A Brave Vessel: The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare'sThe Tempest (9 page)

The bay featured a pink sand crescent onto which the longboat and skiff managed to land without upsetting despite the heavy surf. The thirty or so passengers in the boats were left on shore and the ten or so sailors pushed off immediately to pick up more people from the ship. Unsteady on their feet but vastly relieved to be on solid earth, the landing party waded onto the beach. The palm leaves that had been sighted from the ship moved against a dark afternoon sky in the diminishing wind. A heavy growth of vegetation covered the base of the trees. The island was relatively flat. To the south the land rose to a rocky bluff of perhaps thirty feet, and to the north a point of jagged rocks extended a short way into the sea. There was no time to explore at the moment, though, and the voyagers set about collecting firewood in the wet underbrush. A circle of stones was laid on the beach above the high tide mark and wood was propped in the center to make a fire to guide in the returning boats and, perhaps, other ships at sea. Lighting the kindling proved difficult in the damp conditions, but presently a blaze was lit.

A short way into the woods the voyagers chose a campsite and laid a second circle of stones in the center. When it too was filled with wood, they brought an ember from the beach and the upland fire was alight by the time the second load of people arrived. Through the afternoon teams of sailors in the boats rowed at maximum effort, not knowing whether the
Sea Venture
would remain fast in its nook. The ship was three-quarters of a mile off the nearest land, but the campsite up the coast was almost a mile and a half over water from the grounded vessel. The five or so trips to clear the ship required at least seven miles of rowing by teams of sailors who had just endured four days of constant work in the midst of a hurricane. Dusk was falling as the last group came ashore. In accord with maritime tradition, Newport and Somers were the last off the ship. Incredibly, despite the dire situation of just a few hours earlier, no one on the
Sea Venture
had died or even suffered a serious injury during the storm. “By the mercy of God unto us,” Strachey said, “making out our boats, we had ere night brought all our men, women, and children, about the number of one hundred and fifty, safe into the island.”

The sailors kept the watch schedule they had followed on the ship and tended the fires through the night. Since the castaways could not hunt for food until first light, they lay in a circle around the fire under layers of palm fronds. The survivors of the
Sea Venture
had just come through the most exhausting experience of their lives. Despite growling stomachs they closed their eyes, huddled close to one another, and fell into a deep sleep.

CHAPTER SIX

The still-vexed Bermudas.

—Ariel,
The Tempest

 

 

 

O
n the morning of July 29, 1609, sunrise awoke William Strachey to the saturated colors of leaves waving in the fresh breeze of a departed hurricane. What he noticed immediately was the hot and humid air. Sand stuck to his damp face and hands as he raised himself from his sleeping place on the ground. All around him men, women, and children slumbered. The relief of being on land struck him anew as he rediscovered that he was safe after four terror-filled days.

Strachey stood up and walked to a small water barrel at the edge of the campsite and dipped a drink. Being able to quench his thirst was another refreshing change. Soon after arriving on the previous afternoon the first people in camp had dug a shallow well. Heavy rains had soaked the island and it was not necessary to dig deep to find what Strachey called “gushings and soft bubblings.” Everyone in camp had quenched their thirst, and buckets and the barrel had been filled for the next day. Strachey noticed that the water in the well had already drained away during the night. The hole would have to be deepened or an alternative water source found.

After taking a moment in the woods Strachey walked down to the beach. A heavy surf broke on the sand and the sky was clear. He walked on to the point of rocks just north of the camp. From there he could see that the shore formed almost a square corner just north of the camp. The crescent beach where the boats were pulled up extended about eight hundred feet to the south before merging with a rocky shoreline. To the west the northern coast of the island ran as far as he could see. With the exception of the pinkish sand of the beach, the shoreline was sharp black rock. Foam covered the water as waves crashed down. Palms and cedars lined the shore in both directions.

The beach in front of the camp faced northeast toward England, three thousand miles across the Atlantic, while Virginia lay six hundred miles to the west. Bermuda is an archipelago consisting of one main island and many small ones. The castaways had come to rest at the extreme northeastern point of the archipelago, on the medium-sized island that would later become known as St. George’s. The main land mass lay beyond the castaways’ isle, beginning on the other side of a sheltered bay and extending ten miles to the west in the shape of a giant hook.

