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

by Hobson Woodward

  On the voyage upriver a longboat of fourteen miners searching for fresh water went ashore at the village of Appomattox. The residents asked the visitors to leave their weapons in the boat, which turned out to be a fatal decision. During a meal the Englishmen were set upon and killed. Only Dowse the drummer (the same man who had drawn out the Powhatans at Kecoughtan) survived by running to the longboat and making his way out into the river. Learning of the massacre from the escaped drummer, the rest of the force immediately attacked, burning the town and killing and scattering its residents. The depleted company continued as far as they could with the boats, but did not go farther than the riverside.

  Late in the fall Delaware left Jamestown to winter with the miners at the northern campsite, and before going he sent Samuel Argall north to the Potomac River to trade for food. Being outside the Powhatan confederacy and not directly affected by English settlement, the Patawomecks proved willing to barter. Argall acquired four hundred bushels of grain and stacks of furs in exchange for scrap copper and lead, ninety-six hatchets, sixty knives, some bells, and twelve pairs of scissors.

  On the expedition Argall also recovered an English boy named Henry Spelman who had lived among the Powhatans and Patawomecks for a year. The fifteen-year-old had come to Jamestown in the Gates fleet aboard the Unity. Only a few weeks after arrival he had been left with Wahunsenacawh to learn the Powhatan language, but after a while he ran off and walked through the forest many miles to Patawomeck country. “With this King Patawomeck I lived a year and more,” Spelman said, “at a town of his called Passapatanzy, until such time as a worthy gentleman named Captain Argall arrived.”

  Argall and Spelman returned to Jamestown in early winter 1611. When Strachey heard the story of the expedition and learned Spelman’s history, he was pleased to have a new source of information on the people of Virginia. Spelman had learned the language of the Powhatans and the Patawomecks, which would be a great help to the colonists in general and the secretary in particular. Strachey interviewed the teenager and made notes about the circumstances of his release. Spelman told him that just before his release his overseer, Iopassus, came aboard Argall’s ship “about Christmas” and had a long conversation “sitting (the weather being very cold) by the fire upon a hearth in the hold with the captain.” During the visit Iopassus asked to see a Bible a sailor was reading. After examining the illustrations in the book, he offered to tell of the beliefs of the Patawomecks.

  “We have five gods in all,” Iopassus said. “Our chief god appears often unto us in the likeness of a mighty great hare; the other four have no visible shape but are indeed the four winds which keep the four corners of the earth. Our god who takes upon him this shape of a hare conceived with himself how to people this great world and with what kind of creatures.” The deity in the shape of a hare created a great deer to live upon the earth, Iopassus said, but the gods from the four corners of the earth were envious and slew the deer. The god in the shape of a hare then made each hair of the deer into another deer and placed people upon the earth—“a man and a woman in one country and a man and a woman in another country, and so the world took his first beginning of mankind.”

  Argall then asked what happened to the Patawomecks after death, and Strachey described Iopassus’s answer, as translated by Spelman. “After they are dead here they go up to a top of a high tree and there they spy a fair plain broad pathway, on both sides whereof doth grow all manner of pleasant fruits as mulberries, strawberries, plums, etc. In this pleasant path they run toward the rising of the sun, where the godly hare’s house is and in the midway they come to a house where a woman goddess doth dwell who hath always her doors open for hospitality.” There, Iopassus said, they have a feast of boiled corn, walnut milk, and fruit before continuing on to their destination. “They find their forefathers living in great pleasure in a goodly field, where they do nothing but dance and sing and feed on delicious fruits with the great hare, who is their great god, and when they have lived there until they be stark old men they say they die there likewise by turns and come into the world again.”

  Soon after Argall and Spelman came back to Jamestown, blood fell again on the snow of Tsenacomoco. The blockhouse that guarded the neck leading from the colony to the mainland was attacked on February 9 by Wowinchopunck, the leader of Paspahegh, the town the English had overrun in August. The soldiers in the blockhouse went outside and attempted to seize Wowinchopunck, but seeing that he could not be taken alive the captain of the guard stabbed him twice and fled back to the building. The attackers picked up the fallen man and carried him into the woods. One of the blockhouse guard pursued the carriers and catching one, “overthrew him and with his dagger sent him to accompany his master in the other world.”

