Third Supply: Ill-fated Sea Venture
Newport made a third trip to America in 1609, as captain of the Sea Venture and "Vice Admiral" of the Third Supply mission. However, the nine ships encountered a massive three day long storm, and became separated. The flagship of the mission, the Sea Venture, being new, was leaking like a sieve, having lost her caulking. Sir George Somers, who had taken the helm, deliberately drove her upon a reef to prevent her foundering. In an incident which is often credited as the inspiration for Shakespeare's play The Tempest, the passengers and crew found themselves stranded on the still-vexed Bermoothes (Bermuda). In addition to Newport and Somers, notable personages aboard the Sea Venture included Sir Thomas Gates, John Rolfe, William Strachey, and Sylvester Jordain.
This began the permanent settlement of Bermuda, which had been discovered a century before, but which mariners had avoided as best as they could. Situated, as it is, astride the historical return route to Europe from the West Indies and the North American Atlantic Seaboard, many sailors failed, and numerous ships had been wrecked on Bermuda's reefs in the century before the Sea Venture, helping to give the archipelago its other early name, the "Isle of Devils". Bermuda, (also known officially as the Somers Isles after Sir George Somers, Admiral of the Virginia Company, who also survived the Sea Venture wreck) is still a territory (the current term for what were previously called possessions, dependencies, or colonies) of the United Kingdom almost 400 years later.
Eventually, the survivors of the Sea Venture (150 colonists and crew members, and one dog) constructed two smaller ships, the Deliverance and the Patience, from parts of the Sea Venture and the abundant native Bermuda cedar. These were sailed on to Jamestown, carrying most of the survivors (a number had been lost at sea as the result of an ill-considered mission to reach Jamestown aboard the Sea Venture's rigged lifeboat, others had died in Bermuda, and yet others born). Two (living) men, Carter and Waters, were left behind to hold the rights of the English claim to Bermuda.
Arriving at Jamestown 10 months later than planned, those aboard the Deliverance and Patience learned that the failure of the Sea Venture, carrying most of the Third Supply Mission's supplies, to arrive, combined with other factors, had resulted in the death of over 80% of the colonists during the Starving Time from the fall of 1609 until their arrival in May 1610. Unfortunately for the colonists, Newport's arrival this time was not a long-term solution to the crisis at Jamestown. Newport and the survivors of the Sea Venture had precious few supplies to share with the Jamestown survivors. Both groups felt they had no alternative but to return to England. Several weeks later, they boarded the ships, and started to sail downstream and abandon Jamestown.
However, as they approached Mulberry Island, they were met by a new supply mission arriving from England sailing upstream. Heading this group equipped with additional colonists, a doctor, food, supplies was a new governor, Thomas West, Baron De La Warr, who forced the remaining settlers to stay, thwarting their plans to abandon the colony.
The colony was still critically short of food. If anything, this had been worsened by the addition of the hungry bellies which arrived with De La Warr. Somers returned to Bermuda with the Patience (which had been constructed to carry the food the Sea Venture survivors had stockpiled during their months in Bermuda) intending to obtain more foodstuffs, but died there of a "surfeit of pork". His nephew, Captain of the Patience, returned with the ship to Lyme Regis, instead of to Jamestown. A third man, Chard, remained behind with Carter and Waters. The Virginia Company, in effective possession of Bermuda, was given official control when its Third Charter, of 1612, extended the territorial limits of Virginia far enough across the Atlantic to include the archipelago (control was passed to a spin-off of the Virginia Company, the Somers Isles Company, in 1615).
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