Strachey had read about Bermuda in his travel books. The castaways were the only humans there, as the island had never been reached by people from the New World. Europeans had known of Bermuda since 1505, but its dangerous shallows had kept ships at a distance, and it was never occupied. A few had shipwrecked and left their marks, but all had departed after brief stays. What was notable was Bermuda’s reputation as a bewitched place. During the last minutes before the wreck, the sailors of the
Sea Venture
had lamented their fate even as they bailed and pumped to get the ship close to the island. The island, they said, was a place of strange nighttime noises and supernatural storms.

“We found it to be the dangerous and dreaded island, or rather islands, of the Bermuda,” Strachey wrote. “Because they be so terrible to all that ever touched on them, and such tempests, thunders, and other fearful objects are seen and heard about them, that they be called commonly the Devil’s Islands, and are feared and avoided of all sea travelers alive above any other place in the world. Yet it pleased our merciful God to make even this hideous and hated place both the place of our safety and the means of our deliverance.”

Fellow
Sea Venture
passenger Silvester Jourdain would also write of the apprehension of the castaways. Seafarers avoided Bermuda “as they would shun the Devil himself,” Jourdain wrote. “The islands of the Bermudas, as every man knows that has heard or read of them, were never inhabited by any Christian or heathen people, but ever esteemed and reputed a most prodigious and enchanted place, affording nothing but gusts, storms, and foul weather, which made every navigator and mariner to avoid them.”

 

 

A call to gather brought Strachey back to camp. All were now awake, and the
Sea Venture
cook, Thomas Powell, was preparing what little food had been brought from the ship. The castaways had been told to prepare for a meeting with Governor Thomas Gates. Presently the castaways formed a half circle around Gates as he addressed the crowd. The mariners would row back to the ship and retrieve everything they could. As they did that, the passengers would form teams and spread out from the camp in search of food and water. Several leaders were chosen and the voyagers broke into groups and prepared to go in assigned directions.

Strachey joined a team of gentlemen who left the camp and pushed through the underbrush. In his speech Gates had not mentioned the sailors’ stories of enchantment that virtually all the castaways had now heard, but his manner, the bright sunshine, and focused activity had dispelled the apprehensions of most for the moment. The sun rose higher and the day grew even hotter as the moist tropical air the hurricane pulled behind it settled over the island. While the searchers found no brooks or springs, they soon discovered a pond. They waded in and tasted the water and detected no salt. A lack of running water put the body of water in a category Strachey described as “fens, marshes, ditches, muddy pools.” The water tasted good, though, and there was no hint of contamination. As a later settler would note, rainwater percolated through Bermuda’s limestone to produce pond water that “drinks always sweet like milk.” Strachey and his fellows headed back to camp to tell of their find and retrieve buckets to fill.

The sailors had already returned in the longboat and skiff with useful salvage. Live hogs and the few remaining undamaged containers of food and drink were the first things brought to shore. On the first run of the day the mariners had collected equipment that would be of immediate use—guns for hunting, line and nets for fishing, and containers for water. The remainder of the space in the boats was filled with chests, chairs, cooking utensils, rope, and tools. “We saved all our lives and afterwards saved much of our goods, but all our bread was wet and lost,” George Somers said. As the Virginia Company would later report, the salvage crews would eventually strip the ship and leave behind “nothing but bared ribs as a prey unto the ocean.”

Fishing equipment from the
Sea Venture
was immediately prepared for use. A team headed by George Somers waded into the waters off the beach and found them filled with life. Within minutes of dropping lines they were pulling in fish by the dozen. Silvester Jourdain said the castaways found “many kind of fishes and so plentiful thereof that in half an hour he took so many great fishes with hooks as did suffice the whole company one day. And fish is there so abundant that if a man step into the water they will come round about him so that men were fain to get out for fear of biting. These fishes are very fat and sweet.”

