The Jamestown Experiment (19 page)

Thomas Gates and the other leaders were eager to get off the island and head for their Virginia destination because that was their national mission. Gates could not abandon that mission and had
to pursue every possible means of getting to Virginia. Gates opened the instructions for the colony and discovered the names of the men whom the Virginia Council selected to be members of the local council. They began organizing the men into work teams to fulfill the needs of the settlers and their mission to reach Virginia.

Gates ordered the carpenters and other artisans to refit their longboat to sail to Virginia ahead of the other survivors and make contact with the Jamestown colony. The scouts would then borrow one of Jamestown’s boats and sail back to rescue the rest of the survivors. The workers used a combination of the salvage from the
Sea Venture
as well as materials from the island.

The carpenters fit the boat “with a little deck, made of the hatches of our ruined ship…gave her sails and oars.” The leaders selected a knowledgeable Plymouth pilot, the master’s mate, Henry Ravens, to lead the expedition. Eight hardy sailors volunteered to make the journey in the small boat so soon after their horrific experience during the hurricane and wreck of the
Sea Venture.
Thomas Wittingham, the cape merchant in charge of the storehouse, also agreed to join the venture. Admiral Somers aided their chances for success by making a survey of the treacherous waters around Bermuda.

Governor Gates then had to inform the colony who should govern the settlement in his temporary absence. He imagined the anarchy and struggle for leadership among the ambitious gentlemen when at least a few of the ships had escaped the clutches of the hurricane and arrived without the governor or the instructions for the colony. “For by a long-practiced experience, foreseeing and fearing what innovation and tumult might happily arise amongst the younger and ambitious spirits of the new companies to arrive in Virginia,” Gates composed a letter to the colony and gave a commission to the leaders of the colony until he arrived in Jamestown.
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Gates chose Peter Winne to serve as temporary governor. The
Virginia Council’s instructions listed George Somers as the next ranking official after Gates. John Smith and John Ratcliffe were next, but they had disputes with each other and might polarize the settlement into factions again. John Martin was also named as a council member, but he might have gone down with the
Falcon.
Peter Winne was the next man on the list, outranking two other men at the bottom of council, and Matthew Scrivener was appointed as the council secretary.
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Gates also wrote a letter to the Virginia Council, which was to travel indirectly to England. The governor described the predicament of the survivors of the
Sea Venture
wreck, but he informed the council that he was alive and well and preparing to sail to Virginia. Ravens and Wittingham would deliver the letter to the colony, which would dispatch a ship to England with the news. Gates also expressed the hope that the council might charitably dispatch Lord De La Warr’s expedition earlier than expected to “redeem us from hence” if it proved necessary.
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After stocking the boat with adequate provisions for the trip and working out their position relative to Virginia so that Ravens could plot a course for Jamestown, the eight men boarded the small boat. On Monday, August 28, 1609, they shoved off.

The colonists were not expecting to see them, or any other rescuers, for at least a month. But much to the surprise and dismay of the settlers, Ravens and his crew returned on Wednesday night. The boat could not sail clear of the shoals around the island.

Ravens set sail again in early September. He promised that if he made it to the Jamestown colony, he would return to Bermuda “the next moon with the pinnace belonging to the colony.”

Gates appointed “fires prepared as beacons” on high points on the island, and the settlers diligently tended the fires that would signal their position to any ships searching for them. But after a
month, they wondered whether any ship would come. After two months, most abandoned hope. “Two moons were wasted upon the promontory…and gave many a long and hopeful look round about the horizon, from the northeast to the southwest, but in vain.” The survivors would have to rely upon their own industry and creativity to find a way off the island.
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Ravens and his daring crew were never seen again.

Gates faced even more challenges, and a mutiny among his own men on Bermuda nearly doomed his attempt to get to Virginia. He had to establish the rule of law on this island to ensure that the people under his command would survive their predicament. But, he would have to weigh his rule against their rights and liberties, especially when some of them sought to set themselves up as rulers or decided that the island paradise was a good place to settle instead of Virginia.

