Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Katie Lambert and I'm fair Dowdy. And after we
Speaker 1: recorded our episode on Pocaconta's Last Fall, listeners like Katrina
Speaker 1: and Ron wanted to hear more on one point in particular,
Speaker 1: and that was the shipwreck that stalled John Rolfe's arrival
Speaker 1: in Jamestown. Yeah, and the shipwreck in itself is a
Speaker 1: pretty amazing story. We've got St Elmo's fire and wild
Speaker 1: hogs and even the devil um. But it's also a
Speaker 1: make or break moment in early American history because the
Speaker 1: passengers survived the wreck and they saved Jamestown. And because
Speaker 1: they saved Jamestown and send back all these amazing New
Speaker 1: World stories of their own, they boost English support for
Speaker 1: American colonization. So it's a really good story, so good
Speaker 1: in fact, that Shakespeare wrote about it in The Tempest.
Speaker 1: So our wrecked ship was bound for Jamestown. So we're
Speaker 1: gonna give you a little rundown and start there. Start
Speaker 1: with the Virginia Company. So Jamestown was supposed to be
Speaker 1: a money making operation for for the Virginia Company. Obviously,
Speaker 1: if you're going to invest in something, you wanted to
Speaker 1: have a return. And so in sixteen o seven they
Speaker 1: sent folks. They're hoping to set up industries like silk manufacturer,
Speaker 1: pitch and tar, soap, ashes, glassmaking, lumber, sassafrass. Really anything
Speaker 1: would do. Maybe they'd even find some gold. They just
Speaker 1: wanted to get some money out of it. But of
Speaker 1: course that doesn't happen. And in sixteen o nine, according
Speaker 1: to Sarah's outline, Jamestown is terrible, but it's true. It's
Speaker 1: built on this marshy land. There's lots of mosquitoes, no
Speaker 1: fresh water because the James River is only potable for
Speaker 1: part of the year. All of their crops are failing,
Speaker 1: and the settlers are warring with the Native Americans and
Speaker 1: with each other. So they have an investment of not
Speaker 1: only money, but people too. I mean, you can't just
Speaker 1: abandon the people you've sent to live in the New World.
Speaker 1: So the Virginia Company pours all it has into the
Speaker 1: third Supply Relief Mission, and that's going to be a
Speaker 1: nine ship fleet headed up by the two forty ton
Speaker 1: merchant ship, the Sea Venture, and it's going to have
Speaker 1: six hundred new settlers to go and revitalize Jamestown and
Speaker 1: a ton of supplies, and also really good leadership and
Speaker 1: big names on board. Yeah, and that's important because part
Speaker 1: of Jamestown's problems were coming from their their poor leadership
Speaker 1: and all their in fighting. So we're going to have
Speaker 1: Admiral Sir George Summers, who was a war hero. He's
Speaker 1: actually coming out of retirement for this very mission. Captain
Speaker 1: Christopher Newport, who's on his fourth voyage to the New World,
Speaker 1: which pretty impressive. I mean, this is sixteen o nine.
Speaker 1: The first one was sixteen o seven, so very impressive.
Speaker 1: And Sir Thomas Gates, who's going to be the governor
Speaker 1: and actually has a decree from King James himself seating
Speaker 1: the crowns authority to the Virginia Company, which is, uh,
Speaker 1: it's kind of a stretch, but that's a little quasi independence.
Speaker 1: They're back in sixteen o nine. So this relief mission
Speaker 1: leaves Plymouth Harbor on June two, sixteen o nine, and
Speaker 1: thinks go well for most of the journey. They're almost
Speaker 1: there when something terrible happens, and the night before St
Speaker 1: James Day, Monday, July a terrible storm hits this ship,
Speaker 1: and the sea venture is separated from the others in
Speaker 1: the fleet, and the survivor William Strikey later writes, a
Speaker 1: dreadful storm and hideous gant a blow from out the northeast, which,
Speaker 1: swelling and roaring, as it were, by fits some hours
Speaker 1: with more violence than others. At length diould be all
Speaker 1: light from heaven, which like an hell of darkness, turned
Speaker 1: black upon us. So a scary scene here. Imagine being
Speaker 1: out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on your
Speaker 1: um seventeenth century ship, and the ship is beaten by
Speaker 1: the storms. Streaky says again, prayers might well be in
Speaker 1: the heart and lips, but drowned in the outcries of
Speaker 1: the officers. Nothing heard that could give comfort, nothing seen
Speaker 1: that might encourage hope. And then these ships starts to
Speaker 1: break apart and take on water. The water is already
Speaker 1: five ft above the ballast, so they're sinking. So the
Speaker 1: crew rushes about with candles to try to plug all
Speaker 1: of the leaks, and they plug the leaks with anything
Speaker 1: they can find. His account even mentions them using slabs
Speaker 1: of beef um. But they can't find that leak that's
Speaker 1: sinking the ship, and it's still filling up. So the
Speaker 1: governor organizes all of the men on the ship into
Speaker 1: three companies to bail water and shifts at three different points.
