By Paula Neely
In 1609, the Sea Venture, one of nine English ships carrying settlers and supplies to Jamestown, Virginia—the first permanent English settlement in the New World—was separated when a violent hurricane struck the fleet as it approached the Chesapeake Bay. After four days of trying to stay afloat, Admiral George Somers and Captain Christopher Newport miraculously spotted Bermuda, a remote mid-Atlantic island, and wedged the ship between two reefs off the coast of St. George’s Island in order to prevent the broken vessel from capsizing or sinking. All of the ship’s 150 passengers and crew and one dog made it safely to shore. Accounts of their experience are believed to have inspired The Tempest by William Shakespeare, first performed in 1611.
Located three-quarters of a mile offshore near Fort St. Catherine’s beach, the wreck of the Sea Venture was discovered by Edmund Downing in 1958. It wasn’t until the 1980s, however, that its identity was confirmed based on maritime archaeology and an assemblage of artifacts dating from 1603 to 1610, including lead weights, clay pipes, Bellarmine jugs, and earthenware pottery that matched pottery from Plymouth, England, and Martin’s Hundred in Virginia. The only English ships sailing near Bermuda during that time were those of the Virginia Company, and only one of their ships, the Sea Venture, was wrecked.
The Sea Venture passengers lived in Bermuda, a fishhook-shaped archipelago about 650 miles east of North Carolina, for 10 months while they built two new vessels using Bermuda cedar and sails, rigging, and other material salvaged from the shipwreck. They continued their journey to Jamestown in May 1610. Although they brought food supplies with them, they had no idea that the settlers at James Fort were starving. Only 60 of the original 500 colonists were alive when they arrived, and some had resorted to cannibalism to survive. “If Bermuda hadn’t been there, the Sea Venture passengers would have drowned, and the people at Jamestown would have likely died,” said archaeologist Dr. William Kelso, retired director of Jamestown Rediscovery.
After about a month, the colonists decided to abandon Jamestown, but they were turned back when they encountered Lord De La Warr, the new governor of Virginia, sailing up the James River. De La Warr ordered a massive cleanup, and debris was deposited into pits and abandoned wells throughout James Fort.
During excavations at the fort site, Jamestown archaeologists discovered giant loggerhead turtle shells, tropical fish bones, two Bermuda limestone pipes, chunks of Bermuda limestone (used for ballast), and bones of cahows (a seabird that only nests in Bermuda) in a cellar that was filled with trash during that cleanup. According to Beverly Straube, Historic Jamestowne’s curator when the artifacts were discovered, the objects from Bermuda helped date the features to 1610. No other faunal remains from Bermuda have since been discovered at Jamestown, she said. Even after De La Warr arrived, the struggling Jamestown settlers still needed food, so Somers sailed back to Bermuda to get supplies. Unfortunately, he died there from a “surfeit of pork,” according to one historical account. His heart was buried in St. George’s, and his body was secretly packed into a whiskey barrel and taken to Lyme Regis, England, where he was buried with full military honors.
Early Portuguese and Spanish sailors referred to Bermuda as the “Isle of Devils,” largely because of the 21-square-mile island’s treacherous reef system, frequent storms, and the eerie noises made by the wild hogs and native cahow birds—which they interpreted as supernatural. As a result, ships tended to avoid the island, though it was a visual marker for vessels navigating the Atlantic and returning to Europe, said curator Dr. Deborah Atwood, National Museum of Bermuda. She said the earliest known map that included Bermuda was from 1511 by Italian cartographer Peter Martyr. Named for Iberian captain Juan Bermudez, Spain long knew of Bermuda but declined to colonize it.
Reports sent back to England by the Sea Venture survivors praised Bermuda as a lush island paradise with no Indigenous people and plenty of wild hogs left by Spanish mariners, fish, and birds. This enticed the Virginia Company to send settlers to colonize the island. Commanded by Richard Moore, the governor of the colony, 50 settlers arrived on the ship Plough in July 1612 and established Bermuda as England’s second successful New World colony. All but two of these first colonists were alive in 1622. Although Jamestown was England’s first colony, established in 1607, about 90 percent of the people who emigrated there died. Jamestown survived largely because the Virginia Company kept sending a steady stream of settlers, according to archaeologist Dr. Michael Jarvis, University of Rochester. Bermuda quickly became more financially successful than Virginia; tobacco was profitable, and a strong Puritan ethos predating New England’s colonization made for strong community ties. “From its start, it was a Christian utopia,” Jarvis said. There were two growing seasons, good dirt, and the people who settled there came as families, not indentured servants. It became known as the “Isle of Saints.”
This is an excerpt of ‘After the Sea Venture’ in American Archaeology, Fall 2026, Vol. 30, No. 3. Subscribe to read the full text.
