The Jamestown Experiment (16 page)

Hurricane-force winds began howling in every corner of the ships. Rain started to deluge the ships. The massive seas underneath the behemoth reached twenty feet high. William Strachey recorded, “A dreadful storm and hideous began to blow from out the northeast, which swelling and roaring as it were by fits, some hours with more violence than others.”
²⁴⁸

The eight ships quickly lost sight of one another as they were tossed about by the dreadful storm. In the driving rain, men could barely make out the entire length of their own ships. As one eyewitness wrote, “This tempest separated all our fleet one from another.” They could not do anything to help one another under such conditions anyway—each crew was completely on its own.
²⁴⁹

Day turned to night in the inky darkness of the swirling storm clouds, frightening the passengers even more. The hurricane “beat all light from heaven, which like a hell of darkness turned black upon us, so much the more fuller the horror, as in such cases horror and fear use to overrun the troubled and overmastered senses of all.”
²⁵⁰
Another report stated, “The heavens were obscured and made an Egyptian night of three days perpetual horror.”
²⁵¹

The hurricane overwhelmed sailors’ and the passengers’ senses completely as they numbly held on for their lives, expecting death at any second. The screeching winds topped seventy and eighty miles per hour. Soon, however, they blew almost one hundred miles per hour, drowning out all but the loudest screams and shouts. “The ears lay so sensible to the terrible cries and murmurs of the winds.”
²⁵²

The passengers huddled closely together and clung to one another. Occasional screams were heard above the din and only served to dampen everyone’s spirits and instill greater fear.
“Sometimes shrieks in our ship amongst women and passengers not used to such hurly and discomforts made us look one upon the other with troubled hearts and panting bosoms.” However, most of their “clamors drowned in the winds, and the winds in thunder.”
²⁵³

Prayers muttered by the passengers were only heard by God. “Prayers might well be in the heart and lips, but drowned in the outcries of the officers,” not to mention the fierce winds. Their prayers, however, went unanswered when the fierce screams of the winds increased in intensity hour after hour. “Instantly the winds (as having gotten their mouths now free and at liberty) spoke more loudly and grew tumultuous and malignant.”
²⁵⁴

While the passengers prayed, they were surprised to hear the crew singing songs and hurling curses at the tempest. Besides the fact that sailors usually declared impieties and expletives anyway, the seamen believed that praying during a storm was bad luck.
²⁵⁵

The pounding rain struck the sailors on deck, painfully stinging them with what felt like millions of tiny darts. Visibility was reduced to zero. “It could not be said to rain,” William Strachey noted ironically, “the waters like whole rivers did flood in the air.” The imperiled ships rocked violently in the thrashing seas, barely recovering from one wave when another struck. The “seas were as mad as fury and rage could make them.” Everyone was soaked from head to foot.
²⁵⁶

The ships were completely at the mercy of the violent seas. “Our sails wound up lay without their use.” The men took turns struggling mightily to control the whipstaff steering the ship, if only a little so that the waves would not crash into the ships broadside. “Sometimes eight men were not enough to hold the whipstaff in the steerage and the tiller below in the gunner room—by which may be imagined the strength of the storm.”
²⁵⁷

The hurricane was “so violent that men could scarce stand upon the decks.”
²⁵⁸
Tables and chairs, game boards, and cooking pots rolled back and forth across the decks, threatening to batter and bruise or break an exposed limb. The cannons and their lead cannonballs, weighing almost ten pounds, were secured before they destroyed the
Sea Venture.
People were thrown about, crashing into bulkheads like rag dolls. Some of the immense waves crashed completely over the decks, inundating the ships and threatening to drag them down or roll them over. “There was not a moment in which the sudden splitting or instant oversetting of the ship was not expected.”

