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

by Hobson Woodward

  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.

  Later in the twentieth century other artists drew upon The Tempest as a play about the colonial world. Martinique playwright Aimé Césaire in 1969 debuted a rewritten Tempest he called Une Tempête. The new version transformed Caliban into an African slave and Ariel into a person of mixed race. Césaire succeeded in “unmasking the brutality which underlies colonization,” according to one commentator. “In Une Tempête, Caliban effectively demonstrates that Prospero’s ‘humanism’ is decidedly inhuman (and inhumane) precisely because it does not accord Caliban the status of a human being.”

  In the 1990s Cherokee artist Jimmie Durham embraced the colonial theme of the play as well, creating a series of masks and fictional diary entries depicting the pre-Tempest Caliban as a student of Prospero. Durham imagines the young Caliban as obsessed with finding a reflection of his face on a mirrorless island, a metaphor for his search for identity. Just as The Tempest has an undercurrent of cruelty in the relationship between the magician and the monster, so, too, does Durham’s work. “One time Prospero was going to spank me because I was playing with mud,” a fictional diary entry reads. “When I resisted I caused him to accidentally hit me in the nose.”

  The radical transformation of the Bermuda landscape that began with the introduction of hogs by the Spanish has continued to the present time. The feral hogs were gone within a few years of settlement. By 1623 the colonial government introduced laws to protect cahows, cedar trees, and tortoises, all of which were threatened with extinction only fourteen years after settlement. Prickly pears and palmettos faced the same threat. Bananas, oranges, lemons, pomegranates, and domesticated mulberries were soon introduced to the island, further stressing native species. Since the colonists arrived, more than a thousand foreign plants have been brought from all over the world. Today Bermuda is home to seventeen species of flora unique to the island, a hundred and sixty species native both to Bermuda and other locations, and thirteen hundred introduced plants. One of the unique species, the Bermuda cedar, was the victim of an introduced insect that reached the island in 1940. A resistant strain of the tree has been developed and reintroduced, and the cedar that provided the wood for the Deliverance and the Patience is today a protected species.

  The Bermuda cahow was thought to be extinct for three centuries, but in 1951 ornithologists were delighted to discover that a small breeding population of the bird survived on remote islands. The birds—tame and vulnerable as ever—have been nurtured by conservationists ever since. Now numbering about two hundred, the small flock lives a precarious existence. An attack by a single snowy owl in 1986 killed five birds and was considered a serious blow to the colony. The rescue effort continues with guarded optimism, however, and the haunting night cries heard on the island in 1609 ring ever louder over rocky islets off the Bermuda coast.

  Bermuda quietly relishes its role in the creation of The Tempest. One island entrepreneur in 1946 exploited Shakespeare’s references to Prospero’s cave by opening an island cavern to tourists, putting up a statue of the playwright, and promoting it as “Prospero’s Cave, the scene of The Tempest.” Many of the island’s subterranean hollows feature sunken riv
ers that ebb and flow with the tide. In 1978 a scientist found a new species of marine creature in one of the rivers and named it for Shakespeare’s cave-dwelling magician. George Somers received the same honor two years later. Thus did miniature Bermuda creatures become Mesonerilla prospera and Somersiella sterreri.

  Somers’ Day is celebrated each year in late July or early August on Bermuda. In 1876 a new plaque was installed to mark the traditional burial place of the admiral’s heart. A thirty-foot column of Bermuda limestone was added on the 1909 tercentenary of the wreck. In 1984 on the three hundred and seventy-fifth anniversary, a statue of Somers by sculptor Desmond Fountain was unveiled in the town of St. George’s near a replica of the Deliverance. The same year, Bermuda issued postage stamps that bear portraits of Somers and Thomas Gates and a picture of the Sea Venture fleet departing Plymouth. Across the sea on the New England coast, another trace of George Somers may have been found. A gold signet ring reputed to bear his family crest was uncovered in the sand of a Connecticut beach in 1924. If the ring did indeed belong to Somers, the likely explanation is that he stopped there while awaiting a breeze to take him to Bermuda for the last time.

