A Brave Vessel: The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare'sThe Tempest (12 page)

An accident could certainly have befallen a man hunting in an unknown land. The Powhatan method of hunting demanded the rapid pursuit of wounded prey. Namontack may have sunk an arrow in a hog and taken up the chase across unfamiliar terrain. Perhaps he tripped on broken limestone and hit his head. Maybe he was hunting along the shore and slipped while traversing rocks. If he had fallen in the ocean and drowned his body could have been washed away. Another possibility is that the man from Tsenacomoco discovered one of Bermuda’s two hundred limestone caves, the longest of which runs for more than a mile underground. Namontack may have come across a cavern entrance, gone inside, fallen, and died.

Such a scenario is apparently what Machumps expected the English to believe, either because he thought it true or he wanted an alibi. They were suspicious that he knew more than he told. The Englishmen’s attempts to extract information across a significant language barrier proved ineffective. Their suspicions would remain unanswered. The English were not inclined to launch a search for a lost man of another culture, especially when resources were needed for hunting and finding a way off the island. In the absence of proof, Machumps was allowed to continue to live in his camp and contribute to the general larder, but the English now kept a close watch on his activities. After all, he might be a liar and a murderer.

As time passed the story of Machumps and Namontack was retold and embellished. Eventually Machumps would be cast as the perpetrator of a grisly murder. “Some such differences fell between them,” John Smith would write years later, “that Machumps slew Namontack, and having made a hole to bury him, because it was too short, he cut off his legs and laid them by him, which murder he concealed.” Sensationalized with gore it became a fantastic tale indeed, but one that seems exaggerated in light of Machumps’s continued residency among the English. They may have suspected foul play, but if they could prove it—even by the low standard required in a cross-cultural case—they would not have hesitated to execute him.

CHAPTER EIGHT

’Twas a sweet marriage.

—Sebastian,
The Tempest

 

 

 

A
utumn days were noticeably cooler for the
Sea Venture
survivors. During October and November temperatures averaged in the high sixties and cold fronts crossed the island with clouds and rain. Day and night the fires burned on the beach, though there was no sign of a rescue ship sent by Henry Ravens. The coming of cool weather brought concern that if the stay on Bermuda stretched into winter, the bounty of the island might wane and hardships might increase. The prospect of a winter in exile caused the more pessimistic among the shipwreck survivors to be watchful for signs that the devil was afoot on the island, after all. Perhaps he would materialize in the rains and winds of the dead season.

The first voyager to hear a cahow in the autumn night might well have thought that evil spirits were at hand. The gull-sized seabirds (also known as Bermuda petrels) had frightened Spanish sailors who briefly touched on the island in October 1603. Diego Ramirez reported that when he anchored off Bermuda, “at dusk, such a shrieking and din filled the air that fear seized us.” The sailors first attributed the noise to devils, Ramirez said, but after realizing that the banshees were plump fowl rather than hellish specters the men clubbed five hundred and brought them back to the ship for food.

Six years later the night calls were again heard on Bermuda as the cahows returned to the island to nest in late October and early November. The
Sea Venture
castaways, having lived on Bermuda three months, were apparently more reserved than the Spanish in their reaction. Hunters followed the growing flocks of cahows to what would become known as the Bird Islands to the south. “A kind of web-footed fowl there is,” Strachey said, “of the bigness of an English green plover, or sea-mew, which all the summer we saw not, and in the darkest nights of November and December (for in the night they only feed) they would come forth, but not fly far from home, and hovering in the air and over the sea made a strange hollow and harsh howling.”

The cahows nested in holes in the limestone soil of the islands, which prompted Strachey to compare them to rabbits living in dens in a stony field. “Their color is inclining to russet with white bellies (as are likewise the long feathers of their wings russet and white). These gather themselves together and breed in those islands which are high and so far alone into the sea that the wild hogs cannot swim over them, and there in the ground they have their burrows like conies in a warren and so brought in the loose mould though not so deep, which birds with a light bough in a dark night (as in our lowbelling) we caught. I have been at the taking of three hundred in an hour, and we might have laden our boats.”