The passengers were not the only ones who were afraid; the crew was similarly terrified but kept their fear at bay in front of the passengers. “The company, as who was most armed and best prepared was not a little shaken.”
²⁵⁹
Another wrote, “The skill of the mariners was confounded.”
²⁶⁰

Finally, the clouds parted and the sun presented a very welcome sight. The sea began to calm as the winds died down. Some passengers began to cry from the stress; others prayed in thanksgiving to God for ending the storm. Some did both. They hugged one another and checked themselves to make sure they were in one piece. They rubbed their bruises and helped those who were more severely injured. “For four and twenty hours the storm in a restless tumult had blown so exceedingly, as we could not apprehend in our imaginations any possibility of greater violence.”
²⁶¹

Their joy, however, was soon crushed after the brief respite— they had just been in the eye of the hurricane. From their view another hurricane apparently struck the ships; this one more violent yet. They found the second storm, “not only more terrible, but more constant, fury added to fury, and one storm urging a second more outrageous than the former; whether it so wrought upon our fears
or indeed met with new forces.” Strachey added, “It pleased God to bring a great affliction yet upon us.” The fleet was drawn into the deadly right quadrant of the hurricane. With redoubled effort, the hurricane unleashed the worst of its strength against its fatigued victims.
²⁶²

For two days the ships were tossed about by the tempest. The crew was utterly exhausted and moving only by instinct. The passengers regretted ever deciding to come aboard and thought the end was at hand. They were losing all hope that they would survive the hurricane. They said prayers, but “nothing heard that could give comfort, nothing seen that might encourage hope.” The ships could not endure such a beating forever. Sooner or later a mighty wave would crush the ships, and they would sink to their watery graves.
²⁶³

The ships struggled individually to remain seaworthy and regroup with each other. Meanwhile, it seemed that God’s worst affliction was sent against the flagship and the colony’s leaders.

Chapter Ten

T
he
Sea Venture
eventually succumbed to the power of the hurricane. The incessant hammering of the waves tore open the caulked seams in the hull, which started taking on water quickly. The ship began to sink. “In the beginning of the storm we had received likewise a mighty leak. And the ship, in every joint almost having spewed out her oakum before we were aware (a casualty more desperate than any other that a voyage by sea draweth with it) was grown five feet suddenly deep with water above her ballast, and we almost drowned within whilst we sat looking when to perish from above. This, imparting no less terror than danger, ran through the whole ship with much fright and amazement, startled and turned the blood.”
²⁶⁴

Even the most experienced and bravest sailor was frightened, perhaps because he knew precisely how much danger they were in because of the leak. “The most hardy mariner of them all, insomuch as he that before happily felt not the sorrow of others, now began to sorrow for himself when he saw such a pond of water so suddenly
broken in, and which he knew could not (without present avoiding) but instantly sink him.”
²⁶⁵
Their blood ran cold.

The
Sea Venture
was not destroyed, as the crew and passengers feared, but she was badly damaged. Numb from fatigue and cold, they could not believe they had survived the hurricane when gradually the winds stilled, the rain ended, and the sea calmed. They had no time to reflect on their situation, however, because they were not yet out of danger.

The flagship, still carrying Governor Thomas Gates, Admiral George Somers, Vice Admiral Christopher Newport, and Jamestown’s instructions and charter, survived the storm but had a gash in its bottom that was taking in copious amounts of seawater. She could still sink at any moment.

Moreover, they were all alone on the wide ocean. The might of the hurricane had scattered the fleet. For all Somers and his men knew, the other ships were lost and their crews and passengers dead. The
Sea Venture
was in no condition to make for Virginia. “Without bearing one inch of sail,” she drifted in the currents. The leaders hoped to link up with the rest of the ships along the way by chance and by some miracle save their ship.
²⁶⁶

The exhausted crew immediately went below to search for the leak so they could seal it and prevent the sinking of the
Sea Venture.
The ship still rocked in the giant swells as they carefully examined the hold by candlelight, silently “creeping along the ribs viewing the sides, searching every corner, and listening in every place, if they could hear the water run.” The crew found and plugged many small leaks with chunks of dried beef that expanded when they became waterlogged. But it was “to no purpose,” as the men could not find the source of the major leak that was steadily filling the boat with water.
²⁶⁷