  Late in the winter, the still-ailing Delaware and the remainder of his company abandoned the upriver palisade and returned to the colony. Disease was rife in Jamestown that winter, and among those who died was Kemps, the Powhatan captive who was forced to lead Percy against the Paspaheghs. Percy also reported the demise of Sir Ferdinando Weynman, whose “death was much lamented, being both an honest and a valiant gentleman.”

  By March, Delaware’s health was so fragile that he decided to sail to the West Indies, where he might bathe in the geothermal hot springs of Nevis. Leaving the colony he was charged to govern was sure to anger officials and investors of the Virginia Company, but Delaware felt his life depended upon it. At his sailing the governor reported that he left two hundred in the colony supplied with enough food for ten months. In the estimation of those left behind, however, the food stores were meager and the expectations low. “At his going he left Captain George Percy deputy governor, the people (remaining under his command) provided for three months at a short allowance of victuals,” a colonist reported.

  After Delaware’s ship was out of view, the warriors from Paspahegh assaulted Jamestown in one of the most successful attacks against the colony. George Percy had doubled the guard at the blockhouse and ordered his men not to be drawn from the tower, but the soldiers stationed there disobeyed his orders, with fatal results. The guards, Percy said, “showing more valor than wit, more fury than judgment,” pursued a small band of Powhatans who appeared near the blockhouse. The interlopers withdrew into the forest and the soldiers followed, only to fall into an ambush, “where being five or six hundred of savages let fly their arrows as thick as hail amongst our handful of men and defeated and cut them all off in a moment, the arrows which they had shot being so many in number that the ground thereabouts was almost covered with them.” The attackers’ cries of “Paspahegh, Paspahegh” brought fifty reinforcements from the palisade, but when they arrived all that remained to do was recover the bodies of the soldiers. A spooked Percy dispatched a boat in an unsuccessful attempt to catch Delaware. To the colonists, the move revealed the deputy governor’s reluctance to lead. For the first time, William Strachey was in the wilderness of the New World without the guidance of a governor he trusted. From his first days under the leadership of Percy, Strachey began to mull the possibility of returning home to London.

  Just over a week after the blockhouse ambush, to the relief of the colonists, one of the two ships that had carried Gates back to England came up the James River. The Hercules under Captain Robert Adams carried only thirty people, but in addition to replacing the twenty killed at the blockhouse the arrival did a bit to revive the morale of the dispirited colony. The vessel carried important news for the survivors of the Sea Venture wreck—for the first time they knew that their families and friends were aware they had survived on Bermuda.

  One man aboard the Hercules was a new recruit named Robert Evelyn, a Londoner deep in debt who hoped to return from the New World with riches for his wife and children. “I am much grieved at my heart for it that my estate is so mean,” Evelyn had written to his mother as he prepared to leave. “I am going to the sea, a long and dangerous vo[yage with] other men to make me to be [able] to pay my debts and to restore my decay
ed estate again; which I beseech God of His mercy to grant it may be [made] prosperous unto me to His honor and my comfort in this world and in the world to come; and I beseech you if I do die that you would be good unto my poor wife and children, which, God knows, I shall leave very poor.”

  Adams, Evelyn, and the others on the Hercules reported that Thomas Gates had stunned London and all of England by coming back from the grave. When his ships arrived at the Thames quay in September, the story of the survival of the Sea Venture voyagers had spread rapidly through the city. To satisfy the demand for information on the wreck, two who had lived through it immediately published accounts. Silvester Jourdain was first into print with his Discovery of the Barmodas, a short pamphlet telling the story in spare prose. Another Sea Venture passenger, Richard Rich, calling himself a “soldier blunt and plain,” offered the tale in verse under the title Newes from Virginia: The Lost Flocke Triumphant.