  In the years that followed the Sea Venture wreck the ship yielded a little more of its cargo to Bermuda before finally being lost below the waves. In 1622 island colonists brought up a gun, an anchor, and bars of iron and lead when Governor Nathaniel Butler ordered divers “to make a discovery upon the rotten ribs of a ship called the Sea Adventure, which (as you formerly heard) had been wrecked about some thirteen years before. The which being found out, and his divers sent down to the bottom (which was three or four fathoms deep) to see what was to be done, at the very first proof there was by great chance discovered a very fair saker.” The gun and other material, Butler said, greatly benefited the plantation.

  The remnants of the Sea Venture—said by one historian to be “arguably the most important of Bermuda’s many historic shipwrecks”—lay untouched for the next three hundred and thirty-six years until amateur diver Edmund Downing, a descendant of Sea Venture passenger George Yardley, spent the summer of 1958 searching for the historic hulk. On October 18 he and friend Floyd Heird dove to a wreck near the location described by the chroniclers. The first time down they sighted timbers and ballast of an old ship. A gun was raised to the surface and, perhaps fortuitously, dated by London experts to the eighteenth century. Interest in the wreck consequently waned for twenty years. Then—after Bermuda had passed new legislation protecting historic underwater sites—the Bermuda Maritime Museum undertook a new study of the Downing wreck. This time a painstaking analysis identified the remnants as those of the Sea Venture. Hundreds of artifacts were subsequently raised—a candlestick wedged between two boards, rat and cat bones, a dagger, intact Bartmann bottles, Chinese porcelain, and many others things that had not been touched since a tempest-tossed ship ran for the Bermuda shore on a stormy day in July 1609. The most important artifacts were put on display in an exhibition in the museum’s Treasure House along with a scale model of the Sea Venture.

  Across the Atlantic in Jamestown, archaeological remains have also been revealed. Many artifacts lay undiscovered there, too, on the mistaken assumption that the fort site had eroded into the James River. In 1994 archaeologist William M. Kelso and the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities initiated a dig to determine whether remnants of the fort might instead lay underground at the edge of the river. Kelso’s work revealed that while the fort had indeed lost a guard tower to the scouring water, most of the palisade stood on what remains intact ground. Kelso and fellow archaeologists of his Jamestown Rediscovery project have since uncovered seven hundred thousand artifacts, a third of which date to the first four years of European occupation. In May 2006 a new museum at the site, the Historic Jamestowne Archaearium, was opened to display the artifacts. Among notable discoveries were Bermuda cahow bones and conch shells from refuse pits; Bermuda limestone blocks used as building material; butchered bones of horses, rats, and snakes from the Starving Time; and a skeleton Kelso and his team identified through forensic clues as being that of colonist Bartholomew Gosnold.

  One of the most startling finds in the Jamestown earth was a brass signet ring embossed with an eagle. Research by Kelso’s team at the College of Arms in London tentatively identified a family crest on the ring as belonging to a secretary of the colony whose writings inspired a London playwright to create an ethereal work. The ring apparently slipped from the hand of William Strachey into the dust of Virginia, to emerge in the present as a gleaming reminder of a Jamestown colonist who helped create William Shakespeare’s New World masterpiece.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My colleagues at the Adams Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society have provided unfailing support throughout this project. Editor in Chief C. James Taylor is a mentor and always a friend; Gregg L. Lint demonstrates daily what it takes to be a professional historian; Margaret A. Hogan has taught me much about the artful use of language. My coworkers Karen N. Barzilay, Mary T. Claffey, Judith S. Graham, Robert Karachuk, Amanda Mathews, and Sara B. Sikes, and my former colleagues Nathaniel Adams, Jessie May Rodrique, and Paul Fotis Tsimahides have been great friends. I would also like to thank everyone at the Massachusetts Historical Society for their support during my project.

  My agent, Patricia Moosbrugger, is a constant source of encouragement and a valued adviser. Alessandra Lusardi, my editor at Viking Penguin, has tirelessly helped me to make my book the best it can be. My thanks also to Wendy Wolf, Ellen Garrison, Hilary Redmon, Anna Sternoff, and Jacqueline Powers. I am grateful, too, for the support of Jeanne K. Hanson and Nicholas T. Smith.

