Quotes from Kieran Doherty

the island chain had achieved such a terrible reputation, thanks to its reefs and to the unearthly screams of the island's millions of cahows, that mariners were calling Bermuda the Isle of Devils.

The admiral ordered extra lanterns flown from the flagship's high yards in hopes that the other ships would not lose contact with the Sea Venture during what he knew would be a long, difficult night.

The little satellite settlement was in disarray, with no discipline, no rule other than every man for himself. West himself, the putative leader of the settlement, was gone, searching for gold. The situation was so bad that Smith was unable to smooth relations between the colonists and the Indians,

There was little of the religious idealism or of the search for personal freedom that motivated the Pilgrims in 1620 and none of the search to create a "City on a Hill" that spurred the Puritans to take ships for Boston in 1630. To these financial backers, the settlement of Virginia was primarily about trade and money.

Since the days of the earliest English voyages to the New World, ships crossing the Atlantic had typically followed a course that took them first to the Canary Islands, off the coast of Africa, and then across the southern reaches of the ocean to the Spanish territories in the West Indies before swinging north to use the Gulf Stream to carry them to the coast of what they knew as Virginia.

Passengers were crowded together, forced to live and sleep and eat in intolerably cramped conditions. There was almost no privacy, no water for washing, no break in the tedium as the ship rolled and pitched, hour after hour, day after day, even in fine weather.

turned to gaze seaward at the grounded vessel that had carried them from home to the forlorn beach, the vessel that looked like nothing more than a dying creature, parts of its skeleton already exposed, in the waning day.

Passengers in need of toilet facilities were forced to use slop buckets that soon spilled over and added to the general miasma below or to climb into the "beak"—all the way forward beneath the bowsprit—where they would perch precariously on a seat to relieve themselves as the vessel rolled with the waves and then clean themselves using a length of rope that hung from the bowsprit so that it trailed in the ocean below.

Even after its discovery, Bermuda remained a no-man's-land. The maze of reefs and coral heads that nearly surround the islands make approaching the Bermudas a scary business.

By late February 1609, three months before the new charter was signed by King James I, Pedro de Zúñiga, a savvy Spanish spy on the lookout for unusual activity in the capital, knew of England's plans to strengthen and resupply the Jamestown settlement. He sent a series of frantic warnings to his monarch, King Philip III.

It soon became clear that the ships of the fleet could not maintain contact. Somers ordered the little ketch cut free, knowing that he was almost certainly sentencing all on board to death when he did so, but also knowing it was just too risky to continue towing the smaller ship. At any moment, the ketch could be pooped or broached by a wave, devoured by the ocean, and she would drag the flagship and all her passengers and crew with her to the bottom.

A sea storm attacks the senses, the mind, the spirit, until the gut is filled with terror that can make a brave man cower belowdecks, curled into a ball like a whimpering child.

As challenging as the islands were to mariners, a few Spanish and Portuguese and, later, English sailors did make their way to stand on one of Bermuda's beaches or to climb its rocks or investigate its many caves. None of these early visitors came to stay, though. Bermuda was just too difficult to reach, too dangerous to approach.

Many in the crew—a surprising number—were almost certainly teenagers, still boys, but boys who were expected to do the work of grown men.

During all this time, the ship—without so much as an inch of sail flying—was being driven nine or ten leagues (roughly thirty miles) in each four-hour watch. And all this time, Strachey said, those on board, even those who had never done a hard day's work in their lives, struggled to keep the sinking ship from slipping beneath the waves.

As he walked the eight miles to where the Sea Venture lay docked, passing from his old life to his new, it would have been perfectly natural for him to wonder if he would ever again see the bustling, civilized city of London with its crowds and theaters and taverns and good food and, of course, his friends at the Mermaid and his family.

Even before the boat was fully beached, he jumped into the shallow water. "Gates, his bay!" he supposedly shouted as he slogged ashore. Whether or not the tale is true, the bay on the eastern shore of St. George's Island still bears Gates's name.

the haunts of certain nocturnal birds which during the day remain in their caves but at night come out to feed.… At nightfall these birds come out from their caves with such an outcry and varying clamor that one cannot help being afraid until one realizes the reason.

They would have inspected the bread room, which would soon be filled with casks of flour and biscuits; the gunner's room, where powder and shot were stored; and the steerage area and tiller room. Making their way topside, the ship's officers would have checked the rigging and eyed ropes and lines and masts and spars and surveyed the ship's boat, turned turtle on the upper deck.

they had landed in the Bermudas. To those on the beach who had any knowledge of the island chain at all, the announcement would have been terrible news. The Bermudas were known, as passenger Sylvester Jourdain noted, as "the most dangerous, infortunate, and most forlorn place in the world." Small wonder, then, that they had never been inhabited, as he wrote, "by any Christian or heathen people."3

Even in the best of times, meals were rough affairs. Once their private stores ran out, not long after the voyage began, Gates and Somers and all the other important men and women on the vessel were forced to eat the same bad food as the lowliest of the deckhands: a hard biscuit and perhaps some cold porridge, washed down by sour beer or foul water.

Living a literary gentleman-poet's lifestyle took so much of Strachey's time in the early 1600s that he seems not to have had many hours to devote to the business of making money. And what with evenings at the theater and afternoons spent in Southwark watching cockfights and bearbaitings and hours spent drinking and swapping lies with his friends, Strachey found himself forced to borrow heavily from London's moneylenders.

Miraculously, though, the same coral heads that split the ship's sides held the wounded vessel fast, upright as if she were in the jaws of a vise.

The deck appeared to be nothing more than a jumble of ropes and lines. The vessel was filled with objects that seemed to have no discernible purpose. Even the sailors appeared like aliens. They dressed their scarred, often disfigured bodies in strange clothing, ran around the deck barefoot, or scampered aloft like monkeys as they mouthed words that might as well have been Greek: