A Brave Vessel: The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare'sThe Tempest Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PREFACE

  CHAPTER ONE - Poet of London

  CHAPTER TWO - Aboard for Jamestown

  CHAPTER THREE - Ocean Bound

  CHAPTER FOUR - Hurricane

  CHAPTER FIVE - Rogue Wave

  CHAPTER SIX - Devil’s Land

  CHAPTER SEVEN - Angel’s Garden

  CHAPTER EIGHT - New Life

  CHAPTER NINE - Rebellion

  CHAPTER TEN - Away to Virginia

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - Relief from Home

  CHAPTER TWELVE - Forest People

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Blood in the Snow

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Poison

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Bound for England

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Blackfriars Surprise

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Bermuda Ghosts

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - After the Storm

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  VIKING

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  First published in 2009 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Hobson Woodward, 2009

  All rights reserved

  Map by Jeffrey L. Ward

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Woodward, Hobson.

  A brave vessel : the true tale of the castaways who rescued Jamestown

  and inspired Shakespeare’s The tempest / Hobson Woodward.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-06032-2

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  For Powell, Mary,

  Beth, Sadie, and Sage

  O, I have suffered

  with those that I saw suffer—a brave vessel (who had no doubt some noble creature in her) dashed all to pieces.

  —Miranda, The Tempest

  PREFACE

  To William Strachey the new play by William Shakespeare seemed oddly familiar. Watching The Tempest from a seat in the Blackfriars Theater on an autumn afternoon in 1611, Strachey was sure he recognized the luminous flight of the sprite Ariel about the masts of the Tempest ship. The scene was an eerie reminder of a rain-whipped night two years before, when St. Elmo’s fire appeared on the masts of the vessel on which he rode. Strachey had written a letter home that described a “little round light like a faint star, trembling and streaming along with a sparkling blaze half the height upon the mainmast.” Now here was Shakespeare’s character onstage, a shimmering sprite who told of illuminating the Tempest ship in the same way—“on the topmast, the yards and bowsprit would I flame distinctly.” The similarity seemed so strong, it was almost as if the playwright had read his letter and recast his very words as an enchanted idyll. As William Strachey would soon realize, William Shakespeare had done just that.

  Most of the writings of William Strachey are long forgotten. Virtually all the sonnets and narratives he wrote between 1604 and 1612 met with indifference when he managed to put them in front of readers. His habit was to worry over every line, and his works were invariably labored—all of them, that is, but his tale of the sea voyage of 1609. Strachey told of the wreck of the Sea Venture, the flagship of a fleet carrying colonists to Jamestown in Virginia. That one account seizes the reader from the first sentence, carrying her through a drenching tempest, a shipwreck, and a harrowing adventure on an exotic isle. Perhaps not surprisingly, Strachey’s evocative narrative was written without much thought in a wilderness hut for an audience of one. The woman who received his letter lent it to others, and those readers gave it to their friends, until it was eventually passed along to William Shakespeare.

  The greatest writer of the English language was a bit of a literary pickpocket. Shakespeare was a voracious reader and extracted language and ideas from contemporary and classical literature alike. Such homage to the works of others was not only tolerated in Jacobean England, it was expected, and Shakespeare was a master. In his supremely creative mind, merely good language was made both accessible and profound for readers of his time and those of ages far beyond his own. The ability to select and transform language was one of Shakespeare’s greatest gifts.

  The use of William Strachey’s narrative of the wreck of the Sea Venture as the framework of The Tempest is a prime example of Shakespeare’s craft. In his nimble mind, the glow on the mast of the ship became the winsome Ariel. The enigmatic wild man Caliban was a descendant of a murderous sailor and Powhatan voyagers who were marooned with the English. Elements of the magician Prospero were developed out of Strachey’s portrait of the leader of the shipwrecked company. Good-hearted Gonzalo had a silver-haired counterpart in the admiral who rode the Sea Venture. There are small details—a berry drink Strachey drank was poured into Caliban’s cup, and a rock-dwelling bird the castaways stalked became the quarry of Tempest hunters. There are overarching themes, as well—the musings of Gonzalo about founding an ideal commonwealth on the Tempest isle are a crystallization of the contemporary debate about Britain’s colonial ambitions. Strachey provided a true story of colonial exploration; Shakespeare applied his art and re-created it as a New World masterpiece.

