I shall no more to sea, to sea, here shall I die ashore.
Stephano, William Shakespeare’s The Tempest
In 1609 Stephen Hopkins left his wife Mary and their three small children — Elizabeth, Constance, and baby Giles — near her family in the small English village of Hursley. For reasons that are unknown but likely a matter of simple survival, Stephen had signed a seven-year contract to serve as a minister’s clerk in the fledgling Jamestown Colony of Virginia. He was about 28 years old.
As he made his was along the coast toward Plymouth, Stephen likely had little expectation of seeing his family again. Seven years would have seemed like a lifetime. In those days adult men were frequently struck down by illness, accident, or violence; and even the best possible marketing spin by the London Company would have been insufficient to gloss over the many additional risks a Jamestown colonist would face. Drowning at sea. Starvation. Disease. The knives and arrows of the New World natives.
None of which, it turned out, proved to be any more dangerous than Stephen’s own mouth.
Stephen sailed from England aboard the Sea Venture, the newly built 300-ton flagship of a fleet of seven (plus two small pinnaces). The ship carried most of the colony supplies, the fleet’s admiral, Jamestown’s new governor Sir Thomas Gates, along with the more prestigious colonists. Stephen, who had no special status, was likely only aboard because his new master, the Oxford-educated Reverend Richard Buck, had been invited to join the gentleman elite.
Much of the voyage passed uneventfully. Fair winds, following seas, and — perhaps most fortunate — no run-ins with the Spanish. But on July 24th, with only a week or so remaining in the crossing, a hurricane struck. During the ensuing storm, the Sea Venture was separated from the rest of the fleet. Far worse, the newly constructed vessel began separating from itself, leaking in many places as she “spewed her oakum”, a condition where the sealant that held joints together had not yet sufficiently hardened. Unable to withstand the strain of the angry seas, the ship’s hold quickly flooded. All their food stores were destroyed. Without drastic measures, the ship was going to sink.
For four full days, as the wind and rain and towering waves continued unabated all around them, every man on the ship (including and perhaps especially the lowly Stephen) bailed water. One hour with a bucket followed by one hour of rest, twenty four hours a day, for four days. Without food.
It seemed to be a losing battle, but at the beginning of the fifth day the storm abated and they spotted land. The ship could not be anchored without sinking, but fortunately the crew was able to run it aground on a reef. From there they used the ship’s longboat to ferry all the passengers and the surviving livestock and cargo ashore.
Miraculously, not a single man had been lost, at least not yet. They soon realized they had not landed anywhere on the continent, but on the then uninhabited island of Bermuda. Their trip was by no means over.
In those days Bermuda was known and feared as the Isle of Devils, a place of shipwrecks and storms and enchanted spirits. The castaways found the island presented few dangers, however, but instead only pleasant weather and plentiful food and top-grade building materials. There were no natives to threaten them and, contrary to myth, they saw no evidence of supernatural beings.
Within a few short weeks Governor Gates had sent out eight men in the longboat, now fitted with a deck and sail, to reach Jamestown and organize a rescue. But as the longboat disappeared from view on September 1, some of the party must have wondered if a rescue was in their best interest. Bermuda seemed to offer the best living any of them had ever experienced. Why not simply stay?
After a few days the castaways began watching the horizon, but there was never anything there. The longboat was never seen again, and no other ships happened by. As the months passed their waning hopes would have reinforced the view that a long life on Bermuda was better than a high risk return to sea.
How broad these sentiments ran in those early months is impossible to say, but when the governor ordered the construction of two pinnaces large enough to ferry everyone to the continent, several of the men were slow to comply. A few days of banishment brought them in line, however, and throughout that autumn the governor was largely able to keep order. The other powerful men marooned with him, including the fleet admiral and the Sea Venture’s captain, are said to have supported his decisions which provided a unified front.
At first Stephen Hopkins showed no sign of his views on the matter. When the Reverend held communion on October 1, Stephen read from the psalms. He did so again on Christmas Eve. But according to the account of William Strachey, the governor’s secretary, by January Stephen Hopkins had “quietly begun to shake the foundation of our quiet safety.”
In his discussions with fellow castaways, it seems Stephen had taken to pointing out the governor had no authority over them, as they were not in Jamestown. Nor did the admiral or the captain of the Sea Venture, as they were not at sea. Therefore, Strachey narrates, Stephen argued “it was no breach of honesty, conscience, nor religion to decline from the obedience of the governor or refuse to go any further led by his authority (except it so pleased themselves), since the authority ceased when the wreck was committed, and, with it, they were all then freed from the government of any man.”
Eventually someone reported such a seditious conversation and, unsurprisingly, Governor Gates did not agree. Stephen was arrested for mutiny and stood trial, in shackles, before the whole company. Confronted with the obvious weight of the situation, Stephen begged for his life despite his foolishness, claiming his family would be lost without him. But his pleas fell on deaf ears. The court found him guilty, and condemned him to death.
