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 y...
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 par...
Many in the crew—a surprising number—were almost certainly teenagers, still boys, but boys who were expected to do the work of grown men.
Then there were the people the Virginia Company called the naturals—the roughly nine thousand Indians gathered into a loose-knit confederation of disparate groups ruled by the paramount chief, Wahunso...
Most who boarded the Sea Venture as passengers were men like Strachey who had fallen on hard times. These were men—there were probably fewer than a dozen women on board—who were turning their backs on...
Perhaps it was there that Jonson told him—it was advice he gave to others—that the only hope for any man in debt was to flee to Constantinople, Ireland, or Virginia if he wanted to rebuild his life an...
Minister who addressed the original Virginia settlers before their departure from London in 1606. Now he praised Smythe and the adventurers for again backing the Virginia Company, and he ended his ser...
Hurricanes in honor of Huracan, a god of evil and destruction recognized by the Tainos, an ancient Central American tribe.
Slop buckets filled and quickly spilled over. Floor planks were slick with waste and vomit.
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...
A sea storm attacks the senses, the mind, the spirit, until the gut is filled with terror that can make a brave man cower belowdecks, curled into a ball like a whimpering child.
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 flo...
The Sea Venture was the largest vessel in the fleet, she was small compared with all but the most modest, modern oceangoing vessels. Described as a galleon, she was in reality a merchant ship, properl...
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...
Frantic, knowing they could be lost at any moment, the sailors began to lighten the vessel. Masts were stripped and rigging was hurled overboard along with chests and trunks and anything that wasn’t t...
Like many other merchant vessels, the Sea Venture was armed. Though England and Spain had signed a peace treaty in 1604, soon after James took the English throne, there were still scores of Spanish ve...
It soon became clear that the ships of the fleet could not maintain contact. Somers ordered the little ketch cut free, knowing that he was almost certainly sentencing all on board to death when he did...
800 people of all sortes went in these 6 shippes
By 1609 Strachey, like other Englishmen, knew that Seagull’s words were not true. He knew that no diamonds had been found on Virginia’s beaches, that no golden chamber pots had been discovered. But he...
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 i...
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