  The pages that follow tell the story of that collaboration between William Strachey and William Shakespeare, a joint project of which Strachey was unaware until he returned from the New World to find the reworking of his story on the London stage. Strachey was obscure, and his counterpart was one of the most famous men of his time. One lived through a hurricane and shipwreck on an uninhabited island; the other remolded the story of the voyage as a tempestuous tale with univ
ersal appeal. This book tells the story of those two writers, and the sea storm, black plague, rivalries, murder, love, mutiny, and war they experienced before they wrote their intertwined tale.

  I first encountered the story of the literary intersection of William Strachey and William Shakespeare while reading about the life of Pocahontas. The Englishman whom Pocahontas would marry, John Rolfe, was aboard the Sea Venture and spent ten months as a castaway on Bermuda with Strachey. The reference I came across was brief, saying only that Strachey’s narrative inspired Shakespeare’s play. I was captivated nonetheless, and so began to read everything I could find about the voyage and the play, and—especially—the links between the two.

  My foray into Virginia and Tempest history took me across the Atlantic, where I visited the libraries of London and Oxford and stood on the Thames riverbank where Strachey’s ship departed for Jamestown. I saw Shakespeare’s work on the stage of the rebuilt Globe Theater and wandered the sites of his London haunts. In Bermuda I searched for beach glass in the cove where the castaways launched one of their homemade ships and visited museums and archives to examine artifacts from 1609. Back in America I went to the Historic Jamestowne Archaearium museum to see artifacts of the settlement and inspect the bones of Bermuda birds eaten by the colonists. Nearby I saw Shakespeare’s characters come alive again within the authentic walls of Virginia’s replica Blackfriars Playhouse.

  What I discovered in my travels was the incredible tale of shipwreck that I tell on the pages that follow. My studies reanimated the battering of the Sea Venture and the survival of the voyagers on a mid-Atlantic island, one of the great sea stories of Atlantic history. I recount findings of my own, including new clues about the presence of the two Powhatans on the Sea Venture. Most often, though, I gathered together the detective work of numerous researchers who over the last two centuries have unraveled a fascinating array of the connections between that Sea Venture tale and Shakespeare’s Tempest. That remarkable web of correlations is revealed in the pages below. The men and women whose discoveries I report are credited in the endnotes that follow the text.

  My goal in this book is to present for the first time the complete story of Strachey’s remarkable account and Shakespeare’s transformation of that narrative into his magical Tempest. The tale ends with the birth of a sprite, a monster, a magician, and a pair of chess-playing lovers. At its beginning is a true story of an aspiring writer who emerged from the shadow of a master to voyage to the New World, only to be overtaken by a wild tempest on a dark summer night in 1609.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Poet of London

  Thou hast howled away twelve winters.

  —Prospero, The Tempest

  Few read the markings of William Strachey’s quill. The thirty-two-year-old from the English countryside had spent more than a decade in London trying to become a writer, but few beyond his immediate circle knew his name. That his initials were the same as the most successful literary man of his time, William Shakespeare, was an ironic coincidence. In many ways the two were similar—both came from modest stock, both were educated in classical literature, and both of them had wives and children living in distant villages—but in the most important respect they could not be more different. Few had ever heard of William Strachey, whereas William Shakespeare was renowned throughout the kingdom.

  Now in 1604 the unknown William S. had an opportunity to be noticed. The playwright Ben Jonson had invited Strachey to contribute one of eight introductory sonnets to a new publication of his drama Sejanus: His Fall. The plays of Jonson were second in popularity only to those of Shakespeare, so the invitation was a true opportunity. Strachey’s sonnet would circulate among the literary elite of the city. This was a major advance in his quest to become a writer, and he worked hard to make the verse his best work.

  The family of William Strachey had not always been wealthy enough for the eldest son to lead a literary life in London. That only became possible when William’s grandfather raised enough sheep and finished enough wool to become the richest man in his ancestral town of Saffron Walden. The new affluence had allowed William’s father to go to school fifty miles away in London and to meet and marry the daughter of a city merchant. William the sonnet writer had spent a childhood divided between country and city, growing up in the household of a father whose goal was to attain a higher place in life. A month after grandfather William had died in 1587, father William had been granted a coat of arms by the College of Heralds, the first act of a newly liberated yeoman who longed to live the life of a gentleman. William the writer would emulate his father rather than his grandfather, maintaining minimal ties to the countryseat and pursuing a life in the city that his ancestors would have considered irresponsible.

