Read Online A Brave Vessel: The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare'sThe Tempest by Hobson Woodward - Free Book Online

Pierce passed buckets down the line he was wracked with worry for his wife and child. Whether they lived or were deep in the sea he knew not, and the uncertainty was sorrowful indeed.
    There were three pumps on the Sea Venture , two below by the capstan (the winch used to raise the anchor) and one on the open half deck by the mainmast at the center of the ship. Water drawn from them flowed through pipes to scupper holes at the sides of the ship. Strachey reported that the pumpers maintained a pace of a thousand strokes per hour, the equivalent of one every three seconds. While the pumpers worked, bailers labored in lines from the water-filled hold to three open gun ports—apparently each of the three teams Gates created was responsible for a pump and a bailing line. The bailers managed a pace of twelve hundred buckets per hour, with each pail holding either six or eight gallons and weighing fifty or seventy pounds—a rate of one bucket dumped every nine seconds. Strachey estimated that the pumpers and bailers together removed sixty-four hundred gallons of water each hour (an amount that would, as he put it, fill twenty-five “tun” barrels). That would make just over a half million gallons of water removed from the ship during the storm.
    “We kept one hundred men always working night and day,” Somers reported. Jourdain recalled that during the “sharp and cruel storm” the men put forth an unceasing effort: “With the violent working of the seas our ship became so shaken, torn, and leaked, that she received so much water as covered two tiers of hogsheads above the ballast; that our men stood up to the middles with buckets, barricos, and kettles to bail out the water, and continually pumped for three days and three nights together without any intermission.”
    Not only did the men have little rest; they also had little to eat or drink. Food was inaccessible in the hold, and conditions made it impossible to light a fire in the cookroom. Besides, there was no time to eat. Since the Sea Venture was carrying an unintended load of tons of seawater, the leaders of the expedition ordered the ship lightened by the dumping of heavy material. The heaviest things to go over the side were half of the guns, which were unhitched from their mounts and pushed into the roiling sea. Personal items were also thrown over the side. “We much unrigged our ship,” Strachey said, “threw overboard much luggage, many a trunk and chest (in which I suffered no mean loss), and staved many a butt of beer, hogshead of oil, cider, wine, and vinegar, and heaved away all our ordnance on the starboard side.”
    Through it all, everyone on the Sea Venture knew well that the vessel might sink at any time. Strachey said the pounding was violent and thunderous: “Sometimes strikes 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; nothing heard that could give comfort, nothing seen that might encourage hope.”
    The pregnant Goodwife Rolfe was among the “women and passengers not used to such hurly and discomforts,” whose mournful calls despaired of salvation. Sleepless, thirsty, seasick, and without hope, the agonizing hours of the storm passed with a cruel lethargy. Lacking the monotonous but mind-numbing activity of the men left the women with nothing to do but mull the fate that awaited them in the angry sea. Terrified, too, were Namontack and Machumps. Powhatans were accomplished small-craft mariners and they surely had been on rivers and in coastal seas many times. The Powhatans were also familiar with Atlantic hurricanes, but being at sea in the midst of one in a foreign vessel over which they had no control was a deeply frightening experience.
    By the afternoon of Tuesday, July 25, the Sea