A Brave Vessel: The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare'sThe Tempest by Hobson Woodward

the winds rose sharply, and rain began to fall. Despite the worsening conditions, George Somers stationed himself outside on the high poop deck at the stern of the Sea Venture . There he shouted directions through a grate to the helmsman at the whipstaff below on the enclosed steerage deck—Jacobean ships were steered by a vertical staff rather than a wheel. Somers could tell this was no ordinary gale. The fleet was facing a kind of storm that few English mariners had seen but many had heard about since Europeans began crossing the Atlantic—a hurricano of the West Indies.
    The storm that overtook the Sea Venture was born of winds off Africa in the tropical waters of the Equator. Gathering strength, it followed the trade winds (and the Sea Venture ) across the Atlantic toward the Caribbean, veering north before encountering the West Indian island chain. The ship and the hurricane both turned north, but the Sea Venture was closer to the coast when it did so. They then followed converging tracks and met in open water halfway between the Caribbean and Bermuda. The circular storm caught the flagship with the counterclockwise winds of its northwestern edge, placing the ship at the ten o’clock position if the storm were a giant clock face. Thus, as William Strachey reported, the Sea Venture initially encountered northeast winds.
    “A dreadful storm, and hideous, began to blow from out the northeast,” Strachey said, “which swelling and roaring as it were by fits, some hours with more violence than others, at length did beat all light from heaven, which like a hell of darkness turned black upon us.” Within an hour the fleet was scattered and each vessel was on its own. The Diamond , the Falcon , the Blessing , the Unity , the Lion , and the Swallow disappeared from the view of the Sea Venture watch. George Somers and his crew were now in a desperate struggle for the safety of all on board.
    The ketch under the command of Michael Philes that was being towed by the flagship would sail on its own as well. The conditions were too dangerous for the tiny vessel and the much larger Sea Venture to remain tied together within striking distance of each other, and in the rough seas there was no way to transfer the people from the ketch to the ship. After signaling their intention with flags, the crewmen of the flagship cast off the towropes, and Philes and his complement of about thirty people were left to the mercy of the waves. There was a last look at the faces of the sailors on the bobbing ketch as they disappeared into the sheets of rain—never to be heard from again.
     
    A sea storm of any kind, much less a hurricane, was a dreadful new experience for most of the colonists. Within an hour or two all the passengers on the Sea Venture feared they would die. Strachey, for one, could think of nothing but his own mortality. “It works upon the whole frame of the body and most loathsomely affects all the powers thereof,” he wrote, “and the manner of the sickness it lays upon the body, being so insufferable, gives not the mind any free and quiet time to use her judgment and empire.”
    The gun deck where Strachey and the other passengers braced themselves was stifling, and the increasingly steep movements of the ship were alarming. Servant Elizabeth Persons huddled on her straw mattress as the ship pitched with a nauseating rhythm. Resorting to the rail when seasickness arose was impossible, and so chamber pots were used. Many of those then spilled with the pitching of the ship. The sleeping area with its hatches battened to keep the storm waters out quickly became a foul place. Elizabeth put her face down into her mattress, closed her eyes, and waited for the ordeal to end.
    A typical Atlantic hurricane produces a trillion gallons of rain each day, and the hurricane of July 1609 was no exception. “The sea swelled above the clouds and gave battle unto heaven,” Strachey said. “It could not be said to rain, the waters like