  Strachey the aspiring writer had attended Emmanuel College in Cambridge and Gray’s Inn in London without earning a degree from either institution. At twenty-three he had married Frances Forster, the daughter of a prosperous Surrey family with political connections. Frances resided at her father’s estate at Crowhurst while Strachey lived in London. Two children had been born over the previous decade—William Jr., delivered nine months after the marriage, and Edmund, still an infant. Strachey’s wife and children were all in Crowhurst while he labored in London to produce the sonnet for Jonson’s book, the work he was sure would be the first of many publications in his name.

  The sonnet Strachey produced was a meditation on the life of the Roman soldier protagonist of Jonson’s play. The metaphor he chose to illuminate Sejanus’s rise and fall was a storm of thunder and lightning that produces fury but passes with little effect. The theme of “On Sejanus” was laid out in the final line—“nothing violent lasts.” Strachey wrote of “swift lightning” and “ruinous blasts” of thunder. He then added a second metaphor, comparing both the lightning and Sejanus to a vaunt-courier, or a soldier in an advance guard who delivers an impressive first strike but ultimately falls to the enemy.

  Upon publication of the book Strachey’s theme proved disappointingly prophetic, as the work itself produced a momentary flash that soon faded. Friends complimented him, but the notice did little to change his prospects. As usual the only thing that seemed to advance his goal of gaining literary friends was spending money, and the money he spent was generally on the theater. While Strachey hoped to publish sonnets and travel narratives rather than plays, he loved the work of playwrights and the culture of London theaters. One of his strategic purchases was a share in the Children of the Revels, a troupe of children that performed in a converted room in the former Blackfriars monastery. Owning an interest in a theater company gave him credibility, but it also proved to be an expensive proposition. While he was entitled to a share of the profits, the investment ended up costing him money because he had to pay for food for the boy actors and theater repairs. Strachey had money, but it was growing short. As the eldest son among seven full siblings and five half-sisters, he had assumed control of the family holdings when his father died in 1598, selling much of the property immediately to distribute legacies to his brothers and sisters. Now six years later the inheritance was running thin.

  Strachey had made many friends during his time in London, though he always wondered whether it was due to his generous spending habits. Poet John Donne was his closest companion. They were the same age and shared a love of verse and a thinly veiled anxiety about money, though Donne was more adept at both writing and cultivating patrons. There were others, too. At Gray’s Inn, Strachey had associated with writer Thomas Campion, who would later call him “my old companion Strachey.” Ben Jonson also professed himself a loyal friend. Strachey was also acquainted with Shakespeare, but the two were hardly close. Frankly it was not a very ample return on a dozen years and an inheritance spent in pursuit of literary success. Strachey was almost out of money, so something would have to change soon.

  A break came two years after the publication of Sejanus, in 1606, when a cousin recommended Strachey for the position of secretary to the
new ambassador to Turkey. Thomas Glover would soon depart for Constantinople and needed a reliable scribe. In August, Strachey departed with Glover’s party aboard the Royal Exchange. After a stop in Algiers, the ship reached Constantinople in December. The Turkey assignment started well but would ultimately end badly. Glover was the former secretary of outgoing ambassador Henry Lello and had acquired the job by convincing officials to assign him the post even while Lello labored in Turkey. The two would-be ambassadors met in Constantinople, and during an ensuing power struggle Strachey sided with Lello and was abruptly fired. Cast in the streets of a foreign land without an income, the former secretary eventually returned to England with the deposed ambassador. When Strachey arrived back in London in June 1608, his first act was to borrow thirty pounds from Dutch moneylender Jasper Tien. He was home again, but poorer than ever and embittered by his overseas adventure. A friend told Glover in December that “one Strachey is making a book against you, which if it should be so, it peradventure may cost him both ears.” Strachey never published his diatribe or suffered the punishment for libel, but he told everyone he knew that Glover was a scoundrel.

  Upon his return from Turkey, Strachey was surprised by one development in literary London. He was amused to find that William Shakespeare had been impressed enough with his sonnet “On Sejanus” to use a version of one of its lines in his new play King Lear. Strachey discovered Lear himself comparing lightning to a vaunt-courier—the very term he had used in his sonnet. Strachey may have noticed, too, that three lines earlier Lear used a new word that voyagers had brought back from the West Indies. The word was “ hurricano,” a term derived from the name of a Caribbean deity with a stormy disposition. Shakespeare, it seems, was as partial to storm imagery as the man from whom he borrowed the lightning line. Strachey was flattered to have even an uncredited line in a play by London’s leading dramatist, but he realized that few in the audience would ever be aware of the debt. Strachey’s unheralded debut on the London stage only made him long more keenly to write something in his own name that all England would want to read.