The traditional hunting technique of lowbelling, or hunting at night with torches to stupefy prey, proved an effective technique on Bermuda. Little effort was necessary after landing on the Bird Islands, however, as the birds seemed perfectly willing to come to the hunters. “Our men found a pretty way to take them,” Strachey said, “which was by standing on the rocks or sands by the seaside and hollowing, laughing, and making the strangest outcry that possibly they could, with the noise whereof the birds would come flocking to that place and settle upon the very arms and head of him that so cried, and still creep nearer and nearer answering the noise themselves, by which our men would weigh them with their hand and which weighed heaviest they took for the best and let the others alone, and so our men would take twenty dozen in two hours of the chiefest of them, and they were a good and well relished fowl, fat and full as a partridge.

“There are thousands of these birds and two or three islands full of their burrows,” Strachey said, “whither at any time (in two hours’ warning) we could send our cock-boat and bring home as many as would serve the whole company, which birds for their blindness (for they see weakly in the day) and for their cry and hooting we call the sea owl. They will bite cruelly with their crooked bills.”

 

The Bird Islands were one of many features the Englishmen named as they explored the island by foot and boat. In addition to naming Gates Bay where the expedition came ashore, the castaways designated the channel out to sea Somers Creek. A promontory on an island to the south the castaways passed on the cahow hunting trips also received a name. Strachey may have been the first to climb to its lookout point, as the castaways built a signal fire and shelter there and took to calling it Strachey’s Watch. Somers duly marked all of these locations on a map he was making as he led hunting parties throughout the islands of the Bermuda archipelago. “Sir George Somers, who coasted in his boat about them all,” Strachey said, “took great care to express the same exactly and full and made his draft perfect for all good occasions and the benefit of such who either in distress might be brought upon them or make sail this way.” In giving the reason for the creation of a map—to aid English mariners—Strachey made it clear that Somers expected to leave Bermuda in the near future. The castaways would continue to work toward that goal.

Knowing that an abundance of fowl awaited the cooks each day allowed the voyagers to turn their thoughts from subsistence to the patterns of a more secure existence. One of those whose attention wandered to new pursuits was George Somers’s cook, Welshman Thomas Powell. During the fall Powell grew close to one of the few single women on the island, Elizabeth Persons, the servant who had come aboard the
Sea Venture
in the service of Mistress Horton. Powell’s cooking chores kept him close to camp most of the time, and since Horton never strayed far from her cabin, Persons was always nearby. The two developed a friendship through the summer and by fall it turned to something more. If they followed English custom, Thomas and Elizabeth would have bundled together—slept clothed in a single bed—in a thatched cottage during their courtship. Whether they bundled or not, on November 26, four months after the
Sea Venture
brought the castaways to the island, Richard Buck officiated at the wedding of the cook and the servant. The ceremony took place on a Sunday, the day of the week favored by Jacobean wedding couples.

Out of necessity the event was a simple affair. The bride would have worn a traditional wreath of flowers in her hair and carried a coin in her shoe for good luck. A square “care cloth,” or wedding canopy, would have sheltered the couple during the ceremony. The wedding feast surely included the recently plentiful cahows roasted over the fire. Powell himself likely prepared the banquet, which may also have featured grilled fish complemented by roasted hearts of palm and fresh picked palmetto berries. A recent vintage of fermented bibby likely completed the convivial table. Though the customary plums and almond paste were lacking, a suitable island version of a wedding cake was undoubtedly created. For good luck the wedding couple would have kissed over the bride cake before serving it to their guests. At the end of the evening when the couple was escorted to their cabin, Persons may have thrown a stocking to her friends as a final gesture. The only record of the event that communicates the festive spirit of the day is John Smith’s secondhand report: “amongst all those sorrows they had a merry English marriage.”

 

The easy availability of food also allowed the castaways time to search for treasure. The valuables sought were pearls from the Bermuda lagoons and ambergris washed up on the beach. Ambergris is a waxy substance from the intestines of sperm whales that was highly valued as an ingredient of perfume. Mariners were always on the lookout for the stuff, since even a small lump would bring a fine return in London. According to Jourdain, the
Sea Venture
survivors found what they were seeking: “There is great store of pearl and some of them very fair, round, and Oriental, and you shall find at least one hundred seed of pearl in one oyster. There hath been likewise found some good quantity of ambergris, and that of the best sort.” Strachey also reported the discovery of pearls during the voyagers’ stay on the island, judging the gems as good as those of the West Indies.

