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

by Hobson Woodward

  Despite the division into two camps, in the early months of 1610 mutinous currents still flowed through the ranks of the castaways. Now that a second vessel was under construction and everyone on the island would be able to leave together, the rebels’ old concerns about abandonment were replaced by an unbridled wish to colonize the island. Among the reluctant workers in Gates’s camp was Stephen Hopkins, the shopkeeper who was serving as Reverend Richard Buck’s assistant. Around the campfire and on work details Hopkins tried to convince his fellows that they were no longer under an obligation to the Virginia Company. The London overseers had promised them safe passage to Jamestown, Hopkins argued, and that promise had been broken when the Sea Venture wrecked. The company had defaulted on the contract and left the people on the ship free to do as they saw fit. Not only were the castaways no longer obliged to the Virginia Company, Hopkins said, but in light of the discovery of the potentially lucrative resources of Bermuda, they had a new obligation to claim Bermuda for the company. Similarly, they owed it to their families to seize the opportunity for enrichment they had discovered by chance and at great risk to their lives.

  Those who heard Hopkins’s whispered urgings around the fire were put in a difficult position. After all, Gates had already made it clear that no talk of altering the course of the expedition would be tolerated. Just by listening to Hopkins they became complicit in his scheme. The traditional punishment for plotting against a commander was death, and while Gates had so far shown restraint, no one knew how long his patience would last. A fear of the consequence of discovery drove Samuel Sharpe and Humphrey Reede to report Hopkins’s activities to Gates, and on January 24 the agitator was put on trial in a hearing called by the tolling of the ship’s bell.

  After testimony against him, Strachey said, Hopkins was “full of sorrow and tears, pleading simplicity and denial.” The accused man had left his wife Mary and children Elizabeth, Constance, and Giles back in the village of Hursley in the Hampshire countryside. The misery his execution would cause them was now the subject on which Hopkins focused his impressive rhetorical skills. Strachey was one of those who was moved enough to appeal to Gates for leniency. “So penitent he was and made so much moan alleging the ruin of his wife and children in this his trespass, as it wrought in the hearts of all the better sort of the company who therefore with humble entreaties and earnest supplications went unto our governor whom they besought (as likewise did Captain Newport and myself) and never left him until we had got his pardon.” Gates was indeed proving to be a pliant leader, now tolerating a murder and two mutinies without imposing harsh punishment.

  After the turmoil of the second mutiny trial, the attention of the castaways was turned in a new direction with the impending birth of the first native Bermudian. The wife of voyager John Rolfe was nine months pregnant and expected to deliver a child soon. A palmetto tent was prepared for Goodwife Rolfe by the other married women of the camp, including Mistress Horton, the just-married Elizabeth Persons Powell, and the wife of Edward Eason, who was herself seven months pregnant. A mattress was laid on a Bermuda-built bed for Goody Rolfe’s benefit. At the base of the bed a stool was set for the woman who would act as midwife. Just outside the entrance a fire was kept burning.

  At the first pangs of labor, Goody Rolfe sent for her attendants. As a seventeenth-century childbirth manual advised, “the time of delivery being at hand, they must prepare themselves as followeth, which is forthwith to send for their midwife and keeper, being far better to have them too soon than too late.” As early labor progressed, Rolfe was encouraged to walk slowly around the clearing to hasten the process. The traditional labor-time nourishments of separate cups of broth and egg yolk (in this case perhaps from one of the first cahow eggs of the season) were offered to her.

  As labor progressed and Rolfe was put to bed, one of the attendants may have followed the traditional method of assisting the birth: “Sometimes the midwife, etc., may gently press the upper parts of the belly, and by degrees stroke the child downward, the which pressing down with discretion will hasten and facilitate the delivery.” In the wilds of Bermuda not all the traditional remedies of a well-stocked midwife’s cabinet were available. The women attending Rolfe likely had no oils of lilies, violets, or roses to use as balms. Surely they did not have ingredients for one traditional mix often prescribed to hasten labor: white wine, mistletoe, and mummy (the dried flesh of mummies—purported to be Egyptian but often domestic and of a more recent vintage—ground fine and sold as medicine).

  At the height of labor, one of the attendants surely held Rolfe’s hand as others encouraged her to push. The midwife was advised “to give her women good encouragement, desiring them to hold in their breath by stopping their mouths, and to strain downward.” When the child finally arrived she was found to be a girl. The cord was cut—close, rather than long for a boy, according to tradition—and a cloth compress was tied around the infant’s stomach to protect the cord stump while it was still attached. Rather than the traditional scenting of the compress with oil of roses, Rolfe’s attendants may have initiated a tradition that would persist on Bermuda, the use of a potpourri compress of cedar sawdust on the navel of the newborn. “The child being thus anointed, shifted, and well dried and wrapped up, there must be given to it some small quality of wine mixed with sugar,” the contemporary childbirth manual says. On Bermuda a spoonful of palmetto bibby may have been the first thing the baby tasted.

