Thomas, Lord Delaware.
For the Company as thus reorganized the two most important executive offices were filled by admirable appointments. The treasurer was the eminent merchant Sir Thomas Smith, of whom some account has already been given. For governor of Virginia the council appointed Thomas West, third Baron Delaware, whose younger brother, Francis West, we have seen helping John Smith to browbeat the Indians at Werowocomoco and Pamunkey. This Lord Delaware belonged to a family distinguished for public service. On the mother's side he was nearly related to Queen Elizabeth. In America he is forever identified with the history of Virginia, and he has left a name to one of our great rivers, to a very interesting group of Indians, and to one of the smallest states in our Union. With New England, too, he has one link of association; for his sister, Penelope West, married Herbert Pelham, and their son was the first treasurer of Harvard College. Thomas West, born in 1577, was educated at Oxford, served with distinction in the Netherlands, and was knighted for bravery in 1599. He succeeded to the barony of Delaware in 1602, and was a member of the Privy Council of Elizabeth and James I. No one was more warmly enlisted than he in the project of founding Protestant English colonies in the New World. To this cause he devoted himself with ever growing enthusiasm, and when the London Company was remodelled he was appointed governor of Virginia for life. With him were associated the sturdy soldier, Sir Thomas Gates, as lieutenant-governor, and the old sea rover, Sir George Somers, as admiral.
A communistic programme.
The spring of 1609 was spent in organizing a new expedition, while Smith and his weary followers were struggling with the damage wrought by rats. People out of work were attracted by the communistic programme laid down by the Company. The shares were rated at about $300 each, to use our modern figures, and emigration to Virginia entitled the emigrant to one share. So far as needful the proceeds of the enterprise "were to be spent upon the settlement, and the surplus was either to be divided or funded for seven years. During that period the settlers were to be maintained at the expense of the Company, while all the product of their labours was to be cast into the common stock. At the end of that time every shareholder was to receive a grant of land in proportion to his stock held."[75] Doubtless the prospects of becoming a shareholder in a great speculative enterprise, and of being supported by the Company, must have seemed alluring to many people in difficult circumstances. At all events, some 500 people—men, women, and children—were got together. A fleet of nine ships, with ample supplies, was entrusted to Newport, and in his ship, the Sea Venture, were Gates and Somers, who were to take the colony under their personal supervision. Lord Delaware remained in London, planning further developments of the enterprise. Three more trusty men he could hardly have sent out. But a strange fate was knocking at the door.
Wreck of the Sea Venture.
On the first of June, 1609, the fleet set sail and took the route by the Azores. Toward the end of July, as they were getting within a week's sail of the American coast, the ships were "caught in the tail of a hurricane," one of them was sunk, and the Sea Venture was separated from all the rest. That gallant ship was sorely shaken and torn, so that for five days the crew toiled steadily in relays, pumping and baling, while the water seemed to be gaining upon them. Many of the passengers abandoned themselves to despair and to rum, or, as an eye-witness tells us, "some of them, having good and comfortable waters in the ship, fetched them and drank one to the other, taking their last leave one of the other until their more joyful and happy meeting in a more blessed world."[76] The company were saved by the skill and energy of the veteran Somers, who for three days and nights never once left the quarter-deck. At length land was sighted, and presently the Sea Venture was driven violently aground and wedged immovable between two rocks, a shattered wreck. But all her people, a hundred and fifty or so, were saved, and most of their gear was brought away.
The Bermudas.
The island on which they were wrecked was one of a group the early history of which is shrouded in strange mystery. If my own solution of an obscure problem is to be trusted, these islands had once a fierce cannibal population, whose first white visitors, Vincent Pinzon and Americus Vespucius, landed among them on St. Bernard's day in August, 1498, and carried off more than 200 slaves.[77] Hence the place was called St. Bernard's archipelago, but on crudely glimmering maps went wide astray and soon lost its identity. In 1522 a Spanish captain, Juan Bermudez, happened to land there and his name has remained. But in the intervening years Spanish slave-hunters from San Domingo had infested those islands and reaped and gleaned the harvest of heathen flesh till no more was to be had. The ruthless cannibals were extirpated by the more ruthless seekers for gold, and when Bermudez stopped there he found no human inhabitants, but only swine running wild, a sure witness to the recent presence of Europeans. Then for nearly a century the unvisited spot was haunted by the echoes of a frightful past, wild traditions of ghoulish orgies and infernal strife. But the kidnapper's work in which these vague notions originated was so soon forgotten that when the Sea Venture was wrecked those islands were believed to have been from time immemorial uninhabited. Sailors shunned them as a scene of abominable sorceries, and called them the Isles of Demons. Otherwise they were known simply by the Spanish skipper's name as the Bermoothes, afterward more completely anglicized into Bermudas. From the soil of those foul goblin legends, that shuddering reminiscence of inexpiable crime, the potent sorcery of genius has reared one of the most exquisitely beautiful, ethereally delicate works of human fancy that the world has ever seen. The wreck of the Sea Venture suggested to Shakespeare many hints for the Tempest, which was written within the next two years and performed before the king in 1611. It is not that these islands were conceived as the scene of the comedy; the command to Ariel to go and "fetch dew from the still-vexed Bermoothes" seems enough to show that Prospero's enchanted isle was elsewhere, doubtless in some fairy universe hard by the Mediterranean. But from the general conception of monsters of the isle down to such incidents as the flashing light on the shrouds of the ship, it is clear that Shakespeare made use of Strachey's narrative of the wreck of the Sea Venture, published in 1610.
Arrival of the pinnaces at Jamestown, May, 1610.
Gates and Somers found the Isles of Demons far pleasanter than their reputation, and it was well for them that it was so, for they were obliged to stay there nearly ten months, while with timber freshly cut and with bolts and beams from the wreck the party built two pinnaces which they named Patience and Deliverance. They laid in ample stores of salted pork and fish, traversed the 700 miles of ocean in a fortnight, and arrived at Jamestown on the 10th of May, 1610. The spectacle that greeted them was enough to have appalled the stoutest heart. To explain it in a few words, we must go back to August, 1609, when the seven ships that had weathered the storm arrived in Virginia and landed their 300 or more passengers, known in history as the Third Supply.