A BRAVE VESSEL: The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare's "The Tempest." By Hobson Woodward. Viking Press. 268 pages, $25.95.
Four hundred years ago last year, a hurricane wrecked a ship called the Sea Venture on then-uninhabited Bermuda. The ship, the flagship of a fleet, had been headed from London to the new English settlement at Jamestown in Virginia, and on it were not only badly needed supplies, but also the colony's new governor.
Miraculously, no lives were lost in the shipwreck, and the castaways found on Bermuda -- up to then called the "Devil's Islands" -- everything they needed to sustain life. With several carpenters among the 153 seamen and passengers, they were eventually able to build two smaller ships and complete the trip to Jamestown, which they found in even worse shape than they had been in after the shipwreck.
We know about the events because an aspiring writer named William Strachey kept a diary and wrote about the adventure. Strachey became the secretary of the Jamestown colony for the two years he was there, and he hoped his writing would rescue him from a dire financial situation. But when he finally got back to London in 1611, he was in for a surprise.
The surprise was that one of his dispatches home had apparently fallen into the hands of William Shakespeare, then near the culmination of his play-writing career, and Shakespeare had turned much of the story into what became one of his most popular plays, The Tempest. It's thought that Strachey probably did not know all this until he actually saw the play.
This book tells the story of the Sea Venture, the nine months on Bermuda and Strachey's adventures in the New World, and it's one more piece of documentation about how desperate Jamestown's situation was 400 years ago. The place was on the verge of becoming another Lost Colony -- after the 1587-1591 misadventure on Roanoke Island -- when new supplies came.
Author Hobson Woodward is the associate editor of the Adams Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and, for the most part, his book moves smoothly through the events of William Strachey's life, his attempts to become a successful writer and his eventual decision to go to Jamestown. It's only when Woodward begins recounting all the similarities between Strachey's letters and The Tempest that things become a little strained. I found myself wishing I had re-read The Tempest before taking on Woodward's book -- or better yet, taken in a performance of what came to be known as the Bard's New World play. Hint to the N.C. Shakespeare Festival or the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Va.: This would be a good time to perform The Tempest.
But even the slow parts of A Brave Vessel are interesting. The sprite Ariel, for instance, who serves Prospero in The Tempest, was apparently inspired by St. Elmo's Fire, static electricity that built up and then lighted up the Sea Venture's masts during the storm. We know about the static electricity because Strachey wrote about the glow. The book is full of discoveries like that.
In the end, Strachey's two or three Virginia history books were mostly forgotten, while William Shakespeare went on to become the most famous writer in the English language, and The Tempest one of his best-known plays. Woodward says his goal in this book is to tell for the first time the complete story of Strachey's wanderings and how they were transformed into the play. He's done a painstaking job, even covering the discovery in the 1950s of what was left of the Sea Venture. (You'll find a ship model in the Bermuda Maritime Museum.)
It's one of many footnotes to the unintended collaboration that produced one of the English language's best-known plays.
Tom Dillon is a writer who lives
in Winston-Salem.
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