When Thomas Gates exercised his absolute authority over the colony in the military fashion to which he was accustomed, the individualistic, free men among the colonists bristled. Despite the assertion of what was tantamount to martial law, four major mutinies erupted in the ten months the crew and passengers of the
Sea Venture
resided on Bermuda. Although each plot had its own character, there were a few similarities rooted in the problems of leadership here and at Jamestown. First, free Englishmen refused to be governed according to the martial organization of the colony. Second, the trouble in Jamestown stood in stark contrast to the wonderful experience on Bermuda.

The first mutiny began when Ravens and his crew left on August 28. Gates ordered the men to start building a second pinnace to get them to Jamestown. He commanded Richard Frobisher, a “well-experienced shipwright and skillful workman,” to organize the
building of the ship. Frobisher had four carpenters and a team of workers at his disposal. They laid the keel for the ship at the water’s edge in Building Bay so that the high tides could pull the completed ship into ocean. Frobisher and his carpenters took a careful inventory and used the oak beams, nails, and other materials salvaged from the sunken
Sea Venture
for the forty-foot keel. Every item was used or repaired so that nothing was wasted.

Governor Gates worked just as hard as any man. He felled trees with an axe, hefted them onto his shoulder with some other men, carried them to the work site, and sawed them into planks. He followed the directions of the carpenters without question. Gates spared “no travail of body, nor forbear any care or study of mind” in order to set an example of industry and diligence for the colonists. He used his “own performance [rather] than…authority” to drive them to their best efforts. His leadership style sought to inspire the others with the idea that “example prevails above precepts, and how readier men are to be led by eyes than ears.” Yet not everyone was impressed or persuaded.
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On September 1, John Want—a religious dissenter who was sympathetic to a radical Puritan view called Brownism, which rejected any civil or ecclesiastical authority in favor of allegiance to the higher authority of God and one’s conscience—encouraged six seaman and laborers to stop working on the pinnace. These included carpenter Nicholas Bennett, another religious dissenter against the Anglican Church, and Christopher Carter. The conspirators agreed “not to set their hands to any travail or endeavor which might expedite or forward this pinnace.” William Strachey called Bennett a “mutinous and dissembling impostor,” because he had made much public “profession of Scripture” in front of the company. Want additionally had made “his own prayers much devout and frequent” but was “both seditious and a sectary in points of religion.”
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These mutineers told their fellow colonists that Virginia held “nothing but wretchedness and labor must be expected, with many wants, and a churlish entreaty, there being neither that fish, flesh, nor foul.” Compared to the difficulties of Virginia, they could remain where they were and plant a successful colony, enjoying a life of “ease and pleasure.” The Isle of Devils was actually a beautiful island paradise that provided everything they needed.
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The conspirators believed that the shipwreck was a providential sign not only for their temporary survival but for a permanent settlement that resembled a Garden of Eden. Consequently, they proposed to “break from the society of the colony and like outlaws retired into the woods to make a settlement and a habitation there on their party, with whom they proposed to leave our quarter and possess another island by themselves.” They could incidentally seize the reins of power of their small island kingdom and govern themselves according to their own consent. Their religious dissent was closely tied to their opposition of Gates’s civil authority.
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The plot was discovered, and the rebels were hauled before the governor for trial. Gates punished them by granting their wish, sending them to live apart from the colony and fend for themselves on a nearby barren island. It was not long before “they missed comfort, who were far removed from our store.” The small island did not have the water, fish, and fowl of the main island, and the mutineers nearly starved to death. They humbly petitioned the governor “fraught full of their seeming sorrow and repentance and earnest vows to redeem the former trespass” if they were allowed to return. Gates pardoned them and readmitted them to the colony of the shipwrecked.