  The infant girl was baptized soon after birth. Mistress Horton served as a witness at the ceremony. “The eleventh of February we had the child of one John Rolfe christened, a daughter,” William Strachey said, “to which Captain Newport and myself were witnesses, and the aforesaid Mistress Horton, and we named it Bermuda.” Bermuda Rolfe’s legal status as an Englishwoman was arguably in question. The Virginia Company charter stated that any child born in the colony would be treated for “all intents and purposes as if they had been abiding and born within this our kingdom of England.” The charter said nothing, however, regarding children born in other foreign places.

  Englishwoman or Bermudian, on the warmest February days Bermuda Rolfe was brought outside in a bundle and laid on a dappled spray of palmetto leaves to take in the breezes of the island. After all, as a later anonymous colonist said, the air of her namesake island was clean and sweet and good for all ages. “Young children do thrive and grow up exceeding well,” the colonist wrote, “the climate is so temperate and agreeable to our English constitutions.”

  The bounty of Bermuda continued to feed the Sea Venture castaways through the winter. Early in 1610 the cahows the castaways had hunted since October now began to nest, and the collectors who went to the Bird Islands returned with a new delicacy for the cooks. Cahow eggs had white shells and were nearly indistinguishable from hens’ eggs, Strachey said. Scrambled or fried over the fire, they were a welcome reminder of home.

  Green turtles that had been taken occasionally in the summertime returned in greater numbers in the winter and they too laid eggs. The Sea Venture, in fact, had come to rest in one of the most active sea-turtle nurseries of the Atlantic. Hundreds of the huge animals came ashore in February, each of which provided a meal for as many as seventy people. The timing of the arrival of the turtles was fortuitous, because the palmetto berries had gone out of season and the hogs that subsisted on them were growing thin.

  The sea turtles were hunted nocturnally as well, according to a later colonist named Richard Norwood: “We take them for the most part at night, making a great light in a boat to which they will sometimes swim and seldom shun, so that a man standing ready with a staff in his hand which hath at one end a socket wherein is an iron less than a man’s finger four-square and sharp with a line fastened to it, he striking this iron into the upper shell of the turtle it sticks so fast that after she hath a little tired herself by swimming to and fro, she is taken by it.”

  The average sea turtle weighed three hundred pounds. After they were towed to shore four me
n were needed to drag each one onto the sand, where they were flipped over and left alive until eaten. In a macabre addendum, Norwood described the death throes of the sea giants: “They will live, the head being cut off, four and twenty hours, so that if you cut the flesh with a knife or touch it, it will tremble and shrink away. There is no meat will keep longer, either fresh or salt.” Sea turtles also yielded oil, which provided a medium for cooking, but the prize was the meat in the shell. “The flesh that cleaveth to the inside of this, being roasted against the fire, is excellent meat, almost like the marrow of beef, but the shell itself harder than horn. She hath also a shell on her belly, not so hard, but being boiled it becomes soft like the sinews or gristle of beef.”

  In February and March cool weather continued, Strachey wrote: “The mornings are there (as in May in England) fresh and sharp.” New kinds of animals were found with regularity. The birds were the most remarkable. “Fowl there is great store: small birds, sparrows fat and plump like a bunting, bigger than ours; robins of diverse colors, green and yellow, ordinary and familiar in our cabins, and other of less sort. White and gray herons, bitterns, teal, snipe, crows, and hawks, of which in March we found diverse aeries, goshawks and tiercels, oxen-birds, cormorants, bald-coots, moorhens, owls, and bats in great store.” Once in March Gates and another gunner shot two swans over an island pond.

  The castaways had been on Bermuda for eight months. Despite the turmoil of the mutinies, they had managed to create an island community that by wilderness standards was remarkably prosperous. Castaway society was a version of English culture with its hard work and class conflict. The unusual elements of island existence, though, were almost all good—swan spit roasted over a fire, bibby shared around a camp table, birds on the nest at Christmastime, and an existence remarkably free of disease. They had found a wonderful place, and many still did not want to leave.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Rebellion

  I do begin to have bloody thoughts.

  —Stephano, The Tempest

  A midst the plentiful flocks the old discontents continued to roil the most recalcitrant castaways. In late winter once again nervous plotters betrayed a rebellious plot to the governor. The mutineers planned an armed attack on the storehouse that held the company’s food and equipment, according to Strachey. Even as unnamed informants approached Gates in the main camp, mutineers among the governor’s company fled to Somers’s construction site and warned cohorts among the mariners. Together they took to the woods, leaving only a few workers with the admiral at the camp on the main island. With accused mutineers at large, Gates ordered the storehouse protected by armed guards and told everyone in the camp to wear weapons. In the days following the revelation of the latest scheme, suspicion pervaded the camp, each person wondering whether mutineers remained among them.

