I I A most dreadful tempest (the manifold deaths whereof are here to the life described), their wreck on Bermuda, and the description of those islands
Excellent Lady, Know that upon Friday late in the evening we brake ground out of the sound of Plymouth, our whole fleet then consisting of seven good ships and two pinnaces, all which from the said second of June unto the twenty-third of July kept in friendly consort together, not a whole watch at any time losing the sight each of other. Our course, when we came about the height of between 26 and 27 degrees, we declined to the northward and, according to our governor’s instructions, altered the trade and ordinary way used heretofore by Dominica and Nevis in the West Indies and found the wind to this course indeed as friendly as in the judgment of all seamen it is upon a more direct line and by Sir George Somers our admiral had been likewise in former time sailed, being a gentleman of approved assuredness and ready knowledge in seafaring actions, having often carried command and chief charge in many ships royal of Her Majesty’s and in sundry voyages made many defeats and attempts in the time of the Spaniard’s quarreling with us upon the islands and Indies, etc.
We had followed this course so long as now we were within seven or eight days at the most, by Captain Newport’s reckoning, of making Cape Henry upon the coast of Virginia, when on St. James his day, July 24, being Monday (preparing for no less all the black night before),1 the clouds gathering thick upon us and the winds singing and whistling most unusually (which made us to cast off our pinnace, towing the same until then astern), a dreadful storm and hideous began to blow from out the northeast, which, swelling and roaring as it were by fits, some hours with more violence than others, at length did beat all light from Heaven; which, like an hell of darkness, turned black upon us, so much the more fuller of horror as in such cases horror and fear use to overrun the troubled and overmastered senses of all, which taken up with amazement, the ears lay so sensible to the terrible cries and murmurs of the winds and distraction of our company as who was most armed and best prepared was not a little shaken.
For surely, noble Lady, as death comes not so sudden nor apparent, so he comes not so elvish2 and painful (to men, especially, even then in health and perfect habitudes of body) as at sea; who comes at no time so welcome but our frailty (so weak is the hold of hope in miserable demonstrations of danger) it makes guilty of many contrary changes and conflicts. For, indeed, death is accompanied at no time nor place with circumstances every way so uncapable of particularities of goodness and inward comforts as at sea. For it is most true, there ariseth commonly no such unmerciful tempest, compound of so many contrary and divers nations [? motions], but that it worketh upon the whole frame of the body and most loathsomely affecteth all the powers thereof. And the manner of the sickness it lays upon the body, being so unsufferable, gives not the mind any free and quiet time to use her judgment and empire; which made the poet say:
Hostium uxores, puerique caecos
Sentiant motus orientis Haedi, et
Aequoris nigri fremitum, et trementes
Verbere ripas.3
For four-and-twenty hours the storm in a restless tumult had blown so exceedingly as we could not apprehend in our imaginations any possibility of greater violence; yet did we still find it not only more terrible but more constant, fury added to fury, and one storm urging a second more outrageous than the former, whether it so wrought upon our fears or indeed met with new forces. Sometimes strikes [? shrieks] in our ship amongst women and passengers not used to such hurly and discomforts made us look one upon the other with troubled hearts and panting bosoms, our clamors drowned in the winds and the winds in thunder. Prayers might well be in the heart and lips but drowned in the outcries of the officers:4 nothing heard that could give comfort, nothing seen that might encourage hope. It is impossible for me, had I the voice of Stentor and expression of as many tongues as his throat of voices, to express the outcries and miseries, not languishing but wasting his spirits, and art constant to his own principles but not prevailing.
Our sails wound up lay without their use, and if at any time we bore but a hullock,5 or half forecourse, to guide her before the sea, six and sometimes eight men were not enough to hold the whipstaff6 in the steerage and the tiller below in the gunner room: by which may be imagined the strength of the storm, in which the sea swelled above the clouds and gave battle unto Heaven.7 It could not be said to rain: the waters like whole rivers did flood in the air. And this I did still observe: that whereas upon the land when a storm hath poured itself forth once in drifts of rain, the wind, as beaten down and vanquished therewith, not long after endureth; here the glut of water (as if throttling the wind erewhile) was no sooner a little emptied and qualified but instantly the winds (as having gotten their mouths now free and at liberty) spake more loud and grew more tumultuous and malignant.8 What shall I say? Winds and seas were as mad as fury and rage could make them. For my own part, I had been in some storms before, as well upon the coast of Barbary and Algiers, in the Levant, and once, more distressful, in the Adriatic gulf in a bottom of Candy,9 so as I may well say: Ego quid sit ater Hadriae novi sinus, et quid albus peccet Iapyx.10 Yet all that I had ever suffered gathered together might not hold comparison with this: there was not a moment in which the sudden splitting or instant oversetting of the ship was not expected.