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During the fall, George Somers surveyed the waters around the island and mapped the area. Meanwhile, his mariners fished the waters around the island and hunted for game ashore. In late November, it was obvious that Henry Ravens had not succeeded
in securing a rescue voyage. Moreover, the castaways had split into two rival camps under Gates and Somers that viewed each other suspiciously. Some in the admiral’s camp complained that they recognized “how the pinnace which Richard Frobisher was building would not be of burthen sufficient to transport all our men from thence into Virginia.” They suspected that Gates intended to sail off and leave them to their fate.
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Somers therefore conferred with Gates and asked him for two skilled carpenters and twenty men to build a second pinnace. The penurious governor claimed that he could spare few men, tools, and materials for the admiral. He gave twenty of “the ablest and stoutest of the company,” but only such “tools and instruments as our own use required not.” Somers received only a single iron bolt for the entire ship. His men had to adapt and shape dowels to hold the planks together. They also had to innovate with the caulking of the ship. Whereas a supply of oakum and a barrel each of pitch and tar helped seal the
Deliverance
(Somers’s ship), the
Patience
(Gates’s ship) was caulked with a creative mixture of “lime made of whelk shells, and a hard white stone which we burned in a kiln, slaked with fresh water, and tempered with tortoise’s oil.”
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That winter brought terrible storms that helped feed the frightening reputation of Bermuda. “The islands are often afflicted and rent with tempests—great strokes of thunder, lightning, and rain in the extremity of violence,” Strachey reported. During the winter months, “the winds kept in those cold corners, and indeed then it was heavy and melancholy being there.” A storm on January 2, 1610, depressed their spirits and nearly destroyed the
Deliverance.
The cradle that held the unfinished ship “being almost carried from her” was set right only with “much difficulty, diligence, and labor” amid the hollowing winds and heavy surf. Gates ordered the men to carry huge stones into the surf and make a breakwater “round about
her ribs from stem to stem.” More storms—in the form of further mutinies—were gathering over the colony.
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In the weeks that followed, Stephen Hopkins began to question the governor’s authority. Hopkins was respected because he “had much knowledge in the Scriptures and could reason well therein” and served as the Reverend Buck’s assistant in reading the Psalms and biblical verse at Sunday services. Hopkins made complex political arguments about the nature of government on Bermuda. Admiral Somers justly ruled them on the ocean, and General Gates would rightly govern them according to the company’s instructions in Virginia, but Hopkins argued that the castaways governed themselves on Bermuda. He argued that “it was no breach…to decline from the obedience of the governor, or refuse to go any further led by his authority, except it so pleased themselves, since the authority ceased when the wreck was committed, and, with it, they were all then freed from the government of any man, and for a matter of conscience it was not unknown to the meanest how much we were therein bound each one to provide for himself and his own family.” In other words: the shipwreck disaster broke apart their social compact and placed them in a state of nature, freeing them “from the obedience to the governor.” It was every man for himself according to the higher law of one’s conscience and obedience to God. Hopkins’s dissenting views denied the authority of king and church over an individual’s conscience.
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Hopkins wanted to remain on the island and enjoy its “abundance by God’s providence of all manner of good food.” When they “grow weary” of the island paradise, they could always have carpenter Nicholas Bennett “build a small bark” and eventually “get clear from hence [to Virginia] at their own pleasures.”

Samuel Sharp and Humphrey Reed had heard enough of this talk and feared being convicted of joining Hopkins’s conspiracy
if they did not inform the authorities. Sharp and Reed went to Governor Gates and informed him of Hopkins’s radical views. The governor immediately ordered Hopkins to be arrested for his “fractious offence” of mutiny and rebellion and clapped him in manacles. Gates presided over a court-martial, which found Hopkins guilty and sentenced him to death. Hopkins penitently and remorsefully pled for his life, crying that his execution would lead to “the ruin of his wife and children.” With the entreaty of several gentlemen, Gates was persuaded to pardon the condemned man from the noose.
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