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

by Hobson Woodward

  As Strachey watched Caliban onstage, he kept coming back to the descriptions of sea turtles he had included in his Sea Venture narrative. Caliban had a strange mix of attributes that seemed a hodgepodge of animal allusions from a particular line of Strachey’s narrative. Strachey wrote that the sea turtle is “a kind of meat, as a man can neither absolutely call fish nor flesh,” and that it spends its days “feeding upon sea grass like a heifer, in the bottom of the coves and bays.” In The Tempest Prospero called the slow-moving Caliban “tortoise,” and another character wondered whether he was “a man or a fish.” Caliban appeared to be “half a fish and half a monster” and a kind of sea-turtle man—“legged like a man and his fins like arms.” Strachey’s suggestion that sea turtles were like grazing cows also seemed to reemerge in Caliban. On five occasions Stephano and Trinculo called the Tempest monster a “mooncalf,” a term for a deformed child born on a full moon, but one also with bovine overtones that may have reminded Strachey of his own image of a marine heifer.

  Bermuda cedars may have made an appearance that day on the Blackfriars stage, too. The idea of seething berries in fresh water seemed to have piqued Shakespeare’s interest. In a reference that seemed odd to Strachey unless the source was the Sea Venture chronicles, Caliban mentioned that when Prospero first came to the island the magician “wouldst give me water with berries in’t.” True, in describing their homemade liquor the castaways had spent most of their time talking about bibby, a libation made from the sap of the palmetto tree. Strachey, however, had written of a second drink made from cedar berries. As he watched The Tempest he may have even been able to recall the passage. He remembered writing about the cedar tree, “the berries whereof our men seething, straining, and letting stand some three or four days made a kind of pleasant drink.” Remarkably, the fermented berry liquor he himself had drunk on Bermuda seemed to be a favorite of the monster he was watching on the Blackfriars stage.

  The birthplace of the mother of the Tempest monster was also familiar to William Strachey. Shakespeare set the play in the Mediterranean, and a mention of a city on its coast seemed to link the play to Strachey even though the Sea Venture was far removed from those waters. Strachey stopped in Algiers on the North African coast in 1606 as he voyaged to Turkey to serve as secretary to the British merchant company there, and in his account of the Sea Venture storm he mentioned that he did so. In describing the hurricane, Strachey recalled that he experienced less violent storms “upon the coast of Barbary and Algeere, in the Levant.” Shakespeare seemed to have picked up on that allusion, for twice in The Tempest it was mentioned that Caliban’s mother, the witch Sycorax, was banished from Algiers before she came to Prospero’s island.

  Caliban and Miranda may have bloodlines in another Jamestown narrative. John Smith’s book True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Noate was published—probably without his permission—in 1608 before Strachey departed on the Sea Venture. The work was available on the shelves of London booksellers when Shakespeare was writing The Tempest. In it Smith tells of a visit to Jamestown by Wahunsenacawh’s daughter Pocahontas: “Powhatan,” Smith wrote, “understanding we detained certain savages, sent his daughter, a child of ten years old, which not only for feature, countenance, and proportion much exceeded any of the rest of his people, but for wit and spirit, the only nonpareil of his country.” Caliban echoes the most distinctive word of Smith’s True Relation account, suggesting that the heart of Pocahontas may beat in Shakespeare’s Miranda. While Shakespeare used the term nonpareil in five of his plays, his use of it in The Tempest just after it had appeared in a work of relevance to the theme of the play suggests the playwright may have read Smith. “And that most deeply to consider is the beauty of his daughter,” Caliban said from the stage as he described Prospero’s view of Miranda, “he himself calls her a nonpareil.” Along with his description of Pocahontas, Smith describes a man that Wahunsenacawh sent to accompany Pocahontas on the visit. Smith characterizes the chaperone as the Powhatan leader’s “most trusty messenger, called Rawhunt, as much exceeding in deformity of person, but of a subtle wit and crafty understanding.” The description is suggestive of Caliban’s description in The Tempest’s list of actors, in which the wild man is described as “a savage and deformed slave.”

