The Sea Venture — Wrecked on purpose, and everyone aboard lived
Summary
On 28 July 1609 the Sea Venture, flagship of an English supply fleet bound for the struggling colony at Jamestown, Virginia, was deliberately driven onto the reefs of Bermuda by Admiral Sir George Somers to keep her from sinking under him in a hurricane. The ship had been separated from her fleet, battered for days, and was leaking faster than her exhausted company could bail. Rather than let her founder in open water, Somers steered the dying ship at the land. She wedged between two reefs close enough to shore that every one of the roughly 150 people aboard — colonists, sailors, the new governor of Virginia, women and children — got safely off. Not a single life was lost in the wreck. It is one of the rare entries in this catalogue in which the doom was averted by the very decision that destroyed the ship.
The castaways then spent about ten months on Bermuda, an uninhabited island feared by sailors as the "Isle of Devils" but in fact mild and abundant, thick with wild hogs, fish, birds and cedar. They survived comfortably enough that survival itself bred a new danger: discontent. Several factions argued that the wreck had freed them from their indentures and that they should stay in this paradise rather than sail on to the hunger and disease of Virginia. Sir Thomas Gates, the colony's incoming governor, suppressed a series of conspiracies, and one ringleader, Henry Paine, was executed by firing squad. A handful of people died on the island of illness or violence, and two parties sent for help in a small boat were never heard from again, but the great majority lived.
From Bermuda cedar and salvaged fittings the company built two new ships, the Deliverance and the Patience, and on 10 May 1610 sailed for Virginia, reaching Jamestown on 23 May 1610. There they found the colony nearly annihilated by the "Starving Time" — perhaps sixty survivors of some five hundred. The Sea Venture's castaways, given up for dead, had arrived as unexpected rescuers. Reports of the wreck, above all William Strachey's vivid True Reportory, reached London in 1610 and are widely held to have helped inspire Shakespeare's The Tempest.
Timeline
A fleet for a dying colony
By 1609 the Virginia Company's settlement at Jamestown was failing, and the company gambled on a relief effort larger than any England had yet sent west: a fleet of seven ships and two small pinnaces, carrying several hundred new colonists and supplies, under a slate of senior officers meant to refound the colony on a firmer footing. The flagship Sea Venture, a purpose-built vessel of around 300 tons, carried the men who mattered most. Aboard were Admiral Sir George Somers, commanding the fleet at sea; Sir Thomas Gates, the incoming governor of Virginia; Captain Christopher Newport, the veteran navigator of the Jamestown route; the colony's secretary and chronicler William Strachey; and a young man named John Rolfe, later famous for tobacco and for his marriage to Pocahontas. The decision to put the entire leadership on one ship would nearly cost the colony its government.
The fleet left Plymouth on 2 June 1609 and made good time across the Atlantic. On 24 July, as it approached the West Indies, it ran into a hurricane. The ships were scattered; most weathered the storm and limped on toward Virginia, but the Sea Venture was driven away on her own into the worst of it. For days the flagship was hammered by what Strachey would describe as a darkness and a roaring beyond anything the seamen had known, the seas breaking over her and the wind tearing at the rigging. The storm did to the ship what no enemy could: it worked the oakum out from between her planks, and she began to leak from every seam.
Three days at the pumps
What followed was a contest between the sea coming in and the people aboard throwing it back out. The leak gained quickly, and the whole company — gentlemen and labourers, sailors and passengers, in shifts around the clock — bailed with buckets and worked the pumps to keep the water below a fatal level. Strachey recorded the desperation of it: the men stripped to the waist, standing in water, passing buckets in a human chain for hour after hour, some collapsing at their stations. They threw overboard cargo, ordnance and provisions to lighten the ship. For roughly three days and nights the bailing held the water roughly even, but it was a losing race; the company was exhausted, and the sea was not.