Divers looking for pearl oysters had an opportunity to view the underwater wonders of Bermuda. “In the bottom of the sea,” John Smith wrote, “there is growing upon the rocks a large kind of plant in the form of a vine leaf but far more spread with veins in color of a pale red, very strangely interlaced and woven one into another, which we call the feather.” The anonymous colonist of a few years later reported another underwater marvel in the bays. “There is one very strange fish, and beautiful to behold. We call it an angelfish (as well as it may be), for as you see the picture of an angel made, so is this, and it shows of many colors both in the water swimming and out of the water and as a dainty a fish of meat as a salmon, or rather better.”

Pearls, ambergris, and exotic sea life notwithstanding, the camp of the castaways was not without a continuing undercurrent of tension. The rift caused by the mutiny remained, widening the traditional gulf between mariners and landsmen. The split took the form of segregated campfires within the common clearing, separately planned survival strategies, and an absence of cross-camp chatter. The men at the head of the factions, Admiral George Somers and Governor Thomas Gates, were knights restrained by the genteel traditions of the day, and that restraint veiled the depth of the division. The career seamen formed the core of one group, while the elite landsmen were at the center of the other. Laborers and artisans split between the two factions to some extent, though most remained with the landsmen. The splinter group was that of Somers and his mariners. Seamen traditionally lived a world apart from others of all classes, and so it was on Bermuda. Despite the great disparities of wealth and class among the landsmen, the elite and the poor of the city were familiar with each other and stayed together, albeit as a layered group.

Despite the fires on Strachey’s Watch, by late in the fall of 1609 neither Ravens nor rescuers from Virginia had appeared. “Two moons were wasted upon the promontory before mentioned,” Strachey said, “and gave many a long and wished look round about the horizon from the northeast to the southwest, but in vain, discovering nothing all the while, which way soever we turned our eye, but air and sea.” Everyone knew that the pinnace under construction in Building Bay was not large enough to take everyone to Virginia. The fact that half the castaways would remain behind had been the subject of campfire discussion since late summer, and—despite the desire of some in the company to stay on the island and build a colony there—rumors of such a parting exacerbated the splintering of the company. The assumption by the laborers was that the elite voyagers would take the skilled workmen and the best mariners and sail to safety, leaving them behind. That assessment was undoubtedly accurate and sowed resentment in those who thought they would be abandoned for months or years, perhaps even for the rest of their lives.

In late autumn Somers proposed a new approach to the goal of getting away. “The seven and twentieth of November,” Strachey reported, “when then well perceiving that we were not likely to hear from Virginia and conceiving how the pinnace which Richard Frobisher was a-building would not be of burden sufficient to transport all our men from thence into Virginia (especially considering the season of the year wherein we were likely to put off), he consulted with our governor that if he might have two carpenters (for we had four, such as they were) and twenty men over with him into the main island, he would quickly frame up another little bark to second ours for the better fitting and conveyance of our people.”

Strachey’s description of the governor’s reaction to the new plan is overstated, hinting that the writer declined to describe an air of unease in the relationship between Gates and Somers. “Our governor with many thanks (as the cause required), cherishing this so careful and religious consideration in him (and whose experience likewise was somewhat in these affairs), granted him all things suitable to his desire and to the furthering of the work.” Somers was assigned “twenty of the ablest and stoutest of the company” for his construction crew, probably composed of the two carpenters and his most trusted mariners. The new strategy was attractive to all, not the least because it separated the seamen from the landsmen and put an end to the daily irritations associated with the rift in the company. Neither leader apparently worried that isolation might increase the alienation of the mariners and embolden their opposition to the governor. Somers’s construction crew packed their personal belongings and disassembled their palmetto-leaf huts, packed them into the boats, and rowed to a site on the main island and there created a new camp. Thereafter couriers rowed between the two bases and carried written messages between Gates and Somers.