Howbeit this was not all. It pleased God to bring a greater affliction yet upon us; for in the beginning of the storm we had received likewise a mighty leak. And the ship, in every joint almost having spewed out her oakum before we were aware (a casualty more desperate than any other that a voyage by sea draweth with it), was grown five foot suddenly deep with water above her ballast, and we almost drowned within whilst we sat looking when to perish from above. This, imparting no less terror than danger, ran through the whole ship with much fright and amazement, startled and turned the blood and took down the braves11 of the most hardy mariner of them all, insomuch as he that before happily felt not the sorrow of others now began to sorrow for himself, when he saw such a pond of water so suddenly broken in and which he knew could not (without present avoiding12) but instantly sink him. So as joining (only for his own sake, not yet worth the saving) in the public safety there might be seen master, master’s mate, boatswain, quartermaster, coopers, carpenters, and who not, with candles in their hands, creeping along the ribs viewing the sides, searching every corner, and listening in every place if they could hear the water run. Many a weeping leak was this way found and hastily stopped, and at length one in the gunner room made up with I know not how many pieces of beef. But all was to no purpose; the leak (if it were but one) which drunk in our greatest seas and took in our destruction fastest could not then be found, nor ever was, by any labor, counsel, or search. The waters still increasing and the pumps going, which at length choked with bringing up whole and continual biscuit (and indeed all we had, ten thousandweight), it was conceived as most likely that the leak might be sprung in the bread room; whereupon the carpenter went down and ripped up all the room but could not find it so.
I am not able to give unto Your Ladyship every man’s thought in this perplexity to which we were now brought; but to me this leakage appeared as a wound given to men that were before dead. The Lord knoweth, I had as little hope as desire of life in the storm, and in this: it went beyond my will because beyond my reason why we should labor to preserve life. Yet we did, either because so dear are a few lingering hours of life in all mankind, or that our Christian knowledges taught us how much we owed to the rites of nature, as bound not to be false to ourselves or to neglect the means of our own preservation, the most despairful things amongst men being matters of no wonder nor moment with Him Who is the rich fountain and admirable essence of all mercy.
Our governor, upon the Tuesday morning (at what time, by such who had been below in the hold, the leak was first discovered) had caused the whole company, about 140, besides women, to be equally divided into three parts and, opening the ship in three places (under the forecastle, in the waist, and hard by the bittacle13), appointed each man where to attend; and thereunto every man came duly upon his watch, took the bucket or pump for one hour, and rested another. Then men might be seen to labor, I may well say, for life; and the better sort, even our governor and admiral themselves, not refusing their turn and to spell each the other, to give example to other. The common sort, stripped naked as men in galleys, the easier both to hold out and to shrink from under the salt water which continually leapt in among them, kept their eyes waking and their thoughts and hands working with tired bodies and wasted spirits three days and four nights, destitute of outward comfort and desperate of any deliverance, testifying how mutually willing they were yet by labor to keep each other from drowning, albeit each one drowned whilst he labored.
Once so huge a sea brake upon the poop and quarter upon us as it covered our ship from stern to stem like a garment or a vast cloud; it filled her brim full for a while within, from the hatches up to the spardeck. The source or confluence of water was so violent as it rushed and carried the helm-man from the helm and wrested the whipstaff out of his hand, which so flew from side to side that when he would have seized the same again it so tossed him from starboard to larboard as it was God’s mercy it had not split him. It so beat him from his hold and so bruised him as a fresh man hazarding in by chance fell fair with it and, by main strength bearing somewhat up, made good14 his place and with much clamor encouraged and called upon others, who gave her now up, rent in pieces and absolutely lost. Our governor was at this time below at the capstan, both by his speech and authority heartening every man unto his labor. It struck him from the place where he sat and groveled him and all us about him on our faces, beating together with our breaths all thoughts from our bosoms else than that we were now sinking. For my part, I thought her already in the bottom of the sea; and I have heard him say, wading out of the flood thereof, all his ambition was but to climb up above-hatches to die in aperto coelo and in the company of his old friends. It so stunned the ship in her full pace that she stirred no more than if she had been caught in a net, or than as if the fabulous remora15 had stuck to her forecastle. Yet, without bearing one inch of sail, even then she was making her way nine or ten leagues in a watch. One thing it is not without his wonder (whether it were the fear of death in so great a storm, or that it pleased God to be gracious unto us), there was not a passenger, gentleman or other, after he began to stir and labor, but was able to relieve his fellow and make good his course. And it is most true, such as in all their lifetimes had never done hour’s work before (their minds now helping their bodies) were able twice forty-eight hours together to toil with the best.
During all this time the heavens looked so black upon us that it was not possible the elevation of the Pole might be observed; nor a star by night nor sunbeam by day was to be seen. Only upon the Thursday night Sir George Somers, being upon the watch, had an apparition of a little, round light, like a faint star, trembling and streaming along with a sparkling blaze, half the height upon the main mast and shooting sometimes from shroud to shroud, ’tempting to settle, as it were, upon any of the four shrouds. And for three or four hours together, or rather more, half the night, it kept with us, running sometimes along the main yard to the very end and then returning;16 at which Sir George Somers called divers about him and showed them the same, who observed it with much wonder and carefulness.17 But upon a sudden, toward the morning watch, they lost the sight of it and knew not what way it made.