Speaker 1: So imagine um three groups working around the clock in
Speaker 1: hour long shifts, just bailing water and manning the pumps,
Speaker 1: and even the great men on the ship, like the admiral,
Speaker 1: like the governor, take their hour long turns. And remember
Speaker 1: they started this on Monday, and by Thursday this is
Speaker 1: still going on, so it can't go on much longer.
Speaker 1: But the watch spots st. Elmo's Fire, which was named
Speaker 1: by Mediterranean sailors and was considered a sign of salvation
Speaker 1: because it usually comes at the end of the storm.
Speaker 1: But the sea venture, you know, they're not saved yet.
Speaker 1: By Friday morning, they're still sinking. They've been bailing water
Speaker 1: for days now, and they're getting completely exhausted, and it's
Speaker 1: clear that they won't make it through another night, and
Speaker 1: as Striky said, they'll have to commit the ship to
Speaker 1: the mercy of the sea. But then just miraculously, George
Speaker 1: Summers spots land and the land is close enough that
Speaker 1: he can even see the trees swaying in the wind.
Speaker 1: But they're still not safe. The seafloor is rising so
Speaker 1: quickly underneath them that it's possible their ship is going
Speaker 1: to break up. You know, their rickety old ship will
Speaker 1: break before they can get close enough to the land.
Speaker 1: So Summers does some very impressive Blackbeard style maneuvering and
Speaker 1: manages to steer hard and wedge the ship between two
Speaker 1: rocks about three quarters of a mile off the island,
Speaker 1: and all one hundred fifty aboard, including the dog, make
Speaker 1: it ashore on longboats by nightfall. So great, right, you
Speaker 1: know they're they've been saved. They made it through the tempest.
Speaker 1: They're on land. Not so fests, no, because they're actually
Speaker 1: in hell. They realize, like they really think they're in Hell.
Speaker 1: They're on the Devil's Islands, which kind of reminds me
Speaker 1: of Lost Everybody sorry. And the Devil's Islands were discovered
Speaker 1: by Wanda Bermudas a century before, and they were named
Speaker 1: for the devil screams that the Spanish heard there. Um Fortunately,
Speaker 1: though it's not Hell, they realized pretty quickly that the
Speaker 1: Devil's screams are really just some bird squawking, some delicious birds,
Speaker 1: as they soon discover, and they like eating their eggs
Speaker 1: as well their Bermuda patrols, but no natives or europe
Speaker 1: Hands had lived on the island, but they find evidence
Speaker 1: of Spanish influence. Someone has been there, including feral hogs
Speaker 1: that probably escaped from capsized galleons. So they've got petrol,
Speaker 1: pork and mulberries, cedar berries and the prickly pear um
Speaker 1: from the land, and tons of fish and tortoises. So
Speaker 1: again not really Hell yeah, Devil's Island turns out to
Speaker 1: be a paradise and they build structures, including a church.
Speaker 1: They thatch it with a palmetto roof, and maybe this
Speaker 1: is this is probably a legend, but they are supposed
Speaker 1: to have salvaged the ship's bell for their church, and
Speaker 1: they have funerals there for John Rolf, who is aboard
Speaker 1: his his wife dies, and their baby, who was born
Speaker 1: on the island and named Bermuda, dies there um. They
Speaker 1: also celebrate a wedding though some baptisms, and they get
Speaker 1: to work building new ships. They're not going to just
Speaker 1: kick back and enjoy this pork filled paradise that they've
Speaker 1: landed on. They're gonna work on getting back to their mission, right,
Speaker 1: So they salvage the rigging and iron bolts from their
Speaker 1: wreck and they harvest cedar from the forests, as well
Speaker 1: as barrels of wax from wrecked Spanish ships that they find,
Speaker 1: and they use that to help culk thears and Bermuda
Speaker 1: limestone acts as a ballast. There's only one shipwright, but
Speaker 1: he helped build the thirty ton Patients and the eight
Speaker 1: ton deliver and astute named ships, and the nobles and
Speaker 1: the countrymen all work together on building these ships. Are
Speaker 1: very democratic. Yeah, it's kind of this feel good story. UM,
Speaker 1: at least at first glance. Admiral Summers is supposed to
Speaker 1: have labored from morning until night as duly as any workman,
Speaker 1: which has some fun kind of old timey spelling to that. UM.