  Strachey couldn’t help but think that Namontack and Machumps, too, may have contributed to the character of Caliban. The Tempest monster was probably singing about New World fish traps when he celebrated his impending liberation from Prospero with a song that began, “No more dams I’ll make for fish.” While all the printed mentions of the two Powhatans on the Sea Venture were published after Shakespeare composed his play, their presence on the ship and the disappearance of Namontack on Bermuda were a topic of discussion in London while the playwright composed The Tempest. There was good reason to believe it, since characters portrayed on the Blackfriars stage that afternoon explicitly alluded to New World visitors to London when Trinculo suggested that he and Stephano would become rich if they brought Caliban home and exhibited him as a curiosity in exchanges for coins: “When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar,” Trinculo says, “they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.” When Trinculo alluded to a “painted” Caliban he may have been referring to cosmetics sometimes applied previous to the display of a New World inhabitant (whether alive or dead): “Were I in England now (as once I was) and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver.”

  Just as Caliban and Miranda might have roots in Jamestown, so, too, might Ferdinand, the son of the king of Naples and Miranda’s love interest. Hearing the name that Shakespeare chose for his leading man, Strachey would have been reminded of Sir Ferdinando Weynman, the man who had arrived at Jamestown with Delaware and later died there. Weynman was the second man Strachey had mentioned in his letter to the “Excellent Lady” who had a variant of the name Ferdinand, the first being History of the West Indies author Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (known as “Gonzalus Ferdinandus Oviedus” to the author of the book Strachey carried). Perhaps the repetition of the name had been enough to fix it in Shakespeare’s mind as he mulled what to call the lover of the fair Miranda.

  At the close of the first act, Prospero asked Ariel to draw in Ferdinand, who was wandering the island alone. During the curse of the play, Miranda would be smitten with the prince, and the two would fall in love. Ferdinand would choose a peculiar way to prove his love. Miranda would discover him stacking wood on Prospero’s orders, and she would beg him to rest. Ferdinand would refuse, saying he carried the wood on her behalf. His “wooden slavery” was a self-imposed condition for her benefit, he would say: “For your sake am I this patient log-man.” To Strachey the scene was reminiscent of his description of Thomas Gates on Bermuda patiently cutting wood for the construction on the pinnaces. In Strachey’s account, the governor did so to show his workers that he was willing to work himself and thereby convince them by example “to fell, carry, and saw cedar fit for the carpenters’ purpose.”

  Early in the play, however, Ferdinand was preoccupied with grief over the supposed death of his father, Alonso. In Ferdinand’s musings, Strachey might have wondered whether Shakespeare imagined the undersea world of the Bermuda pearl divers. Ariel described a tropical lagoon as he sang a lament about the supposedly drowned king. As he did so, he evoked the magic of the Tempest isle: “Full fathom five thy father lies, of his bones are coral made; those are pearls that were his eyes, nothing of him that doth fade but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange.”

  At the end of the second act of The Tempest, William Strachey relaxed on his bench and mulled the scenes that had just passed before him. The transformation of his narrative captivated the former Virginia voyager. He was pleased to have a part in Shakespeare’s entertainment, and the insight it provided into the playwright’s literary method fascinated and inspired him. Strachey would watch the rest of the play with interest and see if he could discern more
of his own words in the lines and themes of the magical drama unfolding at the Blackfriars.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Bermuda Ghosts

  Such stuff as dreams are made on.

  —Prospero, The Tempest

  As the second act of The Tempest opened, William Strachey and the rest of the Tempest audience watched Ferdinand and his father, Alonso, wander Prospero’s island, both unaware that the other was alive. Both were under the impression that the other had perished, even though—perhaps not surprisingly, given the play’s origin in the Sea Venture story—no one on the Tempest ship had actually suffered harm. As he grieved for his son, Alonso imagined that a grotesquely large fish had eaten his castaway son, lamenting, “What strange fish hath made his meal on thee?” The line is oddly reminiscent of Strachey’s aside about the remora—a fish that in legend grows to enormous size and intervenes in human affairs.