The superstitious seamen make many constructions of this sea fire, which nevertheless is usual in storms, the same (it may be) which the Grecians were wont in the Mediterranean to call Castor and Pollux, of which if one only appeared without the other they took it for an evil sign of great tempest. The Italians and such who lie open to the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian Sea call it (a sacred body) corpo sancto; the Spaniards call it St. Elmo and have an authentic and miraculous legend for it. Be it what it will, we laid other foundations of safety or ruin than in the rising or falling of it. Could it have served us now miraculously to have taken our height by, it might have strucken amazement and a reverence in our devotions according to the due of a miracle. But it did not light us any whit the more to our known way, who ran now (as do hoodwinked18 men) at all adventures, sometimes north and northeast, then north and by west, and in an instant again varying two or three points, and sometimes half the compass. East and by south we steered away as much as we could to bear upright, which was no small carefulness nor pain to do, albeit we much unrigged our ship, threw overboard much luggage, many a trunk and chest (in which I suffered no mean loss), and staved19 many a butt of beer, hogsheads of oil, cider, wine, and vinegar, and heaved away all our ordnance on the starboard side, and had now purposed to have cut down the main mast the more to lighten her, for we were much spent and our men so weary as their strengths together failed them with their hearts, having travailed now from Tuesday till Friday morning, day and night, without either sleep or food; for, the leakage taking up all the hold, we could neither come by beer nor fresh water; fire we could keep none in the cook room to dress any meat; and carefulness, grief, and our turn at the pump or bucket were sufficient to hold sleep from our eyes.
And surely, madam, it is most true, there was not any hour (a matter of admiration20) all these days in which we freed not twelve hundred barricos21 of water, the least whereof contained six gallons, and some eight; besides three deep pumps continually going, two beneath at the capstan and the other above in the half deck, and at each pump four thousand strokes at the least in a watch. So as I may well say, every four hours we quitted one hundred tons of water. And from Tuesday noon till Friday noon we bailed and pumped two thousand ton; and yet, do what we could, when our ship held least in her (after Tuesday night second watch), she bore ten foot deep; at which stay our extreme working kept her one eight glasses,22 forbearance whereof had instantly sunk us. And it being now Friday, the fourth morning, it wanted little but that there had been a general determination to have shut up hatches and, commending our sinful souls to God, committed the ship to the mercy of the gale. Surely, that night we must have done it, and that night had we then perished. But see the goodness and sweet introduction of better hope by our merciful God given unto us: Sir George Somers, when no man dreamed of such happiness, had discovered and cried land.
Indeed the morning, now three quarters spent, had won a little clearness from the days before, and it being better surveyed, the very trees were seen to move with the wind upon the shoreside; whereupon our governor commanded the helm-man to bear up. The boatswain, sounding at the first, found it thirteen fathom, and when we stood [in] a little, in seven fathom; and presently, heaving his lead the third time, had ground at four fathom; and by this we had got her within a mile under the southeast point of the land, where we had somewhat smooth water. But having no hope to save her by coming to an anchor in the same, we were enforced to run her ashore as near the land as we could, which brought us within three quarters of a mile of shore; and by the mercy of God unto us, making out our boats, we had ere night brought all our men, women, and children, about the number of 150, safe into the island.
We found it to be the dangerous and dreaded island, or rather islands, of the Bermuda; whereof let me give Your Ladyship a brief description before I proceed to my narration. And that the rather because they be so terrible to all that ever touched on them, and such tempests, thunders, and other fearful objects are seen and heard about them, that they be called commonly the Devil’s Islands and are feared and avoided of all sea travelers alive above any other place in the world. Yet it pleased our merciful God to make even this hideous and hated place both the place of our safety and means of our deliverance.
And hereby, also, I hope to deliver the world from a foul and general error, it being counted of most that they can be no habitation for men but rather given over to devils and wicked spirits; whereas indeed we find them now by experience to be as habitable and commodious as most countries of the same climate and situation, insomuch as, if the entrance into them were as easy as the place itself is contenting, it had long ere this been inhabited as well as other islands. Thus shall we make it appear that Truth is the daughter of Time, and that men ought not to deny everything which is not subject to their own sense.
The Bermudas be broken islands, five hundred of them in manner of an archipelago (at least if you may call them all islands that lie, how little soever, into the sea and by themselves) of small compass, some larger yet than other, as time and the sea hath won from them and eaten his passage through; and all now lying in the figure of a croissant, within the circuit of six or seven leagues at the most, albeit at first it is said of them that they were thirteen or fourteen leagues, and more in longitude, as I have heard. For no greater distance is it from the northwest point to Gates his bay, as by this map23 Your Ladyship may see; in which Sir George Somers, who coasted in his boat about them all, took great care to express the same exactly and full and made his draft perfect for all good occasions and the benefit of such who either in distress might be brought upon them or make sail this way.
