The Jamestown Experiment (15 page)

Two other persons who boarded embodied the exotic in the New World. Namontack, Powhatan’s emissary to the English, was returning from his second trip to London. He wore English clothes, as his chaperones dressed him in the garb of civilization, but he stirred the imagination of Londoners as an American native nonetheless. Machumps, another Powhatan, joined Namontack for the voyage, returning to their people with wondrous tales from the world’s largest city.

On May 15, seven of the ships slipped their moorings at Woolwich and rode the ebb tide toward the coast. Their English colors flew proudly in the breeze. Investor Stephen Powle came to see the fleet off and watched it sail out of sight. He listened with the passengers of the ships and other well-wishers to the prayers of Reverend Buck. “God bless them and guide them to his glory and our good,” he prayed.
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The Englishmen and women who were voyaging with the fleet and those that remained at home truly felt blessed by heaven. They
were embarking on a mission to fulfill their national destiny and rightfully take their place under heaven as a great empire. They believed they were divinely favored because of their piety and entrepreneurial spirit, that fortune would favor those who served God devoutly and boldly risked everything in pursuit of their righteous cause. But the Atlantic was full of great dangers that might be interpreted as divine anger should they encounter them. Indeed, in the coming months, they would perhaps see just how much the Almighty was displeased with their national mission to colonize Virginia.

Chapter Nine

T
he fleet of seven ships sailed around the southern coast of England to rendezvous with the two other ships, some passengers, and Thomas Gates and George Somers. The ships put in at the seafaring port of Plymouth on the southwestern coast for a few weeks. In Plymouth Harbor, dockworkers laded the ship with dozens more barrels of provisions and coaxed eight horses on to the
Blessing.

Meanwhile, the passengers grew bored and consumed provisions as they waited for Interim Governor Gates, who had remained in London, attending at Westminster Hall to receive the revised charter from the king. Gates was handed the charter on May 23, and after some final preparations with the company, he immediately made his way to Plymouth to link up with the fleet.

When he arrived, he conferred with Admiral Somers and Vice Admiral Christopher Newport about the voyage. The three gentlemen adventurers squabbled over their positioning in this historic voyage as they jockeyed for fame. Somers was the admiral of
the fleet and would not contemplate sailing on any vessel other than his flagship,
Sea Venture.
Governor Gates also wanted to take his rightful place aboard the flagship
.
Newport, too, was accustomed to command and would not tolerate being consigned to a lesser vessel. John Smith later wrote, “All things being ready, because those three captains could not agree for place, it was concluded they should go all in one ship.” Gates stowed the colony’s sealed instructions in a locked box in his cabin on the
Sea Venture.
Having the leaders of the fleet and of the colony all in one ship, along with the instructions for the governance of the colony, was imprudently risky and foolish. It would prove to be a fateful decision that would determine the course of the Jamestown colony.
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On the pleasant evening of June 2, 1609, the
Sea Venture
and her convoy of ships departed from Plymouth on a southward course around the Devon coast. The passengers were headed for a new life, willingly sailing into the unknown.

The ships were soon “crossed” by gusting “southwest winds,” which delayed the fleet just as the original Jamestown fleet had been stalled in the winter of 1607. The fleet put in at Falmouth and remained there until June 8, waiting for more favorable winds. The brief delay had a dramatic impact on the journey.
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After conferring with his captains, Somers decided that it was safe to sail and tried again. They set course for the Canary Island as was usual for voyagers to the New World. Somers, Gates, and Newport agreed that the fleet would then continue westward along the new path sailed by Samuel Argall in order to avoid any trouble with the Spanish in the West Indies. The commanders wisely agreed on a meeting place at Barbuda in the Caribbean “should [they] chance to be separated.” The only possible place to rendezvous along their chosen course was Bermuda, and superstitious sailors
would do anything to avoid the “Isle of Devils,” where evil spirits would consume the bodies and souls of the unfortunate who landed there.
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“We ran a southerly course for the Tropic of Cancer,” reported Gabriel Archer from the deck of the
Blessing,
“where having the sun within six or seven degrees right overhead in July, we bore away west.”
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The fleet mostly enjoyed fair weather, even if it grew terribly hot—especially so for the passengers in the crowded decks below.

The sailors had a rough idea of their bearing as they progressed across the Atlantic. They determined their latitude with a cross-staff, viewing the sun in its relative position and comparing it with their astronomical tables. They attempted to use dead reckoning to discover their longitude, which was no more than guess. Still, they knew their approximate course, and considering that they had encountered few problems, experienced navigators such as Christopher Newport could roughly estimate when they might make landfall.
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Fortunately, the fleet was able to “keep in friendly consort together, not a whole watch at any time losing the sight each of other” for almost seven weeks.
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They rode the gentle breezes to their destination and were on schedule to make landfall in Virginia well ahead of the four months it took the original fleet during the winter of 1607. All seemed well.

That the trip was relatively uneventful so far did not mean that it was a pleasant voyage. Most of the passengers were seasick at least at the beginning of the journey, while their bodies grew accustomed to the swaying of the ship. The food and drink was starting to turn after nearly two months in the hold. A few persons showed some of the initial symptoms of scurvy. The quarters were cramped and uncomfortable, with the fetid, stale air from unwashed bodies, spilled chamber pots, and livestock between decks. A breath of
fresh air on the top deck brought a welcome respite. The boredom of staring across the unrelieved expanse of the blue ocean was starting to grate on everyone’s nerves. The conditions of the passage resembled most of the other relatively successful ocean crossings— miserable but tolerable.

