A Brave Vessel: The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare'sThe Tempest by Hobson Woodward Page A
Authors: Hobson Woodward
Tags: British History
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Strachey said, “the berries whereof our men seething, straining, and letting stand some three or four days made a kind of pleasant drink. These berries are of the same bigness and color of currants, full of little stones and very restringent or hard building.” The berries were eaten raw as well. Jourdain added, “There are an infinite number of cedar trees (the fairest I think in the world) and those bring forth a very sweet berry and wholesome to eat.”
Many other useful plants grew on the island, not all of them native. The Spanish had planted at least three crops that still grew in patches. Jourdain reported that the Sea Venture voyagers discovered good quality tobacco, and, while they are not mentioned in the chronicles, olives and pawpaws had been growing on the island for more than a decade. Jourdain also found another potential crop—native mulberries and a new variety of silkworm feeding on the leaves that he hoped might produce threads that could be made into cloth. The find was notable because English explorers were eager to develop a silk industry to replace expensive imports from Asia.
With the addition of plant foods the Bermuda larder was becoming ever more ample, though summer temperatures in the low eighties meant only a small supply of meat could be stored. The Sea Venture castaways had only limited opportunity to use the traditional preservation technique of salting. Among the casks rescued from the ship were two or three of brine that could be boiled down to make salt. Gates ordered a salt-boiling operation set up under a palmetto-leaf roof, and, according to Strachey, “kept three or four pots boiling and two or three men attending nothing else in a house (some little distance from his bay).” When the brine in the casks ran out, seawater was used, though because it had a lower salt content it required more boiling and more firewood—a full cord to produce 4.5 bushels of salt. The salt-house fire, a continuously burning signal fire on the beach, and the campfire made woodcutting and log carrying a steady occupation in the Sea Venture camp.
Castaway carpenters also cut cedar trees for use as lumber, an activity possible only because the grounding of the Sea Venture allowed the retrieval of tools from the ship. One of the books Strachey brought on the ship reported that the Spanish had already transported Bermuda cedar boards to their Caribbean colonies and found them useful, albeit prone to splitting and difficult to handle. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo wrote that the wood of the Bermuda cedar was resistant to shipworms when used in seagoing vessels. The largest cedars growing on the island were fifteen feet in circumference, though the woodcutters selected more manageable specimens in their forays for lumber.
In August two boat-building operations commenced. English carpenters constructed a flat-bottomed boat that Strachey compared to a Venetian gondola. The boat allowed the castaways to transport substantial cargoes across water. This was important because it allowed the hog hunters to more easily venture to the main island. Jourdain described Somers’s returning with more than thirty live hogs on the wide bottom of the craft. The gondola was used for offshore fishing when heavy angling thinned near-shore stocks. Crustaceans and shellfish were collected and brought to camp in the boat as well. “We have taken also from under the broken rocks crayfishes oftentimes greater than any of our best English lobsters, and likewise abundance of crabs, oysters, and whelks,” Strachey said. “True it is, for fish in every cove and creek were found, snails, and schools in that abundance as (I think) no island in the world may have greater store or better fish.”
Among the fishermen who brought in the Bermuda catch were Namontack and Machumps. During the summer they dug out two canoes of Bermuda cedar. A single log was used to make each canoe, the center of the tree being slowly removed by
Many other useful plants grew on the island, not all of them native. The Spanish had planted at least three crops that still grew in patches. Jourdain reported that the Sea Venture voyagers discovered good quality tobacco, and, while they are not mentioned in the chronicles, olives and pawpaws had been growing on the island for more than a decade. Jourdain also found another potential crop—native mulberries and a new variety of silkworm feeding on the leaves that he hoped might produce threads that could be made into cloth. The find was notable because English explorers were eager to develop a silk industry to replace expensive imports from Asia.
With the addition of plant foods the Bermuda larder was becoming ever more ample, though summer temperatures in the low eighties meant only a small supply of meat could be stored. The Sea Venture castaways had only limited opportunity to use the traditional preservation technique of salting. Among the casks rescued from the ship were two or three of brine that could be boiled down to make salt. Gates ordered a salt-boiling operation set up under a palmetto-leaf roof, and, according to Strachey, “kept three or four pots boiling and two or three men attending nothing else in a house (some little distance from his bay).” When the brine in the casks ran out, seawater was used, though because it had a lower salt content it required more boiling and more firewood—a full cord to produce 4.5 bushels of salt. The salt-house fire, a continuously burning signal fire on the beach, and the campfire made woodcutting and log carrying a steady occupation in the Sea Venture camp.
Castaway carpenters also cut cedar trees for use as lumber, an activity possible only because the grounding of the Sea Venture allowed the retrieval of tools from the ship. One of the books Strachey brought on the ship reported that the Spanish had already transported Bermuda cedar boards to their Caribbean colonies and found them useful, albeit prone to splitting and difficult to handle. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo wrote that the wood of the Bermuda cedar was resistant to shipworms when used in seagoing vessels. The largest cedars growing on the island were fifteen feet in circumference, though the woodcutters selected more manageable specimens in their forays for lumber.
In August two boat-building operations commenced. English carpenters constructed a flat-bottomed boat that Strachey compared to a Venetian gondola. The boat allowed the castaways to transport substantial cargoes across water. This was important because it allowed the hog hunters to more easily venture to the main island. Jourdain described Somers’s returning with more than thirty live hogs on the wide bottom of the craft. The gondola was used for offshore fishing when heavy angling thinned near-shore stocks. Crustaceans and shellfish were collected and brought to camp in the boat as well. “We have taken also from under the broken rocks crayfishes oftentimes greater than any of our best English lobsters, and likewise abundance of crabs, oysters, and whelks,” Strachey said. “True it is, for fish in every cove and creek were found, snails, and schools in that abundance as (I think) no island in the world may have greater store or better fish.”
Among the fishermen who brought in the Bermuda catch were Namontack and Machumps. During the summer they dug out two canoes of Bermuda cedar. A single log was used to make each canoe, the center of the tree being slowly removed by
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