It should seem, by the testimony of Gonzalus Ferdinandus Oviedus24 in his book entitled The Summary or Abridgment of His General History of the West Indies, written to the Emperor Charles the Fifth, that they have been indeed of greater compass (and I easily believe it) than they are now; who thus saith:
In the year 1515, when I came first to inform Your Majesty of the state of the things in India, and was the year following in Flanders in the time of your most fortunate success in these your kingdoms of Aragon and Castile, whereas at that voyage I sailed above the island Bermudas, otherwise called Garza, being the farthest of all the island that are yet found at this day in the world, and arriving there at the depth of eight yards25 of water and distant from the land as far as the shot of a piece of ordnance, I determined to send some of the ship to land, as well to make search of such things as were there as also to leave in the island certain hogs for increase; but the time not serving my purpose, by reason of contrary wind, I could bring my ships no nearer the island, being twelve leagues in length and sixteen26 in breadth and about thirty in circuit, lying in the 33 degrees of the north side.27 Thus far he.
True it is, the main island, or greatest of them now, may be some sixteen miles in length east-northeast and west-southwest, the longest part of it standing in 32 degrees and 20 minutes; in which is a great bay on the north side, in the northwest end, and many broken islands in that sound or bay, and a little round island at the southwest end. As occasions were offered, so we gave titles and names to certain places.
These islands are often afflicted and rent with tempests, great strokes of thunder, lightning, and rain in the extremity of violence; which (and it may well be) hath so sundered and torn down the rocks and whirried28 whole quarters of islands into the main sea (some six, some seven leagues, and is like in time to swallow them all), so as even in that distance from the shore there is no small danger of them, and with them of the storms continually raging from them, which once in the full and change commonly of every moon (winter or summer) keep their unchangeable round and rather thunder than blow from every corner about them, sometimes forty-eight hours together, especially if the circle which the philosophers call halo were (in our being there) seen about the moon at any season, which bow indeed appeared there often and would be of a mighty compass and breadth. I have not observed it anywhere one quarter so great; especially about the twentieth of March I saw the greatest, when followed upon the eve’s Eve of the Annunciation of Our Lady the mightiest blast of lightning and most terrible rap of thunder that ever astonied29 mortal men, I think.
In August, September, and until the end of October we had very hot and pleasant weather; only (as I say) thunder, lightning, and many scattering showers of rain (which would pass swiftly over and yet fall with such force and darkness for the time as if it would never be clear again) we wanted not any; and of rain more in summer than in winter. And in the beginning of December we had great store of hail (the sharp winds blowing northerly), but it continued not; and to say truth, it is wintry or summer weather there according as those north and northwest winds blow. Much taste of this kind of winter we had; for those cold winds would suddenly alter the air. But when there was no breath of wind to bring the moist air out of the seas from the north and northwest we were rather weary of the heat than pinched with extremity of cold. Yet the three winter months, December, January, and February, the winds kept in those cold corners, and indeed then it was heavy and melancholy being there; nor were the winds more rough in March than in the foresaid months; and yet even then would the birds breed. I think they bred there most months in the year. In September and at Christmas I saw young birds, and in February, at which time the mornings are there (as in May in England) fresh and sharp.
Well may the Spaniards and these Biscayan pilots, with all their traders into the Indies, pass by these islands, as afraid (either bound out or homewards) of their very meridian, and leave the fishing for the pearl (which some say, and I believe well, is as good there as in any of their other Indian islands, and whereof we had some trial) to such as will adventure for them. The seas about them are so full of breaches as, with those dangers, they may well be said to be the strongest situate in the world. I have often heard Sir George Somers and Captain Newport say how they have not been by any chance or discovery upon their like. It is impossible without great and perfect knowledge and search first made of them to bring in a bauble30 boat so much as of ten ton without apparent31 ruin, albeit within there are many fair harbors for the greatest English ship; yea, the argosies of Venice may ride there with water enough and safe landlocked. There is one only side that admits so much as hope of safety by many a league, on which (as before described) it pleased God to bring us; we had not come one man of us else ashore, as the weather was. They have been ever, therefore, left desolate and not inhabited.
