Sea venture - Bermuda Shipwrecks (sitios de interés)
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Underwater Research Center
English shipJuly 28 1609
One of the best-known shipwrecks in literature is that of the merchantman Sea Venture (sometimes called Sea Adventure, Seaventure, or Seaventer), whose loss on a Bermudan reef in 1609 became the subject of William Shakespeare's Tempest. Her early history is not known with certainty, but it is believed that she is the same Sea Venture owned by members of the Company of Merchant Adventurers, for whom she traded between London, the Elbe River port of Stade, and the Dutch market at Middleburg, carrying mostly wool and cloth. In 1609 she was purchased by or chartered to the Virginia Company to sail as flagship of the second supply mission sent out to the fledgling Jamestown colony since its establishment in 1607.
The ship sailed from Plymouth on June 2 as flagship of the "Third Supply" (as it was known), which comprised six full-rigged ships and two pinnaces. On July 23, they were caught in a hurricane and Sea Venture became separated from the rest of the ships. After four days in midocean, when the ship "was growne five feet suddenly deepe with water above her ballast," Admiral of the flotilla Sir George Somers saw land. Soon thereafter, the ship lodged fast between two reefs about three-quarters of a mile from land, and the entire company of 150 rowed ashore on Bermuda, a place dreaded by mariners who knew it as "the Island of Devils." The ship remained afloat long enough for the crew to salvage most of her equipment and stores.
They also built the pinnaces Deliverance and Patience in which all but two of the company continued their passage to Jamestown, arriving on May 10, 1610. The two men who remained at Bermuda were the first permanent settlers in what officially became an English settlement in 1612.
In 1610, William Strachey published an eyewitness account entitled "A True Repertory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight," and Silvester Jourdain published Discovery of the Bermudas otherwise Called the "Isle of Devils." It is believed that Shakespeare read both of these accounts in the course of writing his celebrated romantic drama The Tempest (1611), the last of his complete plays.
The wreck remained undisturbed until 1959 when American diver and amateur historian Edmund Dowling found it at a depth of 9.1 meters. The artifacts he retrieved suggested that the wreck was that of Sea Venture, until experts at the Tower of London misidentified one of the ship's guns as a saker dating from the eighteenth century, rather than a minion from the early seventeenth. Work on the site ceased and was not resumed until 1978, when divers working under the auspices of the Bermuda Maritime Museum Association resumed operations. The site yielded relatively few artifacts: some cannon shot and smaller weapons, fragments of ceramic plates and vessels of English, Rhenish, Spanish, and Chinese origin, and pewter spoons. Little of the hull remains apart from a 15-meter section of keel (which originally may have been as long as 25 meters), a few ceilings and outer planks, and some floors.
Peterson, "Sea Venture." Winwood, "Sea Venture."
Ships of the World: An Historical Encyclopedia