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

burning with coals and scraping with shells and stones. A colonist who saw canoes in Virginia called them “a kind of boat they have made in the form of a hog’s trough.” The canoes added two more vessels to the Sea Venture ’s miniature fleet of gondola, longboat, and skiff. Once the considerable task of hollowing out the first canoe was complete, the Powhatans were able to put their fishing skills to work. Namontack and Machumps fished both with fish-bone hooks and bow and arrow. A third method was to trap fish behind a weir staked across a tidal race. At high tide the fish would pass over the porous barrier of brush, then at low tide the barrier would break the surface and trap the catch behind it. Fishermen then used nets made of bark and animal sinew to collect the corralled fish. Powhatan weirs were “enclosures made of reeds and framed in the fashion of a labyrinth or maze set a fathom deep in the water,” Strachey said, “with diverse chambers or beds out of which the entangled fish cannot return or get out.”
    While the gondola and canoes were useful for on-island activities, they did nothing to help the castaways leave Bermuda. No ships had appeared on the horizon by mid-August. Surely if those on the other ships of the Third Supply had survived the hurricane, they now thought the Sea Venture was at the bottom of the sea. The castaways on Bermuda were hundreds of miles from the point at which the flagship lost contact with the other vessels. The chance that they had made it to land would be considered so slight and the resources of Jamestown would be so scant that no rescue ship would be dispatched to look for them. The castaways would have to devise their own means of deliverance. To that end, Gates formulated a dual plan to transport the voyagers from their unintended sanctuary.
    First the castaways would fit Sea Venture ’s longboat with a cabin and sail and send it to Jamestown as soon as possible. Construction would also begin on a larger vessel, a pinnace capable of carrying half the stranded party. The new vessel would sail to Jamestown and send back the pinnace that was routinely left at the colony for use in coastal exploration. No large ships would be available because those of the Sea Venture fleet—if they made it through the storm—would have long since returned to England with the produce of Virginia.
    Four carpenters were on Bermuda, the most accomplished of whom was Richard Frobisher. Strachey described him as “a painful and well-experienced shipwright and a skillful workman.” Frobisher set up a work site in a small bay a half mile south of the main camp. The spot was thereafter referred to as Frobisher’s Building Bay, or simply Building Bay. The first task was the fitting out of the longboat, which at twenty-one feet was little more than an oversized rowboat. The boat was hauled onto the beach and the carpenters began transforming it into a miniature sailing vessel. “We made up our longboat in fashion of a pinnace,” Strachey reported, “fitting her with a little deck made of the hatches of our ruined ship, so close that no water could go in her, gave her sails and oars, and entreating with our master’s mate Henry Ravens (who was supposed a sufficient pilot) we found him easily won to make over therewith as a bark of adviso for Virginia.”
    Gates wrote letters to the leaders of Jamestown and others to be forwarded to the Virginia Company in London. After two weeks or so of work the reconstruction was complete, and toward the end of August the tiny vessel was sailed the half mile up the coast to the camp for stocking. Ravens was pleased with the handling of the boat and said he was ready to put to sea. The longboat was packed with food and water, fishing equipment, clothes, bedding, and weapons. Then Ravens, according to Strachey, “the twenty-eighth of August being Monday, with six sailors and our cape-merchant Thomas Whittingham, departed from us out of Gates his Bay.”