The soil of the whole island is one and the same; the mold dark, red, sandy, dry, and uncapable, I believe, of any of our commodities or fruits.32 Sir George Somers in the beginning of August squared out a garden by the quarter (the quarter being set down before a goodly bay upon which our governor did first leap ashore and therefore called it, as afore said, Gates his bay, which opened into the east and into which the sea did ebb and flow according to their tides) and sowed muskmelons, peas, onions, radish, lettuce, and many English seeds and kitchen herbs. All which in some ten days did appear above ground, but whether by the small birds, of which there be many kinds, or by flies (worms I never saw any, nor any venomous thing, as toad or snake or any creeping beast hurtful, only some spiders, which, as many affirm, are signs of great store of gold; but they were long and slender-leg spiders, and whether venomous or no I know not—I believe not, since we should still find them amongst our linen in our chests and drinking-cans, but we never received any danger from them; a kind of melantha or black beetle there was which bruised gave a savor like many sweet and strong gums punned33 together), whether, I say, hindered by these or by the condition or vice of the soil, they came to no proof nor thrived.
It is like enough that the commodities of the other western islands would prosper there, as vines, lemons, oranges, and sugar canes. Our governor made trial of the latter and buried some two or three in the garden mold, which were reserved in the wreck amongst many which we carried to plant here in Virginia, and they began to grow; but the hogs, breaking in, both rooted them up and eat them. There is not through the whole islands either champaign ground, valleys, or fresh rivers. They are full of shaws34 of goodly cedar, fairer than ours here of Virginia, the berries whereof our men, seething, straining, and letting stand some three or four days, made a kind of pleasant drink.35 These berries are of the same bigness and color of corinths,36 full of little stones and very restringent or hard-building.37 Peter Martin38 saith that at Alexandria in Egypt there is a kind of cedar which the Jews dwelling there affirm to be the cedars of Libanus, which bear old fruit and new all the year, being a kind of apple which taste like prunes. But then, neither those there in the Bermudas nor ours here in Virginia are of that happy kind.
Likewise there grow great store of palm trees, not the right Indian palms such as in San Juan, Puerto Rico, are called cocos and are there full of small fruits like almonds (of the bigness of the grains in pomegranates), nor of those kind of palms which bear dates, but a kind of simerons or wild palms, in growth, fashion, leaves, and branches resembling those true palms. For the tree is high and straight, sappy and spongious, unfirm for any use, no branches but in the uppermost part thereof; and in the top grow leaves about the head of it (the most inmost part whereof they call palmetto, and it is the heart and pith of the same trunk, so white and thin as it will peel off into pleats as smooth and delicate as white satin into twenty folds, in which a man may write as in paper), where they spread and fall downward about the tree like an overblown rose or saffron flower not early gathered. So broad are the leaves as an Italian umbrella: a man may well defend his whole body under one of them from the greatest storm rain that falls; for they being stiff and smooth, as if so many flags were knit together, the rain easily slideth off. We oftentimes found growing to these leaves many silkworms involved therein, like those small worms which Acosta39 writeth of, which grew in the leaves of the tuna40 tree, of which, being dried, the Indians make their cochineal, so precious and merchantable. With these leaves we thatched our cabins; and, roasting the palmetto or soft top thereof, they had a taste like fried melons, and, being sod,41 they eat like cabbages, but not so offensively thankful42 to the stomach. Many an ancient burgher was therefore heaved at and fell not for his place but for his head. For our common people, whose bellies never had ears, made it no breach of charity in their hot bloods and tall stomachs43 to murder thousands of them. They bear a kind of berry, black and round, as big as a damson, which about December were ripe and luscious; being scalded whilst they are green, they eat like bullaces.44 These trees shed their leaves in the winter months, as withered or burnt with the cold blasts of the north wind, especially those that grow to the seaward; and in March there burgeon new in their room, fresh and tender.
Other kinds of high and sweet-smelling woods there be and divers colors, black, yellow, and red, and one which bears a round blue berry, much eaten by our own people, of a styptic quality and rough taste on the tongue like a sloe, to stay or bind the flux, which the often eating of the luscious palm berry would bring them into, for the nature of sweet things is to cleanse and dissolve. A kind of pea of the bigness and shape of a Catherine pear we found growing upon the rocks, full of many sharp subtle pricks (as a thistle) which we therefore called the prickle pear, the outside green, but, being opened, of a deep murrey, full of juice like a mulberry and just of the same substance and taste; we both eat them raw and baked.
Sure it is that there are no rivers nor running springs of fresh water to be found upon any of them. When we came first we digged and found certain gushings and soft bubblings, which, being either in bottoms or on the side of hanging ground, were only fed with rain water, which nevertheless soon sinketh into the earth and vanisheth away, or emptieth itself out of sight into the sea, without any channel above or upon the superficies of the earth; for, according as their rains fell, we had our wells and pits (which we digged) either half full or absolute exhausted and dry. Howbeit some low bottoms (which the continual descent from the hills filled full and in those flats could have no passage away) we found to continue, as fishing ponds or standing pools, continually summer and winter full of fresh water.
