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

CHAPTER FOUR
Hurricane
Ride on the curled clouds.
—Ariel, The Tempest



The end of the serene sail of the Sea Venture came on the evening of Monday, July 24. A week from Jamestown in open water between the Caribbean and Bermuda, inky clouds and rising wind had the sailors working through the night to tie down everything on the ship in preparation for a storm. Canvas covers were lashed over wooden grates that provided ventilation to the gun deck. The guns were rolled back and tied in place and the gun ports closed, and the passengers secured their personal belongings. After a sleepless night on the ships of the Gates fleet, the morning of St. James Day, July 25, dawned with a frightful prospect.
Charcoal clouds overtook the ship, the winds rose sharply, and rain began to fall. Despite the worsening conditions, George Somers stationed himself outside on the high poop deck at the stern of the Sea Venture . There he shouted directions through a grate to the helmsman at the whipstaff below on the enclosed steerage deck—Jacobean ships were steered by a vertical staff rather than a wheel. Somers could tell this was no ordinary gale. The fleet was facing a kind of storm that few English mariners had seen but many had heard about since Europeans began crossing the Atlantic—a hurricano of the West Indies.
The storm that overtook the Sea Venture was born of winds off Africa in the tropical waters of the Equator. Gathering strength, it followed the trade winds (and the Sea Venture) across the Atlantic toward the Caribbean, veering north before encountering the West Indian island chain. The ship and the hurricane both turned north, but the Sea Venture was closer to the coast when it did so. They then followed converging tracks and met in open water halfway between the Caribbean and Bermuda. The circular storm caught the flagship with the counterclockwise winds of its northwestern edge, placing the ship at the ten o’clock position if the storm were a giant clock face. Thus, as William Strachey reported, the Sea Venture initially encountered northeast winds.
“A dreadful storm, and hideous, began to blow from out the northeast,” Strachey said, “which swelling and roaring as it were by fits, some hours with more violence than others, at length did beat all light from heaven, which like a hell of darkness turned black upon us.” Within an hour the fleet was scattered and each vessel was on its own. The Diamond, the Falcon , the Blessing, the Unity, the Lion, and the Swallow disappeared from the view of the Sea Venture watch. George Somers and his crew were now in a desperate struggle for the safety of all on board.
The ketch under the command of Michael Philes that was being towed by the flagship would sail on its own as well. The conditions were too dangerous for the tiny vessel and the much larger Sea Venture to remain tied together within striking distance of each other, and in the rough seas there was no way to transfer the people from the ketch to the ship. After signaling their intention with flags, the crewmen of the flagship cast off the towropes, and Philes and his complement of about thirty people were left to the mercy of the waves. There was a last look at the faces of the sailors on the bobbing ketch as they disappeared into the sheets of rain—never to be heard from again.

A sea storm of any kind, much less a hurricane, was a dreadful new experience for most of the colonists. Within an hour or two all the passengers on the Sea Venture feared they would die. Strachey, for one, could think of nothing but his own mortality. “It works upon the whole frame of the body and most loathsomely affects all the powers thereof,” he wrote, “and the manner of the sickness it lays upon the body, being so insufferable, gives not the mind any free and quiet time to use her judgment and empire.”
The gun deck where Strachey and the other passengers braced themselves was stifling, and the increasingly steep movements of the ship were alarming. Servant Elizabeth Persons huddled on her straw mattress as the ship pitched with a nauseating rhythm. Resorting to the rail when seasickness arose was impossible, and so chamber pots were used. Many of those then spilled with the pitching of the ship. The sleeping area with its hatches battened to keep the storm waters out quickly became a foul place. Elizabeth put her face down into her mattress, closed her eyes, and waited for the ordeal to end.