  Neither Jourdain nor Rich mentioned the fate of Namontack, the Powhatan emissary who had twice been to London before departing on the Sea Venture with Machumps. Gates retold the Bermuda story many times, however, and a Dutch writer living in London heard one of those tellings. Emanuel van Meteren reported that Gates included among his list of the Bermuda dead “a casicke or son of a king in Virginia who had been in England and who had been killed by an Indian, his own servant.” Gates’s suspicion that Machumps had killed Namontack was reported as a certainty, and the former castaway apparently did not mention that the suspected murderer continued to circulate among the colonists in Jamestown without sanction for the alleged crime.

  As in earlier times, the most anticipated publication in the weeks after Gates’s return was the one issued by the Virginia Company itself. Now instead of having to explain the death of one of its most promising leaders, the company could hail his survival as proof that God intended the English to prevail in Virginia. As the basis of A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia, the company drew upon Strachey’s letter to the “Excellent Lady” and the derivative report that the secretary had drafted for Delaware’s signature. The company highlighted the successes of Bermuda and Virginia and downplayed or omitted the episodes of mutiny, murder, and bloody battles with the Powhatans. Highlighted was the miraculous—some might even say magical—survival of Thomas Gates and his company on an enchanted island.

  This series of fortuitous events proved the intervention of the divine, according to the Virginia Company. Could these coincidences, the company asked, mean anything but that God intended Jamestown to succeed? If Gates had not come from Bermuda, the Virginia settlers would have starved; if Gates had not saved the colony from burning, the palisade could not have been reoccupied; if Jamestown had been abandoned much longer, the Powhatans would have destroyed it; if Gates had left sooner, his fleet would not have met Delaware; if Delaware had not brought ample supplies, his arrival would not have made a decisive difference. This was the hand of God at work, the Virginia Company said, and the preservation of the castaways on Bermuda was final proof that God wanted the English to succeed in the New World.

  In crafting their publicity campaign, the Virginia Company made use of the positive elements of Strachey’s unexpected report. His vivid prose was a great help in crafting their publication, and the company wanted more. The organization’s secretary and friend of Strachey’s, Richard Martin, was enlisted to write him and ask for additional writings. The Hercules carried a letter from Martin to Strachey, complimenting his literary efforts and requesting a new report. Strachey may have sent back an additional description of the country when the Hercules returned to England in a few weeks’ time, but more likely he sent nothing immediately and the request by Martin spurred him to begin work on his comprehensive history of Virginia. Strachey was now convinced that he would realize his opportunity for literary success. At long last he had wealthy and well-placed patrons asking him to write something that would have a lasting impact on the literature of the age. He did not intend to let the chance slip by.

  The most important news arriving with the Hercules was that it was part of a new supply fleet. The ship had separated from two companion vessels on the way over, but others were expected soon in the Chesapeake. The convoy was under the leadership of Sir Thomas Dale, a career soldier with twenty-three years’ military service. Dale had distinguished himself against Celtic forces in Ireland and the Spanish in the Netherlands, rising from common soldier to knight. While serving in the field with Gates in both conflicts, Dale had used strict discipline, in sharp contrast to Gates’s preference for compromise. The Virginia Company had given Dale the rank of marshal and placed him in charge of the colony’s military activities. He had departed with three ships carrying cattle, armor, and three hundred settlers, including sixty women. While Dale was assigned to oversee military activities only, in the unexpected absence of Delaware he would become the highest-ranking official in the colony and take over as acting governor. The marshal would prove to be a strict leader.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Poison

  I fear a madness held me.

  —Alonso, The Tempest

  The sails of the remaining two ships of Thomas Dale’s fleet appeared on the horizon off Point Comfort in May 1611. The Virginia Company’s primary order to Dale was to expand the settlement beyond Jamestown and Point Comfort. The two abandoned forts at Kecoughtan, now named Fort Henry and Fort Charles, were to be reoccupied and planted with corn. The settlement at Jamestown was to become a fully functioning village. Once those goals were accomplished, Dale was to reoccupy and develop the upriver site where Delaware had spent the winter. The new leader’s efforts were to be spent strengthening the colony rather than seeking silver.