The shore and bays round about, when we landed first, afforded great store of fish, and that of divers kinds and good, but it should seem that our fires, which we maintained on the shore’s side, drave them from us, so as we were in some want until we had made a flat-bottom gondola of cedar, with which we put off farther into the sea and then daily hooked great store of many kinds, as excellent angelfish, salmon peal, bonitos, sting ray, cabally,45 snappers, hogfish, sharks, dogfish, pilchards, mullets, and rockfish, of which be divers kinds. And of these our governor dried and salted and, barreling them up, brought to sea five hundred; for he had procured salt to be made with some brine which happily was preserved, and, once having made a little quantity, he kept three or four pots boiling and two or three men attending nothing else in an house (some little distance from his bay) set up on purpose for the same work.
Likewise in Frobisher’s building bay we had a large seine, or trammel net, which our governor caused to be made of the deer toils which we were to carry to Virginia by drawing the masts more strait and narrow with rope yarn, and which reached from one side of the dock to the other, with which (I may boldly say) we have taken five thousand of small and great fish at one hale: as pilchards, breams, mullets, rockfish, etc., and other kinds for which we have no names. We have taken also from under the broken rocks crevises [crayfish] oftentimes greater than any of our best English lobsters, and likewise abundance of crabs, oysters, and whelks. True it is, for fish, in every cove and creek we found snails46 and skulls47 in that abundance as I think no island in the world may have greater store or better fish. For they, sucking of the very water which descendeth from the high hills, mingled with juice and verdure of the palms, cedars, and other sweet woods (which likewise make the herbs, roots, and weeds sweet which grow about the banks), become thereby both fat and wholesome; as must those fish needs be gross, slimy, and corrupt the blood which feed in fens, marshes, ditches, muddy pools, and near unto places where much filth is daily cast forth.
Unsealed fishes, such as Junius48 calleth mollis pisces, as tenches, eel, or lampreys, and such feculent49 and dangerous snakes, we never saw any, nor may any river be envenomed with them (I pray God) where I come.
I forbear to speak what a sort50 of whales we have seen hard aboard the shore, followed sometime by the swordfish and the thresher, the sport whereof was not unpleasant, the swordfish with his sharp and needle fin pricking him into the belly, when he would sink and fall into the sea; and when he startled upward from his wounds the thresher with his large fins (like flails) beating him above water. The examples whereof gives us (saith Oviedus) to understand that in the selfsame peril and danger do men live in this mortal life, wherein is no certain security neither in high estate nor low.51
Fowl there is great store: small birds, sparrows fat and plump like a bunting, bigger than ours, robins of divers colors, green and yellow, ordinary and familiar in our cabins, and other of less sort. White and gray heronshaws, bitterns, teal, snipes, crows, and hawks, of which in March we found divers aeries, goshawks and tassels,52 oxbirds, cormorants, bald coots, moor hens, owls, and bats in great store. And upon New Year’s Day in the morning, our governor being walked forth with another gentleman, Master James Swift, each of them with their pieces killed a wild swan in a great sea-water bay or pond in our island.
A kind of web-footed fowl53 there is, of the bigness of an English green plover or sea mew, which all the summer we saw not, and in the darkest nights of November and December (for in the night they only feed) they would come forth but not fly far from home and, hovering in the air and over the sea, made a strange hollo and harsh howling. Their color is inclining to russet, with white bellies (as are likewise the long feathers of their wings russet and white); these gather themselves together and breed in those islands, which are high and so far alone54 into the sea that the wild hogs cannot swim over [to] them, and there in the ground they have their burrows, like conies in a warren and so wrought in the loose mold, though not so deep. Which birds, with a light bough in a dark night (as in our lowbelling55), we caught. I have been at the taking of three hundred in an hour, and we might have laden our boats. Our men found a pretty way to take them, which was by standing on the rocks or sands by the seaside and holloing, laughing, and making the strangest outcry that possibly they could. With the noise whereof the birds would come flocking to that place and settle upon the very arms and head of him that so cried, and still creep nearer and nearer, answering the noise themselves; by which our men would weigh them with their hand, and which weighed heaviest they took for the best and let the others alone. And so our men would take twenty dozen in two hours of the chiefest of them; and they were a good and well-relished fowl, fat and full as a partridge. In January we had great store of their eggs, which are as great as an hen’s egg, and so fashioned and white shelled, and have no difference in yolk nor white from an hen’s egg. There are thousands of these birds and two or three islands full of their burrows, whither at any time (in two hours’ warning) we could send our cockboat and bring home as many as would serve the whole company. Which birds for their blindness (for they see weakly in the day) and for their cry and hooting we called the sea owl. They will bite cruelly with their crooked bills.
