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In 1609, nine ships sailed from Plymouth with supplies for Jamestown, Virginia. The ships were commanded by Admiral Sir George Somers, sometime privateer and three years earlier one of the founders of the London Company, the stock investors in the colony. Also aboard were George Rolfe who would be known as the husband of Pocahontas and the disciplinarian governor designate of the settlement, Sir Thomas Gates.
The fleet was off the Azores when it was hit by a fierce gale which sent one vessel to the bottom with all hands. Some of the fleet reached Jamestown. The rest, including Somers in his flag ship were wrecked off the Bermudas.
The Spanish called these the Storm Islands. Somers immediately claimed them for King James and they became known as the Somers Isles. The story reached London and it is believed that Shakespeare based The Tempest on this shipwreck even though his play (performed in 1616) was set in the Mediterranean. Some scholars point to the lines at the start and Prospero to Ariel:
PROSPERO - "Of the king's ship, the mariners, say how thou has dispos'd, And all the rest o' th' fleet?"
ARIEL - "Safely in harbour is the King's ship; in the deep nook, where once thou call'dst me up at midnight to fetch dew from the still-vex'd Bermoothes, there's she hid…"
Somers and his men had found themselves ashore in a veritable Eden in the Atlantic and they set about the task of building new ships to get them to Jamestown.
The supplies from the islands would save the lives of the Jamestown colony and the figure of Gates was meant to reorganize the settlers. The Company's view was that they had become ill-disciplined and appallingly managed. Gates had been instructed to declare "Laws Divine, Morall and Martiall".
However, the colony was in such terrible state that Gates decided to abandon it and was prevented from doing so only with the arrival of fresh supplies. Somers went back to Bermuda where there were known food stocks, but never returned. He died in 'his' islands in 1610.
Gates was a hard soldier and taskmaster. He was knighted for his part in the Cádiz adventure with Essex in 1596. He had been with Drake ten years earlier and was in the list of the 1606 St James's charter for Virginia.
In 1611, Gates led a new expedition of 300 settlers including his family to Jamestown. He was governor until 1614, when he returned to England. As far as is known Gates never went back and is thought to have died in the East Indies.
William Strachey on the wreckage of the Virginia Co supply fleet
William Strachey was on board the supply ship Sea Venture when it wrecked in a hurricane in 1609. He wrote True repertory of the wreck and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, July fifteenth, sixteen hundred and ten.
"Saint James, his day, July twenty fourth, being Monday. The clouds gathering thick upon us, and the winds singing, and whistling most unusually, a dreadful storm began to blow from out the North-east, 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 an hell of darkness turned black upon us, so much as, in such cases, horror and fear use to overrun the troubled, and overmastered senses of all. 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, yet did we still find it, not only more terrible, but more constant, fury added to fury, and made us look one upon each the other with troubled hearts, and panting bosoms: our clamors drowned in the winds, and the winds in thunder. Prayers might well be in the heart and lips, but drowned in the outcries of the officers: nothing heard that could give comfort, nothing seen that might encourage hope.
"The Sea swelled above the clouds, and gave battle unto heaven. Howbeit this was not all; it pleased God to bring a greater affliction yet upon us; for 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 was grown five foot suddenly deep with water above her ballast, and we almost drowned within, whiles we sat looking when to perish from above.
"On the Thursday night Sir George Summers, being upon the watch, had 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 light stays with them half the night, and suddenly disappears upon the morning watch.
"The superstitious seamen make many constructions of this sea-fire, which nevertheless is usual in storms: the same which the Grecians were wont in the Mediterranean to call Castor and Pollux, of which, if one only appeared without the other, they took it for an evil sign of great tempest. But see the goodness and sweet introduction of better hope, by our merciful God given unto us. Sir George Summers, when no man dreamed of such happiness, had discovered, and cried "Land-O".
"We found it to be the dangerous and dreaded islands of the Bermuda. And that because they be so terrible to all that ever touched on them, and such tempests, thunders and other fearful objects are seen and heard about them, they be called commonly 'the devil's islands', and are feared and voided of all sea travellers alive, above any other place in this world. Yet it had pleased our merciful God to make even this hideous and hated place both the place of our safety, and means of our deliverance."
