Sea Venture, sailed June 18, 1609

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A part of the Third Supply, a flotilla of nine ships.

Sea Venture, sailed June 18, 1609

The Third Supply was a flotilla of nine ships, all intended for Jamestown, Virginia, commanded by Admiral Sir George Somers. The flagship, the Sea Venture, also called the Seaventure or Sea Adventure, with Captain Christopher Newport. ^[1]

Although many online genealogies show that Samuel Jordan (1578-1623), was a passenger on the "Sea Venture", there is no evidence that he was. This is a case of mistaken identity. The person who came on the "Sea Venture" was Silvester Jourdain/Jourdan, voyager, was son William Jourdain of Lyme Regis, Dorsetshire, and cousin of John Joumain.^[2]

Silvester Jourdain left Plymouth, England on June 18, 1609, and sailed for Jamestown with the interim governor, Sir Thomas West. They sailed on the Seaventure with six hundred land men in a fleet of eight good ships and one pinnance under the command of Sir George Somers. Somers' flotilla encountered a severe storm near the Bermudas which left the Seaventure unseaworthy. The other ships continued on their way to Jamestown. The passengers of the Seaventure, including Governor West, Samuel Jordan, and the Flotilla Commander, Sir George Somers, decided to stay in Bermuda and build two new ships, instead of attempting to repair the Seaventure, in order to carry additional food and supplies the island provided. Samuel Jordan was elected to keep the day-to-day journal because he was well educated. The journal is found in Hakluytls "Voyages, Travels, and Discoveries." Samuel's log serves as the basis of much of our information today. In nine months the shipwrecked persons built two new ships, the Patience and the Deliverer partly out of the wreckage of the Seaventure. They set sail again for Jamestown, May 10, 1610, and arrived July 25, 1610.

Caleb Johnson states that the Sea Venture sailed from Plymouth, England the evening of Friday, 2 June 1609. Aboard were 140 men and ten women, including the next governor of Jamestown, Sir Thomas Gates; the fleet's Admiral, Sir George Somers, and the ship's captain, Christopher Newport. ^[3]

It is alleged that Samuel Jordan, the first of the Jordans (along with relative Silvester Jordaine) to come to America, left Plymouth, England on June 18, 1609, and sailed for Jamestown with the the largest expedition ever sent by any colonizing group. The Flotilla comprising nine vessels ;the Lion, Blessing , Unity, Swallow, Falcon, Diamond,Virginia and the Sea Venture (towing a small ketch for use as a river vessel). The flagship the Sea Venture was two to three times grander than the others in the fleet.

150 men would ride in this ship which carried the Virginia Companies most illustrious men:

In charge - Admiral Sir George Somers, celebrated naval hero and Vice Admiral Christopher Newport. Sir Thomas Gates interim Governor,John Rolfe and his first wife Sarah (Rolfe later married 2) Pochahontas 3) Jane Pierce (Capt. William Pierce’s daughter)), George Yeardley captain of the Governors Guards and future Governor, Captains William Pierce, Samuel Jordan - Governors Guards (Jordan was Joan Pierce’s cousin who married 2) Cecily Bailey), Silvester Jourdain – Cousin to Joan Pierce/Samuel Jordan. Friend and business associate of Admiral Somer’s and travelogue writer as well as merchant specializing in husbanding ship’s provisions - documented the voyage for the Virginia Company. Shipwrecked in Bermuda, arrived in Va. May 23, 1610. The flotilla encountered a severe storm near the Bermudas which left the Seaventure unseaworthy. The other ships continued on their way to Jamestown. The passengers of the Seaventure, including Governor West, Samuel Jordan, and the Flotilla Commander, Sir George Somers, decided to stay in Bermuda and build two new ships, instead of attempting to repair the Seaventure, in order to carry additional food and supplies the island provided. Samuel Jordan was elected to keep the day-to-day journal because he was well educated. The journal is found in Hakluytls "Voyages, Travels, and Discoveries."^[4] Samuel's log serves as the basis of much of our information today. In nine months the shipwrecked persons built two new ships, the Patience and the Deliverer partly out of the wreckage of the Seaventure. They set sail again for Jamestown, May 10, 1610, and arrived July 25, 1610.