Speaker 1: But it's it's not a perfect paradise here. Some people
Speaker 1: don't want to leave, um, and they refuse to help
Speaker 1: build the ships. Others mutiny against the gold in her
Speaker 1: because of course his contract isn't uh specifically allowing him
Speaker 1: to govern Bermuda, it's for Jamestown in Virginia, um. And
Speaker 1: then some people are coveting their their wealthier neighbors goods
Speaker 1: that they managed to save from the ships. Somewhere right,
Speaker 1: at least one man is executed, one or two were murdered,
Speaker 1: and two were left behind because they were hiding from punishments.
Speaker 1: But how bad would that be really? I mean, apparently
Speaker 1: execution got caught and I guess, yeah, pork and petrol
Speaker 1: if you didn't well. Anyways, by May tenth, ten months
Speaker 1: after they landed, a hundred and forty two castaways leave
Speaker 1: for Jamestown and they reached Chesspeake Bay after ten days
Speaker 1: of sailing. And you'd think their shiftwreck survivors, they're coming
Speaker 1: to Jamestown, they'd probably expect, you know, a decent settlement there.
Speaker 1: They know it's not going to be amazing, but they'd
Speaker 1: expect thing. Instead, they find a ghost town, ruined houses,
Speaker 1: the gates are hanging off their hinges. No one is
Speaker 1: in sight. They go into the church and ring the
Speaker 1: bell and a few people trickle out of the fort.
Speaker 1: It turns out that only sixty of the six hundred
Speaker 1: settlers of Jamestown are left, right, because the winter of
Speaker 1: sixteen o nine sixteen ten was starving time, and we're
Speaker 1: arriving right after that. So let's tuck a little bit
Speaker 1: about what was happening while our shipwrecked people were in Bermuda.
Speaker 1: So the survivors of the fleet, you know, the rest
Speaker 1: of the fleet was separated from the C Venture. The survivors,
Speaker 1: who don't think, managed to struggle on through the tempest
Speaker 1: to Jamestown and they got there the previous August, which
Speaker 1: was later than they were supposed to get there, but
Speaker 1: but not too much later. They come with a really
Speaker 1: bad news that the C Venture was lost. Presumably everyone
Speaker 1: on board is dead, when all of their leaders, all
Speaker 1: their leaders, yeah, the governor of the admiral, and this
Speaker 1: is devastating news for the colonists at Jamestown who are
Speaker 1: who are counting on all the supplies and the leadership
Speaker 1: and the new people coming in um from there, some
Speaker 1: of the fleet returns to England and they carry on
Speaker 1: this bad news. So it's it's also terrible stuff to
Speaker 1: hear for the investors of the Virginia Company when some
Speaker 1: of them stay in Jamestown but without again those strong
Speaker 1: leaders and the democratic example of Gates, a lot of
Speaker 1: them are simply too hoity toity to work, or they
Speaker 1: go off looking for gold instead of you know, harvesting
Speaker 1: crops or something helpful. Yeah, and other people in Jamestown
Speaker 1: just become consumed by the internal politics of the city
Speaker 1: and they waste all their time trying their former governor
Speaker 1: gowner John Smith for all these crimes and sending and
Speaker 1: packing for England instead of doing stuff like, you know,
Speaker 1: finishing the harvest and storing it all up for winter,
Speaker 1: when this isn't exactly a good time to be playing around,
Speaker 1: because again, this is where Powaton is considering exterminating these
Speaker 1: very mettlesome settlers, and we're in the middle of the
Speaker 1: worst tidewater drought in eight hundred years, so there's absolutely
Speaker 1: no room for air um and they're making every conceivable
Speaker 1: air But obviously the winter doesn't go well. The people
Speaker 1: are reduced to eating the start from their Elizabethan roffs
Speaker 1: and bugs and horses, and eventually eating each other. And
Speaker 1: the Sea Venture survivors find the Jamestown settlers much worse
Speaker 1: off than they are themselves, and many of them are
Speaker 1: too weak to stand there. Well has collapse that they
Speaker 1: don't have fresh water anymore, and they're clearly on the
Speaker 1: brink of death. But fortunately the Sea Venture rescue crew
Speaker 1: has lots of that yemmy bermudan food that they found
Speaker 1: deliverance from the Deliverance, and Gates is a very compelling leader,
Speaker 1: but even he, after a few days, has come to
Speaker 1: the realization that this isn't going to work. Jamestown is done.