  I have been enormously assisted by input from colleagues and friends who read a draft of my manuscript: Karen N. Barzilay, Susan Beegel, Christy Law Blanchard, Kevin Blanchard, V. Powell Bliss, Sarah Bliss, Peter Cummings, David Gullette, Dr. Edward Harris, Margaret A. Hogan, Amy Johnson, Rosemary Jones, Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Gregg L. Lint, C. S. Lovelace, Dianne O’Donoghue, Nathaniel Philbrick, Laura Prieto, Gary Root, Mary S. Skinner, James Somerville, Renny Stackpole, C. James Taylor, Alden T. Vaughan, Elizabeth Woodward, Stewart Woodward, and Walter Woodward. Any errors or omissions are mine alone.

  This book would not have been possible without the assistance of librarians, archivists, and historians in the United States, Bermuda, and Great Britain. My thanks to the staffs of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the libraries of Harvard University, the Boston Public Library (especially Elise C. Orringer), the New England Historic Genealogical Society, the Newburyport Public Library, Beatley Library at Simmons College, the G. W. Blunt Library at Mystic Seaport, the Folger Shakespeare Library (especially Nicole Murray and William Davis), the Library of Congress, and the Caribbean Conservation Corporation (especially Rocio Johnson). My thanks also to Andrew Dobson and Clarence Maxwell.

  In Virginia I was ably assisted by Katherine Wilkins, Jeffrey Ruggles, and Meg Eastman at the Virginia Historical Society; Dana Angell Puga and Paige Buchbinder at the Library of Virginia; William M. Kelso and Ralph Freer at Historic Jamestowne; Jay Templin at Jamestown Settlement; Howell W. Perkins at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; and the staffs at the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library at Colonial Williamsburg, the Swem Library at William and Mary College, and the American Shakespeare Center.

  Rosemary Jones and Paul Shapiro offered extraordinary assistance on Bermuda to a stranger from America. I received kind assistance also from Dr. Edward Harris, Elena Strong, and Mizzah Hunt at the Bermuda Maritime Museum; Karla Hayward, Kristy R. Warren, Mandellas A. Lightbourne, Roderick W. McFall, and Frances K. Marshall at the Bermuda Government Archives; Michelle Nearon Richardson at the Bermuda National Library; Andrew Bermingham at the Bermuda Historical Society; and the staff at the Bermuda College Library.

  In Britain I received a cordial welcome at the British Library, the British Museum, the National Archives of Britain, the Bodelian Library of Oxford University, the National Portrait Gallery
(especially Helen Trompeteler), and Shakespeare’s Globe (especially Callum Coates). Seán Pòl Ó Creachm haoil assisted me in locating a rare publication about Bermuda history.

  This book would not have been possible without the work of the scholars whose research and writing provided the foundation on which it was constructed. S. G. Culliford’s biography William Strachey, 1572-1621, is a tour de force of historical scholarship. My copy of the Arden Tempest has long been a dog-eared source of information and inspiration thanks to the insightful annotation of editors Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. Alden T. Vaughan’s work on the visits of Powhatans to England was an essential source. Edward Wright Haile, Philip L. Barbour, David B. Quinn, Mark Nicholls, W. Noel Sainsbury, Susan Myra Kingsbury, Wesley Frank Craven, David H. Flaherty, Louis B. Wright, and Alexander Brown provided invaluable access to seventeenth-century letters and accounts through their documentary editions. All but a few of the parallels between the Jamestown chronicles and The Tempest were identified before this book was written in the diligent work of Robert Ralston Cawley, Charles Mills Gayley, Geoffrey Bullough, Geoffrey Ashe, and David Kathman. Many works of Jamestown history have been relied upon, but the scholarship of Helen C. Rountree, William M. Kelso, Karen Ordahl Kupperman, and Frederick J. Fausz deserves special mention. The superb work of Allan J. Wingood, Jonathan Adams, Cyril H. Smith, Eric J. R. Amos, and Rosemary Jones in documenting the culture and history of Bermuda was indispensable in the composition of this work. Numerous books on Shakespeare were consulted, but those by Stephen Greenblatt, Peter Ackroyd, Marchette Chute, John G. Demaray, and Andrew Gurr were especially helpful. Finally, John Parker’s Van Meteren’s Virginia, 1607-1612 provided decisive documentation of the presence of Powhatan voyagers on the Sea Venture.