A typical Atlantic hurricane produces a trillion gallons of rain each day, and the hurricane of July 1609 was no exception. “The sea swelled above the clouds and gave battle unto heaven,” Strachey said. “It could not be said to rain, the waters like whole rivers did flood the air.” In Strachey’s mind the winds and the waves became angry giants. “The glut of water (as if throttling the wind ere while) was no sooner a little emptied and qualified, but instantly the winds (as having gotten their mouths now free and at liberty) spoke more loud and grew more tumultuous and malignant. What shall I say? Winds and seas were as mad as fury and rage could make them.”
Taking the flagship through a hurricane would test the mettle of George Somers. The admiral was faced with an immediate choice between the two options available to Jacobean mariners in heavy weather. The first was to run with the wind and “spoon afore,” or keep the ship headed in the direction of the wind with little or no sail (later called “scudding”). This would put the vessel under the least stress, but steering would be difficult and the Sea Venture might be overwhelmed and sunk by a large wave breaking over the stern. The second option was to “weather coil,” or turn the vessel around and let the waves hit the bow. The wind would then push the high stern structure as if it was a sail and the ship would ride backward.
Somers chose to spoon afore and ride the giant swells of the hurricane. To make use of the winds out of the northeast, he turned the ship and pointed it to the southwest toward the Caribbean. The waves would approach from behind and push the ship forward as they passed underneath. If Somers sensed that the ship was at all weak, this was the safest option, but it was labor-intensive and any lapse in steering would likely mean doom. A series of helmsmen would take turns wrestling the whipstaff to positions called by the admiral. Silvester Jourdain, a passenger on the Sea Venture, recalled, “Sir George Somers sitting upon the poop of the ship (where he sat three days and three nights together, without meal’s meat and little or no sleep) conning the ship to keep her as upright as he could (for otherwise she must needs instantly have foundered).”
While the storm was a horrific trial, at least it seemed that it could not get worse—and yet it did. On Tuesday morning the sailors discovered that the pitching Sea Venture was losing its oakum, the fiber caulking between its planks that was covered with pitch to keep the sea out. A leak allowing a flow of water into the hold during a hurricane was a grave development indeed. The hot sun of the tropics may have softened the pitch covering the Sea Venture’s oakum and weakened the seals, or the pitching during the storm may have loosened them. Perhaps, too, the new flagship had not been properly sealed before the voyage.
“It pleased God to bring a greater affliction yet upon us,” Strachey wrote. “For in the beginning of the storm we had received likewise a mighty leak. And the ship in every joint almost, having spewed out her oakum, before we were aware (a casualty more desperate than any other that a voyage by sea draws with it) was grown five feet suddenly deep with water above her ballast, and we almost drowned within whilst we sat looking when to perish from above.”
Before the leak was discovered the confident work of the sailors had given the passengers reason to hope. The mariners’ confidence vanished with the report that the ship was taking on water. The look on the faces of the sailors was enough to deepen the dread of the idle passengers. Death was almost certain—there was little question now. “This imparting no less terror than danger,” Strachey said, “ran through the whole ship with much fright and amazement, startled and turned the blood, and took down the braves of the most hardy mariner of them all, insomuch as he that before happily felt not the sorrow of others, now began to sorrow for himself when he saw such a pond of water so suddenly broken in, and which he knew could not (without present avoiding) but instantly sink him.”
Gates immediately ordered pumping and bailing to begin. At the same time, he dispatched his officers and men to search the ship for the source of incoming water. “There might be seen master, master’s mate, boatswain, quartermaster, coopers, carpenters, and who not,” Strachey said, “with candles in their hands, creeping along the ribs viewing the sides, searching every corner and listening in every place if they could hear the water run.” Ceramic pots may have been pressed against the inside of the hull of the ship to magnify the sound of in-rushing water. The standard method for stopping leaks at sea was to smear them with a mixture of animal fat and ashes, according to the standard sailor’s manual of the time. Stouter plugs were needed to fill larger gaps, the manual says, and “in some cases (when the leak is very great) pieces of raw beef, oatmeal bags, and the like stuff ” would be pounded into the seams.
