There had been no difficulty recruiting sailors willing, even anxious, to sign on for the voyage to the Chesapeake. Since the end of the war with Spain and the end of privateering, out-of-work sailors...
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...
The Sea Venture, the admiral of the fleet, docked at Woolwich, the bustling royal dockyards about eight miles down the Thames from central London. There she and six other ships of the fleet—the Diamon...
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...
Since the days of the earliest English voyages to the New World, ships crossing the Atlantic had typically followed a course that took them first to the Canary Islands, off the coast of Africa, and th...
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...
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 Co...
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...
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...
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.
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...
John Smith, for one, knew the value of good food during an ocean voyage. The want of good food, he said, occasions the losse of more men, then in any English fleet hath bin slaine in any fight since 1...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...