Fortunately for Stephen, they didn’t execute him right away. In the interim some of the “better sort” of the company, including the Sea Venture captain and Strachey himself, had been moved enough by his fervent penitence to petition the governor for leniency. They were able, with some persistence, to successfully secure the condemned man’s pardon. (While the record doesn’t state, it seems reasonable to believe the sentence was not forgiven outright, only reduced to a severe beating.)
Stephen’s close scrape with the law seems to have taught him his lesson. There was at least one further mutiny, less than six weeks later, but Stephen was not involved. And a good thing too; the leader of that affair was executed the day of his trial.
By spring, construction of the two new boats was nearing completion and the company seemed resolved, or at least resigned, to leave the island. On May 10, 1610, after more than ten months on the Isle of Devils, the 140 survivors of the Sea Venture crowded into their two pinnaces, aptly dubbed the Deliverance and the Patience, and sailed west toward the continent.
Ten days later they arrived in Jamestown, which proved to be the very hellhole many feared it would be. Of the four hundred colonists who had weathered the hurricane and arrived as planned the prior summer, barely fifty remained. The rest had succumbed to disease, starvation, and attacks from the natives, who were facing a food shortage of their own and saw the colonists for the threat that, in their desperation, they undoubtedly were. What had happened? Surviving records are inconclusive, but multiple sources indicate severe droughts had decimated the prior year’s corn harvest, which both native and colonist (through trade) had been relying on to survive the winter.
By the time Stephen arrived in Gates company the surviving Jamestown residents were reduced to skeletons. They were either too weak or too afraid to leave the fort to hunt or gather. They had long since eaten all the livestock and, so the story goes, resorted to eating each other.
With only two weeks of food left from their trip from Bermuda, Governor Gates realized they had no choice but to abandon the colony. Their only hope was to reach the English fishing camps in Newfoundland before their supplies ran out. And so the company, cannibals included, piled back into the boats and headed out to sea.
Stephen might have made it back to England later that year if not for the sudden appearance of three ships. One carried Thomas “de la Warr” West, the colony’s new governor, sent to replace missing-presumed-dead Governor Gates. The ships also carried a year supply of food. West ordered the colonists to turn around while Gates, suddenly left with nothing to govern, sailed on to London with Strachey’s narrative of their shipwreck.
Stephen has no choice but to return to Jamestown and serve out his contract. Such rules did not apply to West, however, who disliked the place and left after a year. His replacement, Governor Thomas Dale, became famous for ruling without pity for natives or Englishmen alike. Dale executed many, with torture often included in his sentences, following a rule of law he largely wrote himself.
With such a tyrant in charge, not to mention his mutinous record, Stephen could expect no leniency for any infraction, nor any consideration for special circumstances. In 1614 a letter arrived asking he be allowed to return to England, which appears to have been denied. The request likely resulted from Mary’s death a year earlier, which left Stephen’s children in the care of relatives.
Jamestown was not a big place and, given his duties under Reverend Buck, Stephen Hopkins would have known most if not all of the colony’s residents, notably those whose stories have grown into legend. He would almost certainly have been present at the marriage of Pocahontas and John Rolfe, a fellow Sea Venture shipwreck survivor who was instrumental in establishing the colony’s tobacco trade. And when Rolfe and Pocahontas sailed to London in the spring of 1616 it is possible Stephen traveled with them, as his 7-year contract was fulfilled around that time.
Finally back in England, Stephen took up residence in London’s east end parish of St Mary’s Whitechapel, not far from the docks. He was now in his mid-thirties and, after his many adventures and hardships, Stephen might have felt content to settle down. His household grew quickly during that time. In 1618 he remarried Elizabeth Fisher, who was about his age and possibly a widow herself. They had a child Damaris in 1619 and by 1620 Elizabeth was expecting again. At least two of Stephen’s children with Mary, Constance and Giles, were back in his care. Rounding out the family were two young servants, Edward Doty and Edward Leicester.
At that time several Brownist separatists had traveled from Leiden, Netherlands, and were frequenting the same area of London. Their goal was to establish a joint stock company to fund a colony in the New World. When they couldn’t find enough laborers in their own ranks to make their investors happy, they began offering shares of the company plus land grants to any Londoners willing to sign up for seven years in the New World. Given Stephen’s experience, any number of common acquaintances would have pointed the pilgrims to Stephen’s door.
Why did Stephen get back on a boat? Perhaps it was the chance to own land this time. Or perhaps he had regained some thirst to be back in the New World. Or perhaps he believed his future in Old England was even less certain than it would be in New England. Whatever the reason, the offer proved too good for Stephen to refuse. When the Mayflower sailed from London in July of 1620, the entire Hopkins household was aboard. This included thirteen-year-old son Giles, a direct ancestor of Mabel Prescott’s grandmother, Lillie Elfie Shaw.
It seems plausible that, before they departed, Stephen would have had occasion to see a production of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Someone would have undoubtedly told him the play was written the same year Strachey’s narrative of the Sea Venture shipwreck on Bermuda reached London, and how the play featured castaways on an island inhabited by the magical Bermooths. I wonder what Stephen’s reaction would have been to the second act, when the servant named “Stephano” gets himself into trouble for inciting mutiny.
Sources:
Here Shall I Die Ashore, Caleb Johnson
Wicked Moxie 