Since the situation on the Sea Venture was dire, the sailors used the most readily available time-tested method—stuffing strips of dried beef into the seams. Once moistened with seawater the beef expanded and formed an adequate temporary caulking. Each time a leak was discovered, the sailors wedged their candlesticks between higher boards of the ship and pounded a strip of beef into place. “Many a weeping leak was this way found and hastily stopped, and at length one in the gunner room made up with I know not how many pieces of beef,” Strachey reported, “but all was to no purpose, the leak (if it were but one) which drunk in our greatest seas and took in our destruction fastest could not then be found, nor ever was, by any labor, counsel, or search.”
The water already in the hold hampered the sailors’ effort to stop the flow. Somers claimed it was nine feet deep when discovered, substantially more than the five of Strachey’s estimate. The flood and the cargo made it impossible to search the most sensitive part of the ship, the bottom along the keel. That left pumping and bailing as the only option. One last attempt to find the leak was prompted by the pumping operation. Soggy masses of bread kept clogging the pumps, Strachey said, raising the possibility that the inflow was in the bread room. “The waters still increasing, and the pumps going, which at length choked with bringing up whole and continual biscuit (and indeed all we had, ten thousand weight), it was conceived as most likely that the leak might be sprung in the bread room, whereupon the carpenter went down and ripped up all the room, but could not find it so.”


Many on the Sea Venture were near despair. “To me this leakage appeared as a wound given to men that were before dead,” Strachey said. “The Lord knows I had as little hope as desire of life in the storm and in this it went beyond my will, because [it was] beyond my reason why we should labor to preserve life, yet we did, either because so dear are a few lingering hours of life in all mankind or that our Christian knowledge taught us how much we owed to the rites of nature, as bound, not to be false to ourselves or to neglect the means of our own preservation.”
Teams of men—the dozen or so women and children on the ship did not work—were at the task of pumping and bailing from the hour the leak was discovered. At the beginning of the operation Somers briefly put another man on steering so that he could take a turn at the pumps. “The men might be seen to labor, I may well say, for life, and the better sort, even our governor and admiral themselves, not refusing their turn and to spell each the other to give example to other,” Strachey said.
Colonist William Pierce worked with his fellows at the pumps and buckets. As much as he feared for his own safety, the fate of his wife and daughter on the Blessing was of greater concern. At the beginning of the storm he had stayed on deck until the sheets of rain obscured the view of the other ships. The Blessing had been lost to view on the surface of a wild sea. Now as Pierce passed buckets down the line he was wracked with worry for his wife and child. Whether they lived or were deep in the sea he knew not, and the uncertainty was sorrowful indeed.
There were three pumps on the Sea Venture, two below by the capstan (the winch used to raise the anchor) and one on the open half deck by the mainmast at the center of the ship. Water drawn from them flowed through pipes to scupper holes at the sides of the ship. Strachey reported that the pumpers maintained a pace of a thousand strokes per hour, the equivalent of one every three seconds. While the pumpers worked, bailers labored in lines from the water-filled hold to three open gun ports—apparently each of the three teams Gates created was responsible for a pump and a bailing line. The bailers managed a pace of twelve hundred buckets per hour, with each pail holding either six or eight gallons and weighing fifty or seventy pounds—a rate of one bucket dumped every nine seconds. Strachey estimated that the pumpers and bailers together removed sixty-four hundred gallons of water each hour (an amount that would, as he put it, fill twenty-five “tun” barrels). That would make just over a half million gallons of water removed from the ship during the storm.
“We kept one hundred men always working night and day,” Somers reported. Jourdain recalled that during the “sharp and cruel storm” the men put forth an unceasing effort: “With the violent working of the seas our ship became so shaken, torn, and leaked, that she received so much water as covered two tiers of hogsheads above the ballast; that our men stood up to the middles with buckets, barricos, and kettles to bail out the water, and continually pumped for three days and three nights together without any intermission.”