  “The twelfth of May we seized our bay,” Dale reported, “and the same night with a favorable southeast gale (all praise be to God for it) we came to an anchor before Algernon Fort at Point Comfort, where to our no small comfort again we discovered the Hercules even then preparing to take the advantage of the present tide to set sail for England.” The Hercules had exchanged its cargo of settlers for one of fish and was set to return home. Percy was at the fort to see the ship off, and the veteran colonist greeted Dale with the news that Delaware had left Virginia a month earlier and Dale would consequently be in charge of the entire colony rather than just its military activities.

  Given the rapid advance of the growing season, the marshal immediately took his ships to Kecoughtan instead of going upriver to Jamestown. There he found that the English encampment remained vacant. Housing and corn were his priorities, so he wasted no time in establishing both at Kecoughtan. Dale ordered carpenters to restore the cabins at the site, and put the rest of the colonists in his ships to work planting the fields around the destroyed Powhatan village. After a week, he left a contingent of settlers at Kecoughtan to tend the fields and moved on to Jamestown.

  Arriving at the Jamestown palisade on Sunday, May 19, Dale found the residents living an undisciplined existence. As colonist Ralph Hamor sarcastically put it, the people were found to be going about “their daily and usual works—bowling in the streets.” The lack of crops in the ground and the perceived lack of effort angered Dale, who vented his frustration on Christopher Newport. The former captain of the Sea Venture had returned to Virginia with him, apparently after supporting the contention of Virginia Company treasurer Thomas Smith that the colony was adequately provisioned. “Sir Thomas Dale, at his arrival finding himself deluded by the aforesaid protestations,” a witness said, “pulled Captain Newport by the beard, and threatening to hang him, for that he affirmed Sir Thomas Smith’s relation to be true, demanding of him whether it were meant that the people here in Virginia should feed upon trees.”

  Dale immediately set the colonists to work restoring the settlement. William Strachey was always quick to show loyalty to a strong leader, and he was careful to avoid being among those who were subjected to Dale’s wrath. The new acting governor would retain Strachey as secretary of the
colony, and one of their first joint projects was an expansion of the laws first imposed by Gates. Strachey spent hours with Dale as the marshal dictated dozens of new civil and military regulations. By the time they were posted on June 22, the original list of twenty-one civil laws had been expanded to thirty-seven, and fifty-one military commandments had been laid out as well. Few colonists were happy with the new rules. “Sir Thomas Dale immediately upon his arrival,” one resident said, “to add to that extremity of misery under which the colony from her infancy groaned, made and published most cruel and tyrannous laws, exceeding the strictest rules of marshal discipline.”

  Dale’s civil laws were much like those imposed by Gates. Anyone killing a domestic animal without permission would be punished by the branding of a hand and the loss of both ears. Despite the threat of attack, settlers were told to go at least a quarter of a mile from the fort “to do the necessities of nature, since by these unmanly, slothful, and loathsome immodesties, the whole fort may be choked and poisoned with ill airs.” Colonists were to keep their houses clean, with the beds at least three feet off the ground to escape contagious vapors. Some of the laws were directed at women—any laundress who stole clothes or surreptitiously replaced new articles with worn ones, for example, was to “be whipped for the same and lie in prison till she make restitution of such linen.” Beyond the civil laws, a new section of military decrees applied only to the male colonists when they were acting as soldiers. If they transgressed while on duty they might be whipped, held in irons, forced to ask forgiveness on their knees, run a gauntlet of pikes, lose a hand, or be executed by their own weapons. Soldiers were subjected to a strict code of honor and were not to “outrage or injure anyone without a cause, in deed or in words, privately behind his back like a sly coward or openly to his face like an arrogant ruffian.”