By midafternoon teams had beaten a path to the pond and filled every available container. Somers’s men were bringing in scores of fish. The campsite, too, was taking form. The sailors brought in rope and canvas and the voyagers strung sails between trees to serve as awnings. Under one canvas roof near the fire a rude kitchen was set up. The well was dug deeper and was again supplying limited water. Separate privies for men and women were dug and equipped with benches at secluded spots out of sight of the camp.

Toward the end of the day a great fish feast commenced in the camp of the voyagers. Among the species eaten were many of those listed by early settlers as teeming in the island’s waters—rockfish, hogfish, amber-fish, hedgehogfish, cunnyfish, old wives, snappers, groupers, cavallyes, mullets, mackerels, pilchers, and breams. Thomas Powell oversaw the cleaning of the exotic fish and the roasting of them on the campfire. As each came crackling from the flames it was laid on a plate or leaf and passed through the crowd. Deep draughts of fresh water followed. In a few hours the stomachs of the castaways were full.

Surveying the camp during the banquet of strange fish, the survivors of the
Sea Venture
looked around at a tiny village that was well appointed beyond all expectation. The sailors had already brought ashore all manner of goods from the ship, including mattresses and blankets, furniture, and chests filled with personal goods. To have these precious items at hand rather than at the bottom of the sea made their situation relatively comfortable. The castaways marveled at their good luck. Despite the desperate times of the hurricane, the
Sea Venture
’s passengers were indeed fortunate.

 

 

The history of the island as a supernatural land was always at the back of the castaways’ minds, so much so that when they heard rustling in the brush during dinner some surely thought they were hearing one of Bermuda’s fabled devils. The commotion in the underbrush did indeed turn out to be a monster, but a monstrous hog rather than a savage and deformed being. The famished domestic swine from the ship had been allowed to root about loose for food, and their presence had not gone unnoticed. “We had knowledge that there were wild hogs upon the island at first by our own swine preserved from the wreck and brought to shore, for they straying into the woods, a huge wild boar followed down to our quarter,” Strachey said.

The presence of hogs on Bermuda was not a surprise to some among the shipwreck survivors. One of the books Strachey brought on the voyage included an account by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo of an unsuccessful attempt by Juan Bermúdez in 1511 to stock his namesake island with hogs as a mid-Atlantic larder for passing ships. Another Spaniard, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, was apparently successful in a similar attempt in 1563. A Spanish captain who landed on the island in 1603 reported that hogs left by Avilés had prospered. Diego Ramirez found large herds when he paused to repair a damaged ship six years before the
Sea Venture
wreck. The hogs had trod out wide paths to watering holes, and trees along the trails were worn where the animals rubbed their backs against the bark.

After dinner around the campfire the sailors devised a plan to capture the boar. The animal turned out to be remarkably unafraid of humans, Strachey said, and “at night was watched and taken in this sort. One of Sir George Somers’s men went and lay among the swine, when the boar being come and groveled by the sows he put over his hand and rubbed the side gently of the boar, which then lay still, by which means he fastened a rope with a sliding knot to the hind leg and so took him and after him in this sort two or three more.”

During the next two weeks many more hogs were taken and penned in enclosures at the camp. The Bermuda hogs were descendants of wild boars from the forests of Europe, a fierce breed that lacked the docility modern pigs have acquired through selective breeding. Living for generations on an island without predators had dulled their sense of danger, however, and the
Sea Venture
dog proved an efficient hunter. “Our people would go a-hunting with our ship dog,” Strachey said, “and sometimes bring home thirty, sometimes fifty, boars, sows, and pigs in a week alive.”

The fauna of Bermuda was proving useful, as was the flora. The leaves of the palmetto trees around the camp were the first plants used by the voyagers. The fan leaves spanned up to ten feet in width and breadth. Within two weeks of landing several castaways had constructed huts of wood frames covered with leaves. The individual structures provided privacy at family campsites around the main camp. “With these leaves we thatched our cabins,” Strachey said. “So broad are the leaves, as an Italian
umbrello,
a man may well defend his whole body under one of them from the greatest storm rain that falls. For they being stiff and smooth as if so many flags were knit together the rain easily slideth off.”