Not only did the men have little rest; they also had little to eat or drink. Food was inaccessible in the hold, and conditions made it impossible to light a fire in the cookroom. Besides, there was no time to eat. Since the Sea Venture was carrying an unintended load of tons of seawater, the leaders of the expedition ordered the ship lightened by the dumping of heavy material. The heaviest things to go over the side were half of the guns, which were unhitched from their mounts and pushed into the roiling sea. Personal items were also thrown over the side. “We much unrigged our ship,” Strachey said, “threw overboard much luggage, many a trunk and chest (in which I suffered no mean loss), and staved many a butt of beer, hogshead of oil, cider, wine, and vinegar, and heaved away all our ordnance on the starboard side.”
Through it all, everyone on the Sea Venture knew well that the vessel might sink at any time. Strachey said the pounding was violent and thunderous: “Sometimes strikes in our ship, amongst women and passengers not used to such hurly and discomforts, made us look one upon the other with troubled hearts and panting bosoms, our clamors drowned in the winds and the winds in thunder. Prayers might well be in the heart and lips, but drowned in the outcries of the officers; nothing heard that could give comfort, nothing seen that might encourage hope.”
The pregnant Goodwife Rolfe was among the “women and passengers not used to such hurly and discomforts,” whose mournful calls despaired of salvation. Sleepless, thirsty, seasick, and without hope, the agonizing hours of the storm passed with a cruel lethargy. Lacking the monotonous but mind-numbing activity of the men left the women with nothing to do but mull the fate that awaited them in the angry sea. Terrified, too, were Namontack and Machumps. Powhatans were accomplished small-craft mariners and they surely had been on rivers and in coastal seas many times. The Powhatans were also familiar with Atlantic hurricanes, but being at sea in the midst of one in a foreign vessel over which they had no control was a deeply frightening experience.
By the afternoon of Tuesday, July 25, the Sea Venture voyagers had fought the storm for nearly twenty-four hours. During that time the flagship had begun to follow the path it would take through the hurricane, ultimately tracing a backward-leaning J. At the time the storm hit, Virginia lay ahead to the northwest, the Caribbean was to the southwest, and Bermuda was to the northeast. When the flagship entered the swirl at the ten o’clock position, Somers veered from his Virginia-bound path to point the bow toward the Caribbean. As time passed he would trace a half circle (the bottom of the backward-leaning J) before ultimately being carried on a long straight line to the northeast toward Bermuda.
Through Tuesday as the ship followed its half-circle path it was drawn ever closer to the center of the hurricane. Then at dusk, the Sea Venture passed through the eye. “For four and twenty hours the storm in a restless tumult had blown so exceedingly, as we could not apprehend in our imaginations any possibility of greater violence,” Strachey wrote, “yet did we still find it, not only more terrible, but more constant, fury added to fury, and one storm urging a second more outrageous than the former.” To the people on board the Sea Venture, the passage through the eye was a bizarre interlude between one intense storm and another of even more power.
In a description that probably referred to the passage over the haphazard waves of the eye, Strachey recalled that the Sea Venture “ran now (as do hoodwinked men) at all adventures, sometimes north and northeast, then north and by west, and in an instant again varying two or three points, and sometimes half the compass.” After passing through the center, the vessel reentered the maelstrom and began riding with the hurricane toward the center of the Atlantic. A storm that would have passed over an anchored vessel and left it behind instead pushed the floating flagship along with it as it moved. Those on board consequently experienced extreme weather conditions for an unusually long time.
All through Tuesday and into the night Somers remained at his post on the stern deck. The heavy clouds made it impossible to use the sun or stars to chart the ship’s position, and Somers steered in the dark by the feel of the ship as it rode the waves. The helmsman below at the whipstaff had it a little easier, as fellow sailors kept lanterns lit so he could see to move the steering pole to the positions ordered from above. Even in its horror the rhythm of the ship was lulling, at times almost enough to cause Somers to shut his eyes and sleep, but he did not. If he could just remain awake and steer the Sea Venture through the storm, they might make it to Virginia without further incident. The admiral settled in for a long stint at his post, unaware that even as he did so a foaming giant was looming behind him and preparing to strike.