On the morning of 28 July, with the men at the end of their strength and the water rising in the hold, Sir George Somers, who had taken the helm, sighted land — the long, dangerous reefs of Bermuda. The island had a black reputation among mariners as the "Isle of Devils," ringed by reefs that had wrecked ships before. Somers made the decision that defines the case: rather than let the Sea Venture founder in deep water, where the company would drown, he drove her straight at the reef under what sail she could carry. She struck and jammed fast between two coral ledges, roughly half a mile from shore, held upright long enough for the boats to ferry everyone off. All aboard — some 150 souls, including women and at least one child — reached the beach alive. The ship was destroyed; the people were saved.
Ten months on the Isle of Devils
Bermuda proved the opposite of its reputation. The castaways found an island empty of people and predators but crowded with food: herds of wild hogs left by earlier wrecks, fish so thick they could be taken by hand, sea birds that came to a call, palmetto, berries and the tall, workable cedar that would become their salvation. After the terror of the storm, the company found themselves in something close to plenty. That very ease became the central problem of the ten months ashore. To many of the colonists and sailors, Bermuda looked far better than the disease and famine waiting in Virginia, and they argued that the shipwreck had legally dissolved their contracts and that they were free to remain. Sir Thomas Gates, determined to deliver his people to the colony he was sent to govern, treated this as mutiny.
A series of conspiracies followed over the winter. Gates and Somers, themselves at odds over precedence, nonetheless held the company together through persuasion and force. The most serious plot collapsed when one of its leaders, Henry Paine, was condemned and shot by firing squad after defying the governor — the island's one judicial execution. A handful of others died on Bermuda of illness or in quarrels, two children were born there, and a longboat sent under Henry Ravens to carry word to Virginia vanished without trace. Through it all the main work went on: under Gates's direction the carpenters built a pinnace, the Deliverance, from Bermuda cedar and the salvaged ironwork and rigging of the Sea Venture, while Somers oversaw a second, smaller vessel, the Patience. On 10 May 1610 the company crowded aboard the two new ships and sailed for Virginia, reaching Jamestown on 23 May to find the colony reduced by the "Starving Time" to perhaps sixty gaunt survivors out of some five hundred. The dead men of the Sea Venture had come back as the colony's relief.
The Five Factors
Aftermath
The Sea Venture's castaways did not merely survive; they arrived in time to keep Jamestown from being abandoned. When the two ships reached the ruined colony in May 1610, Gates judged the settlement beyond saving and began to evacuate it — only to be turned back at the river mouth by the arrival of Lord De La Warr with further supplies, and Virginia endured. Sir George Somers sailed back to Bermuda for more food and died there later that year; the island, claimed for England after the wreck, was settled within a few years and is named for him, the Somers Isles.
The wreck's most durable legacy is literary. Several survivors wrote accounts — Silvester Jourdain's Discovery of the Bermudas was printed in 1610 — but the fullest was William Strachey's A True Reportory of the Wrack and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, a letter completed in July 1610 that circulated in manuscript in London. Its description of the storm, the St Elmo's fire on the masts, the enchanted island and the deliverance of the castaways closely parallels Shakespeare's The Tempest, first performed in 1611, and is widely regarded by scholars as one of its principal sources. The disaster that began as a near-drowning in a hurricane thus survives, four centuries on, as the likely seed of one of the language's great plays.
Lessons
- When a vessel is already lost, choose the controlled wreck over the uncontrolled one; a grounded ship can be evacuated, a foundered one cannot.
- Disciplined collective effort under clear command can buy the time that converts an immediate catastrophe into a survivable one.
- Where a disaster strands you matters enormously; survey and exploit the resources the place actually offers before assuming the worst.
- Plenty can erode a group's cohesion faster than hardship; leadership must manage morale and purpose, not only supplies.
- Do not wait passively for a rescue that may never come; build your own way out with the materials at hand.
References
- Sea Venture WIKIPEDIA
- Sea Venture ENCYCLOPEDIA VIRGINIA
- The Wreck of the Sea Venture: The Untold Story THE BERMUDIAN MAGAZINE
- 405th Anniversary of the Sea Venture's Hurricane Encounter NOAA AOML
- True Reportory WIKIPEDIA