Speaker 1: They've got to get out of Jamestown. So they pack
Speaker 1: up the two ships that were made in the in
Speaker 1: Bermuda and on June seven, sixteen ten, everybody gets on
Speaker 1: board head back to England, maybe by way of Newfoundland.
Speaker 1: But the Jamestown people are so ashamed of their failure
Speaker 1: of this. You know, it must be a horrible memory.
Speaker 1: If you're cannibals the winter before, you're probably pretty upset by, um,
Speaker 1: how things went. So let's set the city on fire.
Speaker 1: They want to just erase it from history. Gate says, no,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe somebody else will come here eventually and
Speaker 1: it will be of use to them, and the group sales.
Speaker 1: They're almost in open water when they run into an
Speaker 1: English fleet that's coming to save them, which is if
Speaker 1: this were Burke and Wills, I think they'd miss each
Speaker 1: other probably and they wouldn't leave a note. But um, yeah,
Speaker 1: the new fleet has provisions to re establish Jamestown. They
Speaker 1: have new people, and they're saved. Although It's an important
Speaker 1: note that if the James towners had had to rely
Speaker 1: on this fleet's arrival, they would have been dead by this.
Speaker 1: It was the Bermudan ships that saved them. So of
Speaker 1: course this is a really fantastic story, and popular accounts
Speaker 1: start to come out back in England. Sylvester Jordana wrote
Speaker 1: Discovery of the Bermudas otherwise called Isle of Devils, which
Speaker 1: may have been the first best seller about colonial America,
Speaker 1: and William Strakey's account, which is the one we've been
Speaker 1: quoting for, was even more candid and intense. It was
Speaker 1: originally a letter, so you know, it's got lots of
Speaker 1: juicy details in it. Um Sarah, do you wonder if
Speaker 1: maybe the story would be good enough for a play?
Speaker 1: It might be. I think it's pretty inspirational, so I'm
Speaker 1: sure you know where we're going with this. It's right
Speaker 1: to Shakespeare and the writing of the Tempest. Alden Vaughan,
Speaker 1: a professor of history at Columbia, thinks that the Wreck
Speaker 1: of the Sea venture was, unquestioned doubly an inspiration for
Speaker 1: Shakespeare's writing of the Tempest, which is a romance about
Speaker 1: a terrible storm, a shipwreck, and a mysterious island. Some
Speaker 1: don't think though, that that's the case, that Shakespeare writing
Speaker 1: about the New World was a quote fanciful conceit. But
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go with yes. We're gonna lay down our
Speaker 1: points at least for for why we think it's pretty viable.
Speaker 1: So first, consider that North American exploration and settlement happened
Speaker 1: concurrently with Shakespeare's writing career. The Tempest was written in
Speaker 1: sixteen ten or sixteen eleven, which is the same year
Speaker 1: the accounts were published in England. Point one and second,
Speaker 1: Shakespeare definitely knew some of the Virginia Company investors, maybe
Speaker 1: even Admiral Somers himself. William Strakey. Also, the guy who
Speaker 1: who wrote one of the famous accounts was a poet
Speaker 1: in London before going abroad, so uh, we're not sure
Speaker 1: Shakespeare knew him, but they may have run in the
Speaker 1: same circle. And uh. Our third point is in the language.
Speaker 1: Look to the language as English Major Ship always looked
Speaker 1: to the language, and the language used to describe the
Speaker 1: storm in the play sometimes picks up directly from the
Speaker 1: Streaky and Jordana accounts, although the action is different. I
Speaker 1: think in the play the nobles Hamper rather than help
Speaker 1: save the ship, and obviously Shakespeare drew from lots of
Speaker 1: different sources. Um, the Tempest probably has bits of Avid's
Speaker 1: metamorphosis and the I needed in it. And also in
Speaker 1: the Tempest, the ship is leading from North Africa, so
Speaker 1: there's a lot of Mediterranean scenes mixed in with the
Speaker 1: Bermuda stuff. But it seems pretty clear that this huge
Speaker 1: national event in sixteen ten, you know, the survival of
Speaker 1: these lost men at sea, would would maybe have a
Speaker 1: little influence on Shakespeare or a lot or a lot.