  Strachey was among the most wary, alleging the latest plot was “deadly and bloody” and that “the life of our governor with many others were threatened.” In a revealing statement, Strachey said the conspirators believed Gates did not have the will to “pass the act of justice upon anyone.” The tension broke on March 13. The man charged with treason that day was said to have been stealing tools for the mutineers, but the allegation was likely exaggerated to justify Gates’s severe treatment of a quarrelsome man whose temper emerged at the worst possible time. Gentleman voyager Henry Paine refused to stand his assigned night watch, Strachey said, telling the commander there was no need to guard the storehouse from an attack that would never come. Paine addressed the officer with “evil language,” and when the commander threatened to report the incident to Gates, “Paine replied with a settled and bitter violence and in such irreverent terms as I should offend the modest ear too much to express it in his own phrase, but the contents were how that the governor had no authority of that quality to justify upon anyone (how mean soever in the colony) an action of that nature, and therefore let the governor (said he) kiss, etc.”

  The commander made a report to Gates the next morning, complete “with the omitted additions” of words Strachey was too gentile to record. Either Gates’s patience finally ran out or he saw that he no longer had any choice if he was to maintain order. Paine was sentenced to die, and this time there would be no reprieve. “Our governor who had now the eyes of the whole colony fixed upon him,” Strachey wrote, “condemned him to be instantly hanged, and the ladder being ready after he had made many confessions he earnestly desired being a gentleman that he might be shot to death, and towards the evening he had his desire, the sun and his life setting together.”

  A resigned and manacled Henry Paine was led into the woods and placed against a tree. Soldiers stood a few paces from and in the twilight shot the condemned man. When death was confirmed, Paine’s body was carried to a freshly dug grave next to that of the murdered Edward Samuel. Paine’s execution had an immediate effect on the company’s perception of their leader. When pushed to the extreme, Gates had finally acted. Mutinous voyagers who had become brazen in their talk now feared that Paine’s execution was the first of many. The response was a new wave of desertions. By Sunday morning, March 18, another band had fled to Somers’s camp. The latest contingent was composed of conspirators with marginal connections to the plot who feared that their foreknowledge would be discovered and prosecuted. Upon their arrival at Somers’s camp they and the remainder of Somers’s work crew fled to the woods together, leaving the admiral alone as the only man ostensibly loyal to Gates. Somers’s role was a complicated one. The admiral was torn between the mutineers’ plan to colonize Bermuda and the sense of honor that bound him to Gates and the Virginia enterprise. True he was now on his own, but he was also in regular contact both with the mutineers in the woods and the governor in the main camp. When the mutineers wanted to send a petition to Gates they brought it to Somers for relaying to the governor. The petition prompted negotiations in the form of letters between the camps over the coming days.

  “Whether mere rage and greediness after some little pearl (as it was thought) wherewith they conceived they should forever enrich themselves and saw how to obtain the same easily in this place,” Strachey said, “or whether the desire forever to inhabit here, or what other secret else moved them thereunto, true it is, they sent an audacious and formal petition to our governor.” In the appeal the men laid out their arguments as to why they should be allowed to remain on Bermuda. They asked only what was fairly theirs, they said, namely that they be provided two sets of clothing each from the warehouse and a year’s worth of food.

  While the rebels’ petition may have struck Strachey as improper, to George Somers the arguments they put forth were not entirely unreasonable. As Hopkins had argued earlier, the mutineers said the failure of the Virginia Company to provide safe transport to Jamestown had released them from any obligation to the organization. Through their own extraordinary efforts during the hurricane, the petitioners said, they had by the grace of God been presented a new opportunity. Surely the people who suffered the failure could not be faulted for embracing the opportunity. Therefore, they said, Gates should provide them the allocations of food and clothing assigned to them for the Jamestown enterprise, allow them to stay and become Bermuda’s founding settlers, and ensure that the Virginia Company supported the venture by sending fresh supplies to the island.

  Gates did not attempt to refute the arguments of the rebels, but maintained his position that everyone on Bermuda was bound by honor and duty to get to Jamestown. No one on the expedition could presume to rewrite the instructions of the Virginia Company without consulting the members, he argued, and in the absence of new instructions they had no choice but to go on to their intended destination if they were able to do so. Jamestown was the place that company leaders, in their wisdom, had decided to focus their resources. Certainly Gates would report to London about the advantages of Bermuda and the company might well choose to establish a colony there. That was a decision for the Virginia Company to make from a settled perspective, Gat
es said, and not something for their charges to decide in the wilds of an unintended land. On this point the governor would not waver. His company would go to Virginia.

  In his response to Somers and by extension the mutineers, Gates addressed what he assumed was a lingering resentment about who would have been left behind on the island. First, Gates said, he would have left the forsaken part of the company enough supplies to sustain them for a year. Then he would have done everything in his power to send relief to Bermuda as soon as possible, either by appealing to the Virginia Company or by drawing upon his personal resources or those of his friends. Gates then spoke directly to the admiral. If the mutineers were allowed to pursue their plan, he wrote, it would be the ruin of both their reputations. Referring to himself and Somers in the third person, Gates said the Virginia Company would place the blame on the governor and the admiral of the expedition, “so weak and unworthy in their command,” rather than on the unruly colonists.