The men worked continuously at the vessel’s rudimentary pumps, the muscles of their arms straining with the effort. Others
formed a line and hoisted weighty buckets of water to the top deck, where they were dumped and returned below. Despite the Herculean effort by the fatigued men, the water in the hold continued to rise inexorably. The men cursed when the pumps became choked with soggy biscuits, since tons of hardtack floated in the murky water. But they also thought that it might be a clue to discovering the source of the leak. Since they believed that the water was pouring in through a leak in the bread room, the carpenter went down and “ripped up all the room.” But still the leak remained hidden from view.
²⁶⁸

The countermeasures failed to work because the violent seas rocked the ship and tore at her seams. A passenger noted, “So much water as covered two tier of hogsheads above the ballast, that our men stood up to the middles with buckets, barricos, and kettles to bail out the water and continually pumped for three days and three nights together without any intermission, and yet the water seemed rather to increase than to diminish.”
²⁶⁹

Somers tried his best to rouse the spirits of his men. He “most comfortably encouraged the company to follow their pumping, and by no means to cease bailing out of the water.” Somers stayed on the poop deck, “where he sat three days and three nights together without meals and little or no sleep, steering the ship to keep her as upright as he could (for otherwise she must needs instantly have foundered).” His example motivated the crew and passengers to exert themselves beyond their normal endurance to save the vessel.
²⁷⁰

For his part, Thomas Gates was a governor who would rule once they landed but had no formal authority on the wide ocean. The gentleman adventurer sprang into action, helping Somers control the perilous situation and provide much-needed leadership for the terrified people on the ship. Gates divided the 140 men on the
Sea Venture
into three work crews and assigned them to different parts of the ship. Each man had alternated an hour of
grueling labor and an hour to recover his strength and sleep. They stripped to their waists and worked day and night, losing track of time in their exhaustion. Soon the fatigued men became confused and had difficulty performing the simplest tasks. “Then men might be seen to labor (I may say well) for life, and the better sort, even our governor and admiral themselves, not refusing their turn…kept their eyes waking and their thoughts and hands working, with tired bodies and wasted spirits, three days and four nights.”
²⁷¹

The men were suffering from their grueling efforts, working “destitute of outward comfort and desperate of any deliverance.” But they continued nevertheless, working together to save their own life and that of everyone else on board. Their actions were “testifying how mutually willing they were yet by labor to keep each other from drowning, albeit each one drowned whilest he labored.” No one stopped working, lest he let down the others who continued pumping water from the hold.
²⁷²

During these exertions, a colossal wave broke “upon the poop and quarter [decks and] upon us, as it covered our ship from stern to stem.” The seamen coughed up buckets of salt water and desperately tried to scream. “Like a garment or a vast cloud, it filled for a while within, from the hatches up to the spar deck.” Tons of water violently swept the men and women off their feet and threw the helmsman so roughly that “it was God’s mercy it had not split him.” Several more feet of water filled the sinking ship.

A second wave—this one of a wave of terror amongst the people—engulfed the ship just as surely as the ocean had. One man said, “For my part, I thought her already in the bottom of the sea.”
²⁷³
Governor Gates responded to the despondency that overtook the men. He heartened their spirits with inspiring speeches and by the authority of his person. He waded out of the flooded hold and confidently asserted that if he were going to die, he would
do so under the open sky “in the company of his old friends.” They recovered their determination and “not a passenger, gentleman or other, after he began to stir and labor but was able to relieve his fellow and make good his course.”
²⁷⁴

Those who struggled to keep the
Sea Venture
afloat worked mostly in darkness while it was still caught in the clutches of the storm; the hurricane blotted out daylight and starlight. “The heavens looked so black upon us that it was not possible the elevation of the Pole might be observed, nor a star by night, not sunbeam by day was to be seen.” Then, suddenly, Somers was on watch on the deck when he called to the sailors and passengers and pointed toward the top of the mainmast. They were amazed when they looked up and saw “an apparition of a little round light like a faint star, trembling and streaming along with a sparkling blaze half the height upon the mainmast, and shooting sometimes from shroud to shroud, tempting to settle as it were upon any of the four shrouds.” The men stood completely still, mouths gaping open, mesmerized by the phenomenon.
²⁷⁵