  The scene suggested another parallel between the Sea Venture story and The Tempest. Publications put out by the Virginia Company after the loss of the flagship suggested that its voyagers might have survived on some remote shore. In light of the facts then known, the suggestion was excessively optimistic, even if in hindsight it proved to be entirely accurate. William Shakespeare included in The Tempest a similar case of misplaced optimism that turned out to be true. In the play, Alonso’s servant Francisco tried to comfort him by arguing without rational basis that Ferdinand had survived the wreck, which in fact he had. Sebastian had trouble believing Francisco’s overly cheerful assessment, saying that the cities to which the Tempest voyagers would return would “have more widows in them of this business’ making than we bring men to comfort them.” Furthermore, as the king and his handlers wandered after the wreck, Adrian called the Tempest island “uninhabitable and almost inaccessible.” The statement is a succinct echo of the Sea Venture voyagers’ assessment of Bermuda (or more precisely, their perception of the island before they landed and found it eminently habitable if accessed by luck). Few ocean islands in the world were inaccessible, and so Shakespeare’s use of the term to describe the Tempest isle would have been especially telling to Bermuda veteran William Strachey.

  The action of The Tempest then shifted to yet another band of castaways wandering the island unaware that others had survived the storm. Now began a dual story line of plots against the leaders—one a serious conspiracy by Prospero’s brother Antonio against King Alonso, and the other a comic scheme against the life of Prospero by the drunken butler Stephano, the court jester Trinculo, and Caliban. The manner in which the three comic mutineers met reinforced Caliban’s origin as a sea-turtle man. As the scene opened, Caliban mistook an approaching Trinculo for a spirit of the isle and lay down to feign death. When a thunderstorm threatened, the jester climbed on top of the prone Caliban, joining the wild man underneath his cloak to avoid the rain. Stephano then came upon the other two, unaware that Trinculo had survived the wreck. All that was sticking out from under the cloak—turtlelike—was Caliban’s head between Trinculo’s feet at one end and Caliban’s feet at the other. Stephano mistakes his find as “some monster of the isle, with four legs,” until he recognizes Trinculo’s voice and pulls him out from under the cloak.

  Trinculo’s entrance reinforced the frivolous tone of the scene, his costume cuing the audience that he was a comedian. During the course of the play Caliban would insult him as a “pied ninny” and a “scurvy patch.” True to those hints, when the jester appeared onstage he wore the patchwork apparel of a court comedian, including the classic belled cap of a motley fool. The costume of his companion Stephano was nothing unusual, but his name may have struck one member of the audience as curious. William Strachey may have sensed an echo of the inept mutiny of Stephen Hopkins of Bermuda in the comic rebellion of Stephano of The Tempest. In reading Strachey’s narrative of the castaways’ time on Bermuda, Shakespeare may have seen a clownish stage character in the pathetic supplications of Hopkins. The conspiracy of Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban would serve as a comic version of the more significant machinations of Antonio and Sebastian against Alonso. In the plot of the Bermuda mutineer named Stephen, Shakespeare may have seen the possibility of a slapstick rebel named Stephano.

  Stephano’s method of getting to shore from the distressed Tempest ship may also have had an origin in Strachey’s chronicle. Strachey wrote that when Sea Venture voyagers lightened the leaking ship, they threw overboard trunks, chests, and heavy guns, and dumped the contents of “many a butt of beer, hogshead of oil, cider, wine, and vinegar.” While casks of wine were dumped over the side of the Sea Venture, at least one had been pitched intact from the Tempest ship. “I escaped upon a butt of sack,” Stephano said, “which the sailors heaved o’erboard.” The cask of wine proved a double benefit, serving Stephano both as a float at sea and a source of drink on the island. He gave Caliban his first drink of alcohol, and the servant monster so enjoyed the result that he proclaimed Stephano to be heaven-sent and pledged his loyalty.