The Sea Venture - Source for Shakespeare's "The Tempest"

Alden T. Vaughan, professor emeritus of history, Columbia University; co-curator of Folger Shakespeare Library's 2007 Shakespeare in American Life exhibition Excerpted from Alden T. Vaughan, "Shakespeare Discovers America, America Discovers Shakespeare," Shakespeare in American Life exhibition catalog. Folger Shakespeare Library, 2007.

The story of the Sea Venture's wreck on the Bermuda Islands has often been told, but it bears a brief summary here because it opened Shakespeare's works to the influences of English colonization and, perhaps more important, because it undergirds the theory—espoused intermittently since the late nineteenth century—that Shakespeare set The Tempest on Bermuda and intended the characters to reflect early American persons and events. Bermuda, to this day, reminds visitors of its reputed Tempest connections with venues like Prospero's Cave (a night club), Caliban's Bar, and the Ariel Sands Beach Club.

The five hundred potential colonists in nine ships that departed England in early June 1609 expected to sail north of Bermuda on their westward route from the Canary Islands to Virginia. When they were several days short of their destination, a massive hurricane scattered the fleet. One vessel sank; seven ships straggled into Jamestown, weeks overdue. The flagship Sea Venture, carrying the fleet's admiral, Sir George Somers, and Virginia's new governor, Sir Thomas Gates, never arrived at Jamestown and was presumed to have been lost.

News of the tragedy reached England when the surviving ships headed home from Jamestown, "laden with nothing but bad reports and letters of discouragement." England's only American colony, readers learned, was beset by Indians, ravaged by sickness, on the verge of starvation, and shorn of legitimate leadership. Its "headless and unbridled multitude," lamented the Virginia Company of London (the colony's supervisory body), had succumbed to "disorder and riot." Company spokesmen blamed everything, directly or indirectly, on "the Tempest."1

Against all expectations, the Sea Venture had weathered the storm—barely. Among the survivors, William Strachey described the experience most vividly in a very long letter (twenty-two folio pages when finally printed), written in Virginia to an unnamed lady in England.2 For three days and four nights, Strachey remembered, all hands—crew and passengers, noblemen and commoners—pumped, bailed, cast trunks and barrels overboard, and jettisoned much of the ship's rigging, while sailors, lighting their way with candles, stuffed the leaking hull with whatever came to hand, even beef from the ship's larder. Many distraught souls, resigned to a watery death, bid their friends farewell or took refuge in drink. But "it pleased God," another survivor gratefully recalled, to push the Sea Venture within three-quarters of a mile of Bermuda, where it "fast lodged and locked" between coral boulders.3 All 150 passengers and crew rode the ship's boats to solid land.

1 Various documents concerning the Virginia Colony, the relief expedition, and the Sea Venture's fate are printed in Alexander Brown, The Genesis of the United States:…A Series of Historical Manuscripts Now First Printed, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1890). Quotations here are from 1: 333, 347, 348.

2 Soon after his arrival in Virginia in May 1610, Strachey composed "A true reportory of the wracke, and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates Knight; upon, and from the Ilands of the Bermudas; his comming to Virginia, and the estate of the Colonie then...." Strachey dated the letter 15 July but composed it over several days or weeks before it accompanied Sir Thomas Gates to England. The letter circulated there in one or more manuscript copies before Samuel Purchas published it in Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 4 vols. (London: for Henry Fetherston, 1625), 4:1734–56. A modernized and annotated version is in A Voyage to Virginia in 1609, ed. Louis B. Wright (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1964).

3 Silvester Jourdain's slim pamphlet, A Discovery of the Barmudas, otherwise called the Ile of Divels (London: for Roger Barnes, 1610) complements Strachey's longer account but without the latter's exposé of conspiracies in Bermuda and deplorable conditions in Virginia. A Discovery of the Barmudas is reprinted, with modern spelling, in Wright (note 2). A new charter for the Virginia Colony, issued in 1612, put Bermuda within its boundaries, although the islands soon became a separate jurisdiction in the English empire.