As they drifted along, the blue light of St. Elmo’s fire danced on the masts for “three or four hours together, or rather more, half the night it kept with us; running sometimes along the mainyard to the very end, and then returning.” To their disappointment, it abruptly vanished: “But upon a sudden, toward the morning watch, they lost the sight of it and knew not what way it made.” William Strachey reported that the “superstitious seamen make many constructions of this sea fire, which nevertheless is usual in storms.”
²⁷⁶

Strachey knew that sailors from different regions of Europe had slightly different names for what they had seen. The Italians, for example, “who lie open to the Adriatic and Tyrrhene Sea, call it (a sacred body)
Corpo sancto.
” The Spaniards called it St. Elmo’s fire “and have an authentic and miraculous legend for it.”
²⁷⁷
St. Elmo’s
fire was a “corposant” or starlike mass that appeared after a storm at sea. Saint Elmo was a diminutive of Saint Erasmus, the patron saint of Mediterranean sailors. He generally appeared “like a Great Ball of fire” or a “small star” affixed to a mast.
²⁷⁸

Similarly, the Greeks looked back into their mythical past and regarded the lights as Castor and Pollux. This pair of brothers spent half of their time on earth and half in heaven. Their mother was Leda, the wife of a Spartan king, who bore Castor and Clytemnestra (the wife of Agamemnon) by the mortal king and Helen and Pollux by Zeus. Castor and Pollux were regarded as the special protectors of sailors.

Strachey relates the common belief that “if one only appeared without the other, they took it for an evil sign of great tempest.”
²⁷⁹
Another seafarer agreed: “The seamen have an observation that when the meteors called Castor and Pollux come not together, that it was a bad omen.” If the brothers appeared together as two lights, it portended fair weather and good fortune.
²⁸⁰

Strachey believed that hard work would determine the fate of the ship, not a superstitious sign. “Be it what it will, we laid other foundations of safety or ruin, then in the rising or falling of it.” If the light had actually helped them to reckon their position, it “struck amazement, and a reverence in our devotions, according to the due of a miracle.” But as it was, “it did not light us any whit the more to our known way.” They continued to drift “now (as do hoodwinked men) at all adventures, sometimes north, and northeast, then north and by west, and sometimes half the compass.”
²⁸¹

They were lost, wandering aimlessly on the ocean and ready to sink at any moment. They continued their losing battle with the leaks in the ship. Despite bailing several tons of water every day,
Sea Venture
still held ten feet of water in her bottom.

Somers concluded that they would have to lighten their load
and ordered the men to throw tons of materials overboard. They tore down the ship’s rigging and jettisoned it. They dumped their trunks and chests, conceding that their lives were more valuable than any of their possessions. They threw over “many a butt of beer, hogsheads of oil, cider, wine, and vinegar,” deciding to save themselves from the sinking ship and later worry about provisions. Recognizing that the ocean presented a much more imminent threat than any Spanish privateers, they “heaved away all our ordnance on the starboard side.” They were leaving a trail of debris and hope behind the drifting ship.
²⁸²

They considered cutting down the mainmast, a move that would improve the ship’s seaworthiness but simultaneously doom her ability to sail. The men hardly cared, “for we were spent, and our men so weary as their strengths together failed them with their hearts, having travailed now from Tuesday till Friday morning, day, and night, without either sleep or food.”
²⁸³

The work teams pumped out an estimated hundred tons of water every four hours, and still the
Sea Venture
slowly took on more water. They were expecting their deaths and were ready to consign themselves to the sea. They saw no escape from their immediate predicament. After four fruitless and exhausting days there was a “general determination to have shut up hatches, and commending our sinful souls to God, committed the ship to the mercy of the gale.”
²⁸⁴