Sea Venture Quotes

“In exchange, he was given a note “with the armes of Englande testifying the receipt therof.”24 Because of the size of his investment—£50, or roughly $10,000 in modern money, compared with the single share price of £12 10s (12 pounds, 10 shillings), or about $2,500 in modern terms—and because of his legal background, he was also appointed to the Virginia Council, the group of men whose job it would be to oversee operations of the colony from London.”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown

“Sir George, meanwhile, remained on the ship’s poop, conning the vessel. As the morning hours passed, the storm abated slightly. Suddenly, the admiral jumped to his feet. He wiped the driving rain from his face and stared ahead, hoping his tired eyes were not deceiving him. Suddenly, Somers cried a word that brought amazement, and then joy, to all on the struggling ship. “Land!” he cried. “Land!”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown

“labored almost without rest to save the ship and who had urged and cajoled his fellow passengers to bail and pump and then pump and bail some more, was ready to concede defeat. He waded out of the flooded hold saying that if he was to die, he did not want to perish in the hold of the ship, but on the deck, under the open sky, in the company of his friends. But the Sea Venture was not sinking—not yet, at least. And, probably at screamed orders from Admiral Somers, Strachey and Gates and the other men who were still able—and women, too, no doubt—went back to the pumps, back to the buckets and pails, and back to the exhausting, ceaseless, lifesaving work.”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown

“In exchange for the parcel of land, Smith promised copper and “gave” Parahunt a teenaged English boy named Henry Spelman to serve as a translator. With the deal closed, Smith ordered West to move into the Indian village with his men and then made his way back to the ship for his journey downriver to Jamestown.”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown

“The little satellite settlement was in disarray, with no discipline, no rule other than every man for himself. West himself, the putative leader of the settlement, was gone, searching for gold. The situation was so bad that Smith was unable to smooth relations between the colonists and the Indians,”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown

“It took no time at all for trouble to break out between the colonists sent north with West and the natives living near the falls on the James River, near the site of present-day Richmond. More interested in searching for gold—that nonexistent Virginia gold yet again!—than in planting crops or in peaceful trade, the colonists built a fort of sorts on some low land close to the river and then simply demanded that the natives supply them with food. When the natives resisted, the English took what they wanted. “That disorderlie company so tormented those poore naked soules [the Indians], by stealing their corne, robbing their gardens, beating them, breaking their houses, and keeping some prisoners,”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown

“At the same time, Smith decided that the best way, indeed the only way, to guarantee Jamestown’s future was to disperse settlers. In making this decision, he was taking a page out of the Indians’ playbook since the Powhatan people routinely broke into small groups when food was scarce so that they could better forage and live off the land. Smith opted to send about sixty colonists downriver under the leadership of John Martin and George Percy (two of the men he counted as enemies). At the same time, he dispatched roughly 130 colonists up the James to a spot near the village of Powhatan, ruled by Wahunsonacock’s son, Parahunt. This group he placed under the leadership of Francis West, whose only claim to leadership was that he was the twenty-three-year-old younger brother of Thomas West, Lord De La Warre, the man who had been named “governor for life” of the Virginia colony, and who was expected to arrive in Jamestown at almost any time. These groups, Smith believed, would be able to trade for supplies and live off the land, enabling those who remained in Jamestown to survive the fast approaching winter. Smith, as well as the men who left the protection of the settlement to live off the land, were unaware that Wahunsonacock was no longer willing even to feign friendship”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown

“By this time, Wahunsonacock (Powhatan) and his people all along the Chesapeake were fully aware of the arrival of the hundreds of settlers on board the ships that rode at anchor off Jamestown. The paramount chief, while not privy to the plans that had been made in London, was savvy enough to know in his bones that the occupation of his lands and the threat to his rule—his very survival and that of his people—had been ratcheted to a new level. Thanks to his spies close to the colony and to several colonists who abandoned the settlement to take shelter with the natives, he also knew that the settlement was once again short of food and, even more important, that John Smith’s rule was under attack from within. Since his first meeting with Smith, the old chief had known Smith was the colonist most worthy of respect and fear. Now less fearful of the short, red-bearded captain than at any time since that first meeting, Wahunsonacock determined to abandon his policy of more or less peaceful coexistence and to do what was needed to force the coat-wearing people from his lands once and for all or to force them to submit to his rule.”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown

“In reality, Smith, the man of action who had won respect as a soldier in Europe, would not have had to expend much in the way of bribes or feasting to earn the mariners’ support. They certainly knew they had a better chance of surviving long enough to reboard their ships for the return voyage to England by following John Smith’s lead than by throwing their lot in with Archer, Ratcliffe, or John Martin. Whether by bribery or, more likely, simply by dint of his personality, Smith quickly garnered enough support to convince his opposition to leave him in control of the colony. With as much good grace as his enemies could muster, which was not much, they allowed Smith to remain in office as their soon-to-be-replaced leader.”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown

“George Percy, the journal keeper who would later prove to be a terribly inept governor in his own right, said that Smith, “fearing … thatt the seamen and thatt factyoin mighte growe too stronge and be a meanes to depose him of his governmentt,” bribed the mariners “by the way of feasteings Expense of mutche powder and other unnecessary Tryumphes That mutche was Spente to noe other purpose butt to Insinewate wth his Reconcyled enemyes and for his owne vayne glory for the wch we all after suffered.”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown

“Still, John Smith knew he had to have backing if he was to lead the colony successfully even for a few weeks. He would have deeply felt his responsibility to both the four hundred or so newcomers who had survived the hurricane as well as the approximately two hundred already living in Jamestown when the remnants of the 1609 fleet arrived.”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown

“Now Archer and Ratcliffe and, to a lesser degree, John Martin, another of the original settlers whose laziness had angered Smith in the colony’s early days, and who had departed in 1608 only to return on the Falcon, all saw their chance to repay Smith for his cheek by stripping him of his office. Of course, Smith was not about to give up without a fight. He said, with justification, that since the colony’s new leaders and the new charter authorizing the change in leadership were somewhere out on the Atlantic (or at its bottom), there was neither need nor authority for him to give up his post. And he certainly did not want to turn the leadership of the colony over to men he knew were ill suited to guarantee its safety or survival. For his part, if Smith had known what lay in store in the next few weeks, he might well have simply thrown up his hands and ceded control to the men he found so distasteful. As it was, at one point, he said he would give up his commission to Martin, a man he apparently found slightly less offensive than Ratcliffe and Archer. Martin accepted, but kept the job for only three hours before deciding the responsibility was more than he wanted to shoulder and turning the task back to Smith. As much as Smith disliked Ratcliffe, Archer, and Martin, he felt no better when he surveyed the new settlers dispatched by the Virginia Company. They were, in Smith’s view, a pretty sorry lot.”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown

“The bad blood that pitted Archer and Ratcliffe against Smith had its beginnings in 1607, in Jamestown’s earliest days, when the three men served together on the colony’s ruling council. In the months when colonists were dying of hunger and illness, Smith discovered that the duo, along with a few others, were planning to steal supplies and a small boat they could use to flee Virginia for the safety of England. While Smith would almost certainly have been happy to see the last of the two men he thought of as cowards and traitors, he knew the colony could not survive without the boat and that the supplies the men were about to steal were sorely needed by the hungry colonists. Smith, in typical John Smith fashion, soon spiked those plans when he ordered several of the settlement’s cannon turned on the boat and ordered those on board to come ashore or be shot out of the water. Neither Archer nor Ratcliffe was the type of man to take such effrontery lying down, especially from a man they would have considered their social inferior. A few weeks later, the two saw an opportunity to even the score. At that time (it was after Smith’s rescue by Pocahontas, when he returned to Jamestown), Archer and Ratcliffe used the Bible as a legal text and charged Smith with murder under Levitical law. Ludicrous as it seems, the two argued that the “eye for an eye” verse made Smith responsible for the deaths of two of his men who had been killed when Smith was captured by the Powhatan people. It is a measure of Smith’s unpopularity with the “better sort” of colonists (not only Ratcliffe and Archer) that he was—within hours of his return to Jamestown—charged, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to die, with the execution scheduled for the next morning. That night (it was in early 1608), Smith was saved from death when Captain Christopher Newport, the man who later served as the Sea Venture’s captain, unexpectedly sailed up to Jamestown with a handful of new colonists and a shipload of food and other supplies. Newport, who recognized Smith’s value to the colony even if some of the other leaders did not and who, no doubt, saw the idiocy of making Smith responsible for the death of the men who had been killed by the Indians, immediately ordered him freed and all charges against him dropped.”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown

“Captain John Smith, who had taken the colony’s reins in September 1608, was fully able to continue leading and he was entitled, under the terms of the original charter, to hold the office for a full year, or until September 10, 1609. However, several settlers, men who saw themselves assuming the leadership of the settlement, had other ideas. This group was almost certainly led by two of the colony’s original settlers who had left the colony only to return in the fleet of 1609. One of the two was Gabriel Archer, the Blessing passenger who wrote about conditions on the vessel in the hurricane. His right-hand man was John Sicklemore, a settler who, for reasons no one has ever been able to determine, used the alias John Ratcliffe. These two men soundly despised Smith—a feeling he returned in kind. Now, they saw an opportunity to supplant Smith as the colony’s leader or, at the very least, to force him to step down in accordance with the terms of the new charter.”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown

“the settlers in the little fort on the banks of the James must have been dismayed when they discovered that the “admiral” bearing Sir Thomas and Sir George was missing in action along with the lion’s share of provisions meant to help the colony survive the winter, when food was scarce at best. Of course, the seven ships that survived the hurricane did carry at least some food and other supplies, but nowhere near enough to satisfy the growling bellies inside the fort. Then, too, there was the fact that the ships carried all those new settlers whose presence could only add to the colony’s seemingly endless food shortages.”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown

“it is unlikely that any of the ships’ captains seriously considered steering their damaged and undermanned vessels to either Barbuda or the Bermudas in search of the Sea Venture. Instead, the storm would have convinced all the captains to steer for Virginia and what they hoped and prayed would be safety.”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown

“the death toll on the Diamond and the Swallow was terrible. Between the two vessels, thirty-two passengers and crew—well over 10 percent of their total complement—had died at sea, their bodies thrown overboard. Somehow, during the crossing, perhaps at the height of the storm, two of the women passengers gave birth to babies. Not surprisingly given the circumstances, the two children, both boys, died in mid-Atlantic.”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown

“vessels in the fleet endured after leaving the company of the Sea Venture. The first thing that happened—and this was reported by every witness—was that the ships scattered. Contact was soon lost and it was every vessel for herself. In reality, even if the ships’ captains had wanted to stay in contact, it would have been impossible. The only way for ships to communicate was by flag or other visual signals, by lights at night, or by horns or cannon. At the height of a storm, such communication was obviously out of the question. As the wind increased and waves grew, every ship’s master would have had his hands full saving his own ship and passengers and crew.”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown

“the balance of the fleet—other than the little ketch that was lost after separating from Sea Venture in the early hours of the storm—had survived the tempest, if barely. On August 10, four of those ships passed between Cape Henry and Cape Charles, named for the sons of King James I, and sailed slowly up the Chesapeake Bay on the rising tide. The ships—the Blessing, the Falcon, the Lion, and the Unity—were battered, their masts broken or missing, sails in tatters, decks scoured by roaring seas. Over the next two days, the ships moved north and east to the mouth of the James River and then crept up the James River, described by George Percy, one of the original Jamestown settlers, as “one of the famousest Rivers that ever was found by any Christian … where ships of great burthen may harbor in safety.”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown

“Even before those in Bermuda knew that Ravens’s mission was unsuccessful, Sir Thomas Gates ordered the construction of a pinnace that could carry survivors on to Jamestown. He may have figured there were no ships in Virginia large enough to rescue all the survivors—more than 140 following the departure of Ravens and his shipmates—or he may simply have been pragmatic about the likelihood that the longboat might never make it to the Chesapeake. In any event, the same day that Ravens left, the keel of the pinnace was laid on Buildings Bay, just south of the beach on which Gates and the other survivors first came ashore. There, a group of men set about building a large pinnace under the direction of Frobisher, the able ship’s carpenter. But even as they laid the keel and began fashioning the ribs of the vessel they hoped would carry them to safety, trouble was brewing, trouble that would ultimately threaten tragedy for all the Sea Venture survivors.”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown

“Night after night, Strachey would sit by the fire, waiting and watching and hoping.24 Perhaps it was at this time that he began his long report on the shipwreck or perhaps he simply gazed seaward and thought of what the uncertain future might hold. September turned to October and October to November, however, with no sight of Ravens or of any rescue vessel from Jamestown. His fate and the fate of his mates was never determined. Almost certainly, they were lost in a sudden storm—after all, it was still hurricane season—that sent their tiny vessel to the bottom.25”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown

“Ravens and the others were able to find water deep enough to handle the longboat’s twenty-inch draft. Before his departure, Ravens promised Gates and Somers and Strachey and the other survivors that if he lived and arrived safe in Virginia, he would return by the time of the next new moon, or by late September. Ravens, in turn, was told that the survivors would light a signal fire to guide him back.”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown

“Sometime around mid-August, the ship’s carpenter, Richard Frobisher—described by Strachey as “a painful and well-experienced shipwright and skillful workman”—set about making the ship’s boat ready for a sea voyage.22 Using hatches salvaged from the wreck, he built a deck and made the longboat “so close that no water could go in her.”23 He fitted the little vessel with sails and checked its caulking and made the boat—probably about twenty-four feet in length and unballasted—as ready as he could for a voyage across almost six hundred miles of dangerous, open ocean.”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown

“Within a week or two weeks of their grounding, Gates and the others knew that the other ships in the fleet had either been lost in the storm or had sailed on to Jamestown. If any of the other sea captains had decided after the storm to search for the Sea Venture and those who sailed in her, they had abandoned those efforts as futile within just a few days. Those in Bermuda knew that they had to try to let the Virginia colonists know of the shipwreck and, if possible, to arrange for their own rescue.”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown

“Of course, Sir George and Sir Thomas and Captain Newport had worries other than just food and water and shelter. They were bound, by duty and by desire, to fulfill their obligations to the Virginia Company. The men and women in Jamestown were waiting for their arrival and the supplies they carried, while others in Virginia and in England and in Bermuda, too, had invested heavily in the Virginia venture. Somehow, the Sea Venture survivors had to escape the islands and make their way to the Chesapeake.”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown

“By the first week of August—within a week or so of the wreck—Sir George “squared out a garden” where he planted muskmelons, peas, onions, radish, lettuce, and other herbs and good English plants.21 In ten days the seeds, carried as cargo on the Sea Venture, had sprouted and pushed their way above ground. The island’s birds made quick work of the sprouts, though, and none of the plants matured. Somers had no better luck with several sugarcane sprouts he planted in the garden area near the little gathering of thatched huts; they were almost immediately rooted up and eaten by the island’s wild hogs. Despite these early disappointments, Somers and the other survivors thought that the Bermudas would prove to be a likely place for English settlers to grow the lemons, oranges, sugarcane, and even grape vines that thrived in some of the Spanish islands of the Caribbean. In fact, as fertile as the Bermudas appeared to the survivors, the island chain’s soil and subtropical climate were ill suited to producing most crops. Still, the survivors found plenty of food and lush surroundings and mostly pleasant weather and ready shelter.”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown

“the survivors had established their tiny settlement on the beach overlooking Gates Bay. The quarters were described as “cabins” thatched with palmetto fronds. Nearby stood the small enclosure they had built to hold the hogs ferried ashore from the Sea Venture wreck. Men had dug a well not far from the beach, near the site where Fort St. Catherine would be built in 1616. Because there was no salt on the island and none had been salvaged from the ships, Somers ordered a hut built near the shore where fires were kept burning beneath three or four of the ship’s kettles filled with seawater to produce salt.”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown

“In fact, it is unlikely that all the men on the island went in search of food and water. While some went foraging, others would have set about building rough shelters, thatched with palm fronds, above the high-water mark. At the same time, sailors, probably under the watchful eye of Sir George Somers, made repeated trips to the grounded vessel, salvaging anything that might be of service. Planks above the waterline were torn from the ship’s oaken frames and hauled ashore along with hatches and any undamaged spars that could be removed and metal fittings and canvas and cordage and tools and even books and the important charts from Newport’s cabin and, of course, the instructions and a copy of the new Virginia charter given to Gates by the officers of the Virginia Company in London. Somehow the heavy ship’s bell was hauled ashore, as were several heavy cooking kettles and at least one of the smallest cannon. Within days, though, the salvage operation came to an end as the Sea Venture slipped beneath the waves, to rest where her bones still lie, between the two coral outcroppings that trapped her. Even though the survivors must have known the ship was lost once it struck the reef,”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown

“the haunts of certain nocturnal birds which during the day remain in their caves but at night come out to feed.… At nightfall these birds come out from their caves with such an outcry and varying clamor that one cannot help being afraid until one realizes the reason.”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown

“the island chain had achieved such a terrible reputation, thanks to its reefs and to the unearthly screams of the island’s millions of cahows, that mariners were calling Bermuda the Isle of Devils.”
― Kieran Doherty, Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown