More than 650 individuals became shareholders along with fifty-six city companies and guilds, including the Company of Drapers, the Company of Grocers, the Company of Brewers, and the Company of Poult...
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...
Passengers were crowded together, forced to live and sleep and eat in intolerably cramped conditions. There was almost no privacy, no water for washing, no break in the tedium as the ship rolled and p...
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...
The passengers and crew gathered each morning and evening and each Sunday for prayers,
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...
As he walked the eight miles to where the Sea Venture lay docked, passing from his old life to his new, it would have been perfectly natural for him to wonder if he would ever again see the bustling,...
As challenging as the islands were to mariners, a few Spanish and Portuguese and, later, English sailors did make their way to stand on one of Bermuda’s beaches or to climb its rocks or investigate it...
After a moment, Jourdain reported, Somers urged the men on the ship not to give up. He urged them to get back to the pumps and continue bailing. The men, spent with long fasting and continuance of the...
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 sh...
In addition to the stored foods, livestock—chickens and pigs and probably a few goats and geese—were penned on Sea Venture’s deck, both to provide fresh meat during the voyage and to help stock Jamest...
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 interes...
Johnson praised Virginia for its uncivilized yet friendly natives and argued that the English settlers’ goals included the betterment of the savages. Of course, the truth was different, as Johnson and...
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 capt...
William Strachey, who would later write the most detailed account of the storm, must have made his way from his quarters to the deck so he could see conditions for himself.
They sit roughly 900 miles north and east of the Bahamas; roughly 600 miles east of Virginia; and about 3,500 miles south and west of London.
Strachey, no doubt hungry for firsthand information about the colony, would have passed the bookseller a few coins, snapped up a copy of Smith’s brief report, and hurried home to read it voraciously a...
Though the ship seemed secure, the steady wearing of the waves or a sudden squall could easily send her sliding off the reef or batter her to pieces, scattering the valuable supplies still in her hold...
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