or denying that the play was written by “Shakespeare” (both approaches have been attempted). Despite the arguments of de Vere supporters, mainstream Shakespeare scholars remain convinced that the best interpretation of the documentary record is that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, the King’s Men actor, was the author of the plays.

The work of William Strachey attracted new attention in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well. The comprehensive history of Virginia that Strachey wrote (and to a large extent copied from John Smith) after returning to England was finally published after more than two centuries in 1849 as
The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia
. Fifty years after that his
True Reportory
was reprinted in a 1907 edition of
Purchas His Pilgrimes
, and scholars began to recognize Strachey’s importance as an observer of colonial life. While
Historie of Travaile
owes much to John Smith,
True Reportory
is largely original and has earned its author a reputation as an unflinching observer (despite his bias in favor of colonial leaders). One modern scholar calls
True Reportory
“magnificent—it has some sentences which for imagination and pathetic beauty, for vivid implications of appalling danger and disaster, can hardly be surpassed in the whole range of English prose.” Another designates it “one of the finest pieces—clear, specific, descriptive, critical—in the literature of the whole period of seventeenth-century American enterprise.” Strachey is said to be “notably good as an interpreter of Indian life, being both shrewd and sympathetic in his comments.” His original dictionary of the Powhatan language included in
Historie of Travaile
has particular importance: “The large Strachey vocabulary of Powhatan Indian words—with six times as many as are to be found in Smith’s writings—is invaluable for modern students of Algonkian languages.”

The stories that Strachey and his fellow
Sea Venture
chroniclers told inspired writers and artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, just as they did those of the seventeenth. In 1840 Washington Irving wrote two essays on the wreck, noting that his interest was especially drawn to the founding of the Bermuda islands because he “could trace, in their early history, and in the superstitious notions connected with them, some of the elements of Shakespeare’s wild and beautiful drama of
The Tempest
.” Irving unfortunately slipped once and identified the wrecked ship as the “
Sea Vulture
” and made the exaggerated claim that a “bitter feud” on the island resulted in “a complete schism” between Gates and Somers. The Irving essays are best known for their depiction of the men Matthew Somers left behind as “the three kings of Bermuda.”

Rudyard Kipling learned of Shakespeare’s connection to Bermuda when he took a cruise to the island in 1894. In 1896 he wrote a letter to the editor of the
Spectator
suggesting that the playwright might have overheard the
Sea Venture
story from a sailor in a London tavern. Kipling believed that the wind in the Bermuda coral caused the strange sounds of Prospero’s island and a particular cave on the shore near Hamilton was a likely model for the magician’s cell. Kipling went on to imagine that a castaway taking refuge under the ribcage of a whale skeleton inspired the scene of Trinculo hiding under Caliban’s cloak. Thirty-four years later Kipling incorporated his ideas into a poem entitled “The Coiner.” In it he pictured Shakespeare meeting
Sea Venture
sailors at a tavern in 1611 and hearing about the Bermuda shipwreck. Shakespeare buys them drinks to keep them talking about their “seven months among mermaids and devils and sprites, and voices that howl in the cedars o’ nights.” The sailors eventually fall asleep and awake the next morning to find that coins had been left in their pockets. They congratulate themselves on their luck, without realizing that Shakespeare—the “coiner” of the title—got the better of the deal by acquiring a story he would turn to gold on the London stage.

The
Sea Venture
and
The Tempest
bewitched another twentieth-century literary great as well. In 1924 James Joyce mentioned both in his monumental novel
Ulysses
. Episode Nine of the stream-of-consciousness work is thick with allusions to Shakespeare and includes the following line: “The
Sea Venture
comes home from Bermudas and the play Renan admired is written with Patsy Caliban, our American cousin.” Joyce was referring to Ernest Renan, who wrote
Tempest
criticism.
Our American Cousin
was a nineteenth-century work of the American theater, but the play lacks a character named Patsy and Joyce’s reason for joining it to the name of Shakespeare’s servant monster remains obscure.

Novelist Cothburn O’Neal also discovered the story of William Strachey and
The Tempest
and in 1954 turned it into his novel
The Dark Lady
. In a riff on the authorship question, the story features the fictional Rosaline, an illegitimate daughter of Edward de Vere, who is pretending to be a man playing women on the Jacobean stage. Rosaline is also the true author of London’s most popular plays, which she publishes with the cooperation of a King’s Men actor named William Shakespeare. Rosaline, who has a daughter named Miranda, is the “Excellent Lady” who receives Strachey’s letter from Jamestown. When King James discovers that she is the secret author of Shakespeare’s work he forbids her to write any more plays. The novel ends when the inexplicably blond-haired Strachey, conveniently widowed after the death of his wife, Frances, offers to take her away to Bermuda.