Speaker 1: So The Tempest was first performed at Whitehall Palace November one,
Speaker 1: sixteen eleven, for King James, and it's sometimes called Shakespeare's
Speaker 1: American Play and it's believed to be his last. But
Speaker 1: to sort of wrap this one up, we're gonna go
Speaker 1: even broader than the Sea venture, being responsible for saving
Speaker 1: james Town and maybe inspiring a great work of literature.
Speaker 1: UM investors liked Bermuda. So when these accounts, yeah, I
Speaker 1: know what, Katie and I both would like to vacation
Speaker 1: in Bermuda now, Um. But when these accounts came back
Speaker 1: to England, you know, Strachy and Jordan's um people realize
Speaker 1: Bermuda not an isle of devils, actually a really nice place,
Speaker 1: maybe a good place to invest some money in a
Speaker 1: jewel in fact. Yeah, and it becomes the site of
Speaker 1: the first English Parliament in the New World and a
Speaker 1: really important, uh important stopping point on journeys to the
Speaker 1: New World and important just for setting up other colonies.
Speaker 1: The islands become test farms for foods to grow on
Speaker 1: the mainland, and just some interesting little they cast money
Speaker 1: that has a hog on one side and the Sea
Speaker 1: Venture on the other, which is the first English currency
Speaker 1: minted in the New World. And even today Bermuda's flag
Speaker 1: has the image of a sinking ship on the motto
Speaker 1: whichever way the fates should carry us. So this is
Speaker 1: why of the story. Yeah, and of course the survivors
Speaker 1: of the Cea Venture are also really important, and listeners
Speaker 1: suggested that we record this story because of one of
Speaker 1: the survivors. But we're gonna start with Gates, who is
Speaker 1: very important for the survival of Jamestown, the long term
Speaker 1: survival of it. He's a strict leader, but he's successful.
Speaker 1: He builds this house of stone over the collapsed well.
Speaker 1: So that's a really great image of Jamestown's revival when
Speaker 1: he makes his own hearth from that Bermuda limestone ballast. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and maybe at least partly because of him, and partly
Speaker 1: because of the experience in Bermuda, people are a little
Speaker 1: bit less concerned about class distinctions because they work together
Speaker 1: to save the ship and to live together in Bermuda.
Speaker 1: You know, you've got to think of that relatively, but
Speaker 1: still it's something. And then we have our guy Rolf,
Speaker 1: who doesn't just marry pocahonas he's more important than that.
Speaker 1: He figured in Virginia's first big export. And hint, it's
Speaker 1: not gold, it's tobacco. And seven years after Rolf's arrival,
Speaker 1: Virginia's tobacco experts were at twenty thousand pounds. Twelve years
Speaker 1: after that they were at one and a half million
Speaker 1: pounds a year. So this is clearly the big point here.
Speaker 1: Rolf figures out that you can grow um West Indies
Speaker 1: varieties of tobacco in Virginia, which is the kind that
Speaker 1: people back in Europe like, and they can make a
Speaker 1: ton of money, and not only someone like Rolf, but
Speaker 1: investors back in England. It's the real key to the
Speaker 1: financial success of Virginia. So really a shipwreck led us
Speaker 1: to a success story, and we would like to end
Speaker 1: with a pretty cool quote that Sarah found, and this
Speaker 1: is from Shakespeare's The Tempest. Now would I give a
Speaker 1: thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground,
Speaker 1: long heath, brown furs, anything the wills above be done?
Speaker 1: But I would fain die a dry death. And since
Speaker 1: we can't follow Shakespeare, we will go to listener mail
Speaker 1: and let y'all do it instead. So this is real
Speaker 1: mail from Hillary in Portland's She sent us a beautiful
Speaker 1: postcard of the Bahamas Um and she's from the island,
Speaker 1: so we thought we would we would pick up on
Speaker 1: that beam for listener meal today. So she wrote that
Speaker 1: she wanted to thank us for helping me step up
Speaker 1: my Jeopardy game. Last night, I correctly guessed Lord Byron
Speaker 1: for the final Jeopardy clue, and I owe my success
Speaker 1: entirely to your podcast. He really does pop up everywhere. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's good to hear we're helping people step up their
Speaker 1: Jeopardy games too. If you're not a big center of mail,
Speaker 1: you can join our Facebook fan page or follow us
Speaker 1: on Twitter at missed in History. And if you'd like
Speaker 1: to hear a little bit more about the scientific aspects
Speaker 1: of our podcast, this particular one. You can check out
Speaker 1: the article what is St. Almo's Fire that Sarah edited
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