Have been built in East Anglia in about 1603, the Sea Venture was a three-masted vessel roughly a hundred feet long from the end of her bowsprit to her stern post. The vice admiral, or second-largest...
Evangelista Torricelli, the Italian physicist who invented the barometer, the instrument used to forecast storms by registering fluctuations in air pressure, was an infant in mid-1609. The instrument...
Virginia was seen as a convenient place to send the poor and unemployed and to dump some of the criminals who infested London’s crowded streets and alleyways.
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...
The spy also warned his monarch that the English would set about converting the Indians not to the Roman Catholic faith, but to the hated Protestant faith. The preparations they are making here are th...
Passengers in need of toilet facilities were forced to use slop buckets that soon spilled over and added to the general miasma below or to climb into the beak—all the way forward beneath the bowsprit—...
These hard men were middle-aged in their twenties and ancient if they saw their thirties, made old by poor diet and lives filled with dangerous work performed under terribly harsh conditions. Many wer...
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 sh...
William Strachey and the others who had battled for four days to survive the hurricane threw themselves to the sand above the high-water mark to rest and to dry their sodden clothing.
Miraculously, though, the same coral heads that split the ship’s sides held the wounded vessel fast, upright as if she were in the jaws of a vise.
Even in the best of times, meals were rough affairs. Once their private stores ran out, not long after the voyage began, Gates and Somers and all the other important men and women on the vessel were f...
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 w...
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 t...
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...
In mid-1608, or at about the time that Strachey started thinking of emigrating, Captain John Smith, the Virginia settler, had written a long letter to a friend about conditions in 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 t...
Even after its discovery, Bermuda remained a no-man’s-land. The maze of reefs and coral heads that nearly surround the islands make approaching the Bermudas a scary business.
By late February 1609, three months before the new charter was signed by King James I, Pedro de Zúñiga, a savvy Spanish spy on the lookout for unusual activity in the capital, knew of England’s plans...
Like other ships of her time, the Sea Venture was built of long, thick planks laid flush, edge to edge and end to end over oak frames. These planks were laid just close enough to one another to allow...
As the realization of their continued peril became clear, crewmen and passengers—men and women and older children—clawed and battled for position along the ship’s rails, terrified that the horribly wo...
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