Then things took a turn for the worse. Gabriel Archer blamed the “fervent heat and easy breezes” for the rapid spread of disease on a few of the ships. He reported that “many of our men fell sick of the Calenture,” which was a fever on ships in the tropics. Archer and the other frightened passengers saw that “out of two ships was thrown overboard thirty-two persons.”
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Rumors started flying throughout the fleet, and Archer heard that the
Diamond
“was said to have the plague in her,” which was a possibility because of the plague then raging through London and the presence of shipboard rats. Fortunately, Archer wrote, on “the
Blessing
we had not any sick, albeit we had twenty women and children,” whom he apparently believed were especially susceptible to disease because of their supposed weak constitutions.

With each body cast into the sea, the passengers and crew wondered who would be next or whether all would perish in the middle of the ocean with no escape.
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The seamen whispered such terms that the dozens of dead had “come to port” or been “boarded” by the grim reaper. Everyone aboard wanted to have a Christian burial on land and not simply be flung overboard. But it was not possible to keep dead bodies on board because of the health risk and stench, which according to the prevailing miasmatic theory of disease would have made others sick. Sometimes bodies were tied down with cannonballs to give them the closest thing possible to a marked grave in the ground.
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People aboard the ships would have been horrified to witness sea creatures feeding off their dead. One time a sailor noted that “ten or
twelve sharks hankered about the ship for another such meal, they having met with the poor greasy cook.” Another seaman wrote that anyone who died at sea inevitably became “meat for the fishes of the sea.”
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Since so many people died from fever and presented such an immediate threat to the health of all, there was little ceremony for the dead. The Reverend Richard Buck from the
Sea Venture
would have said a few words to calm the passengers of that ship, although the captains of the ships would have overseen any burial ceremony. Others joined in silent prayers both for the souls of the dead and for themselves. Family members and friends wept and sought comfort. It was customary to fire off cannons to commemorate the dead, although the fleet preferred to continue in stony silence, especially since it did not lose any of the important gentlemen adventurers.
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Meanwhile, the summer sun boiled the cauldron of equatorial Atlantic waters, which absorbed the heat and were heated to over eighty degrees. The heat evaporated massive amounts of unseen water vapor, which rode upward convection currents and cooled as it rose higher and higher. The water vapor encountered lower temperatures and pressures in the updraft and condensed into tiny water droplets. Sailors could see cumulus and cumulonimbus thunderclouds forming overhead.

The sailors noticed the winds picking up and building into a gust. The sails bellied tautly in their lines, and the ships crested over the growing ocean swells. The men of Neptune knew that a storm was blowing in.

Menacing thunderclouds could no longer hold the water and dropped heavy downpours of rain back into the ocean. George Somers and the other captains calmly ordered their crews into action, and men not on watch sprang from their hammocks. Most of the
storms were spent quickly and finished with an anticlimactic light tropical rain.

A few survived, however. They were fed by the warm ocean waters. The storms grew and the pressure continued to drop. The planet’s rotation and the easterlies caused a slow vortex to form that proceeded on a westward drift around ten miles per hour, paralleling the equator.

The hurricane began its slow, steady crawl across the Atlantic. As it grew, the storm developed a more clearly defined shape and center eye. The storm intensified and became a full-fledged hurricane, a deadly monster.

The hurricane was only a few hundred miles across and unlikely to cause a direct hit on any ships crossing the Atlantic. Unfortunately, the trajectory of the hurricane and the English fleet were on a collision course.

As dawn emerged in the early morning light of July 25, the crews aboard the fleet bound for Virginia were roused from their hammocks for their regular four-hour shift and set about their tasks. The early morning was pleasant as the sun peeked over the horizon. The Caribbean heat was mitigated somewhat by brisk winds. It was the Feast of St. James Day.

Saint James was a fisherman called by Jesus to be one of the twelve apostles. He was later martyred by King Herod’s grandson in 44 AD. During the Middle Ages, his bones were treated as relics and moved to Spain, where they were visited by pilgrims. The English sailors aboard the fleet had a somewhat ambiguous regard for the saint. They revered him as a patron saint of fishermen who was associated with the symbol of the oyster shell. On the other hand, he was the patron saint of Spain, the hated enemy.

Indeed, the English sailors might not have celebrated the feast day at all. Although Europeans had an annual calendar so filled
with holy days that many employers complained that their workers feasted more than worked, at sea it was a different story. “All the days were alike to us, and many times it fell out that we had more work on a Sabbath day than we did on other days,” noted one sailor. They simply had neither the time nor inclination to spend their hours in devotion. Moreover, the Protestant Reformation had attacked the veneration of the Catholic saints, and as a result many feast days were eliminated (to the chagrin of many workers).
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The captains and crews quietly noted the strengthening winds throughout the day. Taking advantage of the opportunity, they rode the winds whipping their unfurled sails toward their destination at a brisk four to five knots. As the morning progressed, the steadily increasing winds caused whitecaps to appear and choppy swells to shake the ship with a growing intensity.

Gabriel Archer thought that they were “about one hundred and fifty leagues distant from the West Indies, in crossing the Gulf of Bahama.” John Hawkins also believed they were very close to the Bahamas, but their exact location is unknown. They were probably a few hundred miles to the east, roughly in the vicinity of longitude 70° west and latitude 26° north.
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In the distance, a sailor’s worst nightmare—a massive hurricane—appeared across the breadth of the horizon, “the clouds gathering thick upon us and the winds singing and whistling most unusually.”
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The hurricane approached the ships at a steady pace of ten or twelve miles per hour. Lightning flashed and peals of thunder boomed louder with each moment as the fleet inexorably moved closer to the storm.

The captains barked orders and the mariners furled the sails to prevent tearing. The crew of the
Sea Venture
was forced to cut loose the ketch with twenty persons aboard. They “cast off our pinnace, towing the same until then astern”; the people aboard the boat were
consigned to the angry seas. They were never heard from again.
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The passengers on the other ships went below and sought shelter; many of them prayed.