  In order to impress his new master, Caliban promised to gather them the fine things of the island. To the ear of the Virginia voyager, the bounty the monster pledged to gather was something that sounded suspiciously like the cahows the Sea Venture castaways found living in holes in the Bermuda ground. What Strachey probably heard that afternoon from the Blackfriars stage was Caliban say he would gather nuts, capture marmosets, and “get thee young seamels from the rock.” The word is presumably pronounced “sea-mell,” a variation of the term Strachey used in his narrative to identify the cahow—“sea-mew.” Twelve years after the Tempest debut, the word would apparently be inadvertently changed to “scamel” when a typesetter misread Shakespeare’s now-lost manuscript, mistaking an “e” for a “c” and in the process adding a new word to the English language. The highly influential First Folio version of The Tempest would give the word as “scamel,” evidently enshrining a casual error as a new word that has been dutifully included in dictionaries ever since.

  The cries of sea-mews seemed to be heard in more ways than one on the afternoon Strachey watched The Tempest. The nighttime hunting technique of the Sea Venture survivors, which Strachey in his narrative called “lowbelling,” has a corollary in The Tempest as well. From the stage Sebastian proposed that the shipwrecked Tempest party go “bat-fowling,” or nocturnal hunting with clubs and lights. The haunting calls that the voyagers heard on those hunting trips also seemed to echo in the play. On Prospero’s island Sebastian reported hearing a “hollow burst of bellowing, like bulls, or rather lions.” Later the theater was filled with music played by the invisible Ariel. “Be not afeard,” Caliban told Stephano and Trinculo as the music began. “This isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about mine ears.” Still later, the boatswain described being awakened by “strange and several noises of roaring, shrieking, howling, jingling chains and more diversity of sounds, all horrible.” Strachey would surely have heard all of these mysterious wails as the nocturnal cries of Bermuda birds transformed into enchanted airs on the Blackfriars stage.

  Just as William Strachey had written about “bloody issues and mischiefs” arising in the Bermuda camp of the castaways, so, too, did Shakespeare put “bloody thoughts” in the heads of his Tempest mutineers. Life on Bermuda also featured punishment imposed by a leader who was at once harsh and indulgent, and so did Shakespeare’s drama on the stage. Strachey described discontent among the Sea Venture castaways as a “desire forever to inhabit here”; in The Tempest he may have recognized his phrase transformed into Ferdinand’s declaration “Let me live here ever!” and the musings of Gonzalo on what life would be like “had I plantation of this isle.” In Ariel and Caliban the Virginia voyager in the audience may have sensed a kinship with the laborers and artisans of the Sea Venture, whose indentures to the Virginia Company served as their tickets to Jamestown. In The Tempest Ariel acted as the loyal indentured servant to the most powerful man
on the island, chafing under onerous contractual terms but nevertheless serving without complaint. Ariel is the descendant of William Strachey and his ilk, including the informants who betrayed mutinies hatched by their compatriots. At the other end of the spectrum, Caliban’s plots of murder mirror those of the rebellious voyagers of the Bermuda expedition.

  As Strachey mulled the ideas put forth in the speeches of the characters onstage, the stark contrast of Jametown’s inexplicably apathetic populace in the midst of an imagined paradise also may have come to mind. The failure of expectations to match reality in the New World was a principal point of contention in an ongoing public debate about the value of exploration, and Strachey would not be surprised to find that it was a theme of The Tempest, as well. Sure enough, the issue emerged in explicit form when Gonzalo launched into an extended rumination on what he would do “had I plantation of this isle.” Gonzalo pictured a Golden Age on Prospero’s island—using the signature phrase of philosopher Michel de Montaigne, who suggested that the people of the New World lived in an uncorrupted Eden. The Tempest counselor said that were he to possess the Tempest isle he would establish a society in which there was no need for a legal system; poverty would cease to exist, food would be plentiful, and there would be “no occupation, all men idle, all; and women, too, but innocent and pure; no sovereignty.” Sebastian and Antonio served as foils in the scene, badgering Gonzalo as he mused. When Gonzalo said the Tempest isle offered “everything advantageous to life,” Antonio sarcastically responded, “True, save means to live.” Gonzalo’s proposal that the ideal state would feature “all men idle” in particular drew the derision of the wits. “All idle—whores and knaves,” said Antonio.