We had knowledge that there were wild hogs upon the island, at first by our own swine preserved from the wreck and brought to shore; for they straying into the woods, an huge wild boar followed down to our quarter, which at night was watched and taken in this sort. One of Sir George Somers’ men went and lay among the swine, when, the boar being come and groveled by the sows, he put over his hand and rubbed the side gently of the boar, which then lay still; by which means he fastened a rope with a sliding knot to the hinder leg and so took him, and after him in this sort two or three more. But in the end (a little business over) our people would go a-hunting with our ship dog and sometimes bring home thirty, sometimes fifty boars, sows, and pigs in a week alive; for the dog would fasten on them and hold whilst the huntsmen made in. And there be thousands of them in the islands, and at that time of the year, in August, September, October, and November, they were well fed with berries that dropped from the cedars and the palms; and in our quarter we made sties for them and, gathering of these berries, served them twice a day, by which means we kept them in good plight. And when there was any fret of weather (for upon every increase of wind the billow would be so great as it was no putting out with our gondola or canoe) that we could not fish nor take tortoises, then we killed our hogs. But in February, when the palm berries began to be scant or dry, and the cedar berries failed two months sooner, true it is, the hogs grew poor; and being taken so, we could not raise them to be better, for besides those berries we had nothing wherewith to frank56 them.
But even then the tortoises came in again, of which we daily both turned up great store, finding them on land, as also, sculling after them in our boat, stuck them with an iron goad and sod, baked, and roasted them. The tortoise is reasonable toothsome (some say), wholesome meat. I am sure our company liked the meat of them very well, and one tortoise would go further amongst them than three hogs. One turtle (for so we called them) feasted well a dozen messes, appointing six to every mess. It is such a kind of meat as a man can neither absolutely call fish nor flesh, keeping mostwhat in the water and feeding upon sea grass like a heifer in the bottom of the coves and bays, and laying their eggs (of which we should find five hundred at a time in the opening of a she-turtle) in the sand by the shoreside and so, covering them close, leave them to the hatching of the sun, like the manatee at Santo Domingo, which made the Spanish friars (at their first arrival) make some scruple to eat them on a Friday, because in color and taste the flesh is like to morsels of veal.
Concerning the laying of their eggs and hatching of their young, Peter Martire writeth thus in his Decades of the Ocean:
At such time as the heat of nature moveth them to generation, they come forth of the sea, and, making a deep pit in the sand, they lay three or four hundred eggs therein. When they have thus emptied their bag of conception, they put as much of the same again into the pit as may satisfy to cover the eggs and so resort again unto the sea, nothing careful of their succession. At the day appointed of nature to the procreation of these creatures, there creepeth out a multitude of tortoises, as it were pismires out of an anthill, and this only by the heat of the sun, without any help of their parents. Their eggs are as big as geese eggs and themselves, grown to perfection, bigger than great round targets.57
1. Marginal comment: “A terrible storm expressed in a pathetical and rhetorical description.” Most of the marginal notes accompanying Purchas’ printing of Strachey’s narrative merely summarize the text and consequently have been omitted.
2. Spitefully.
3. “May the wives and children of our foes be the ones to feel the blind onset of rising Auster and the roaring of the darkling sea, and the shores quivering with the shock!” (Horace Odes iii.27.21-24). Where Haedi appears in Strachey’s quotation, the original reads Austri (the south wind). The translation is that of C. E. Bennett for the Loeb edition (New York: Harvard University Press, 1939).
4. Compare The Tempest (I,i): “(Cry Within) A plague upon this howling! They are louder than the weather or our office.”
5. Scrap of sail.
6. The lever by which the ship was steered; the lower end connected with the tiller and controlled the rudder of the ship.
7. Marginal comment: “Swelling sea set forth in a swelling style.”
8. See The Tempest (I,i): “Though every drop of water gape at widest to glut him.” The word “glut” is not used elsewhere by Shakespeare.
9. Bottom of Candy: Cretan vessel.
10. “Full well I know what Hadria’s [the Adriatic’s] black gulf can be and what the sins of clear Iapyx [the northwest wind]” (Horace Odes iii.27.18-19). This is C. E. Bennett’s translation for the Loeb edition cited above.
11. Bravados.
12. Immediate bailing out.
13. Compass box. The modern word “binnacle” is a corruption.
14. Made good: supplied.
15. marginal note explains, “Remora is fabled to be a small fish able to withstand a ship in her course.”
16. Compare Ariel’s description of his activities: “Now on the beak, / Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin, / I flamed amazement. Sometimes I’ld divide / And burn in many places; on the topmast, / The yards, and bowsprit would I flame distinctly, / Then meet and join” (Tempest, I,ii).
17. Anxiety.
18. Blindfolded.
19. Broke open and emptied.
20. Wonder.
21. Kegs.
22. That is, continual pumping kept her water level at ten feet for four hours (a revolution of eight glasses by nautical timekeeping).