No humans, European or aboriginal, inhabited the Bermuda archipelago when the Sea Venture fortuitously arrived. During the previous century, ships of many nations had crashed on its reefs, and a few survivors had lived to describe the "Isle of Devils," but the most tangible signs of those accidental visits were the wild hogs whose ancestors swam ashore from shipwrecked vessels. Yet Bermuda was, as the Sea Venture's passengers quickly realized, an island paradise strategically located for transatlantic commerce or piracy and free for the taking. Instead of the reputed devils and malicious spirits, the English encountered docile and abundant birds, fish, tortoises, and the immigrant hogs; fruits and berries were ubiquitous. The climate was salubrious, the environment healthy. During the next nine months, Admiral Somers supervised the construction of two seaworthy vessels from Bermuda cedar and the Sea Venture's salvageable timbers and tackle.

Not everyone pitched in. Some men preferred a life of ease on Bermuda to the imagined perils of Virginia and refused to build the ships. Other men objected to cutting and carrying cedar logs, still others resented Gates and Somers's firm authority, and a few cast covetous eyes on the survivors' valuable goods. Strachey's letter bristles with charges of "conspiracy," "Mutinie," "Rebellion," and "bloudy issues and mischiefes." By the time the Sea Venture's passengers and crew sailed to Jamestown in the newly completed Deliverance and Patience in May 1610, one man had been executed, one (maybe two) had been murdered, and two men who hid from harsh punishment were left behind.

The Virginia Colony, Strachey discovered on arrival, was comparably chaotic. "[W]e found the Pallisadoes torne downe,…the Gates from off the hinges, and emptie houses…burnt" for firewood. Outside the fort, "the Indian[s] killed as fast…if our men stirred but beyond the bounds of their blockhouse, as Famine and Pestilence did within." With only sixty men and women surviving from the several hundred who had reached Jamestown since 1607, Gates and the disheveled remnant abandoned the colony; only the unexpected arrival of fresh settlers and supplies under a new governor, Francis West, Lord De La Warr, saved the day. With order largely restored, Sir Thomas Gates left for England in early September 1610, carrying Strachey's letter. It was too candid for the Virginia Company of London to permit publication, but the manuscript fascinated many readers, including William Shakespeare.

The Tempest (completed in late 1610 or early 1611) borrowed some of Strachey's words, phrases, and themes, as well as touches from Silvester Jourdain's less revealing pamphlet (1610), and many other—mostly non-American—texts and ideas.4 In 1613, Shakespeare and John Fletcher would take a leaf from Ben Jonson's Epicoene by invoking an Indian from England's colonial sphere. A muscular captive named Epenow, displayed frequently in London "as a wonder," almost surely inspired Henry VIII's porter to smirk: "have wee some strange Indian with the great Toole, come to Court, the women so besiege us?" (5.3) English America had entered Shakespeare's literary source book.

4 Purchas, 4:1749; S. G. Culliford, William Strachey, 1572–1621 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1965), 151–58. Robert Ralston Cawley, "Shakspere's Use of the Voyagers in The Tempest," PMLA 41 (1926): 688–726, compares Strachey's (and other) narratives with The Tempest.

Sources

• Johnson, Caleb; Here Shall I Die Ashore, Stephen Hopkins: Bermuda Castaway, Jamestown Survivor, and Mayflower Pilgrim. Xlibris Corporation, 2007.
• Encyclopedia Virginia

References

1. ↑ This and other information concerning the Sea Venture, sailed 1609 from research and compilation by Anne Shurtleff Stevens of packrat-pro.com 2001.
2. ↑ Jourdain, Silvester (DNB00). (2012, November 17). In Wikisource . Retrieved 00:03, February 16, 2018, from https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Jourdain,_Silvester_(DNB00)&oldid=4141219
3. ↑ Here Shall I Die Ashore
4. ↑ Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (London, 1598-1600).