The Sea Venture — Wrecked on purpose, and everyone aboard lived

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.