23. Purchas adds a marginal note: “Sir George Somers’ diligent survey; his draft which we have not. M. Norgate hath since published an exact map.” “M. Norgate” is Richard Norwood, who made an official survey of the islands in 1618 and wrote a description of the islands. The Stationers’ Register contains an entry, dated January 19, 1621/22, for “A Plot or Map of Bermudas or the Summer Islands Made by Richard Norwood.” If the map was separately printed, no copies seem to be known, but Captain John Smith used the text and printed a copy of the map in The General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Islands (1624), and Samuel Purchas also printed the description in Purchas His Pilgrims (1624-25), IV, 1796-1800. For further details see the “Bibliography of Norwood’s Writings” by William A. Jackson in The Journal of Richard Norwood, Surveyor of Bermuda (New York, 1945), pp. lix-lx.
24. It has been conjectured that Oviedo’s given names suggested to Shakespeare the names “Gonzalo” and “Ferdinand” for characters in The Tempest.
25. Purchas has a marginal note: “Or fadams braccia. In his Gen. Hist., lib. 2, cap. 9, he reciteth the same history more particularly. He saith it hath two names, Garza, of the ship which first discovered it, being so called, and Bermudez, of the captain of that ship, named John Bermudez. Note that he placeth it more to the north than that which is by ours inhabited and says sometime they see it, sometime not, as they pass. The Spaniards (as I have heard) which were wrecked there in Captain Butler’s time were of opinion that ours are not the Bermudas. Yea, some of ours affirm they have seen such an island to the north of ours and have offered to discover it. Sub iudice list est: Veritas Temporis filia [Judiciously it is said, ‘Truth is the daughter of Time’].” Braccia is an Italian nautical measure, but it is not clear whether Purchas means to equate yards, fathoms, and braccia. The General History referred to is a larger work by Oviedo than the one described below and was published in two parts in 1535 and 1557. Captain Butler is the Nathaniel Butler who was governor of Bermuda in 1619-22 and who wrote a “History of the Bermudas” (Sloane MS 750) which remained unpublished until an edition was prepared by J. H. Lefroy for the Hakluyt Society in 1822. General Lefroy mistakenly attributed the anonymous narrative to Captain John Smith.
26. The breadth of the island is given as six rather than sixteen leagues in the source.
27. The passage appears in Richard Eden’s The Decades of the New World (1555), which is substantially a translation of Pietro Martire d’Anghiera’s De orbe novo (1530) but also contains Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdes’ Historia general y natural de las Indias (Toledo, 1526). S. G. Culliford suggests, however, that Strachey actually used Richard Willes’ enlarged edition of Eden entitled The History of Travel in the East and West Indies (1577), in view of references in “The History of Travel into Virginia Britannia.” For example, a citation of Plato is from an interpolated section in Willes titled “A most ancient testimony of the West Indies by the writing of the divine philosopher Plato” (see the Culliford dissertation already cited, pp. 336-40).
28. Whirled.
29. Stunned.
30. Trifling; of small draught.
31. Certain.
32. Marginal note: “Experience hath better showed since, as we after see, both for fruits, worms, etc., those that dwell there finding more than these which took there inn or lodging. Yet the dawning and Aurora yield a delightsome light, though not all so certain as the sun; for which cause I have not omitted these first discoveries.”
33. Pounded.
34. Thickets.
35. Compare Caliban’s mention of “water with berries in it” (Tempest, I,ii).
36. Currants.
37. Astringent.
38. Pietro Martire d’Anghiera.
39. José de Acosta, The Natural and Moral History of the East and West Indies (1604).
40. Usually the term for the prickly pear (genus Opuntia). Acosta, after describing the prickly pear, mentions another “tunall” tree bearing worms, probably one of the varieties of cactus on which the scale insect Dactylopius coccus lives.
41. Stewed.
42. Probably, “flatulent.”
43. Tall stomachs: brave or lusty appetites.
44. A variety of plum, Prunus insititia.
45. Allied to the French cabillaud (cod).
46. The original reads “snaules.” Possibly these are sea snails or snailfish.
47. Skullfish?
48. Hadrianus Junius, referring to his Nomenclator octilinguis rerum propria nomine continens. An English edition was published in 1585, which translates mollis pisces as “Soft, smooth, or slippery fishes, without scales.”
49. Impure.
50. Company; i.e., many.
51. This moral is drawn by Oviedo from a contest between flying fish, dolphins, and sea gulls.
52. Tercels, or male peregrine hawks.
53. Marginal note: “They call it of the cry which it maketh a cahow.” The bird, a variety of shearwater, was so defenseless against the human occupants of the island that it became extinct before many years had passed.
54. The word possibly should be “along.”
55. A method of fowling at night with sticks, bells, and lights to confuse the birds and drive them into nets. This passage may have suggested to Shakespeare the dialogue between Gonzalo and Sebastian in Act II, scene i, of The Tempest:
“Gon. . . . You would lift the moon out of her sphere. . . .
Seb. We would so, and then go a-batfowling.” “Batfowling” was another name for “lowbelling.”
56. Fatten.
57. The quotation is from Eden or Willes, with some variations in phraseology. This passage actually ends at “geese eggs” in the original; the statement about their size has been added by Strachey from another part of the book.