Literacy as a cultural force multiplier

From A Brave Vessel: The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare's The Tempest by Hobson Woodward. Page 192.

Woodward makes a credible case that the voyage of the Sea Venture, wrecked in Bermuda in 1609 was the inspiration for Shakespeare's The Tempest.

In doing so, he indirectly highlights one of the force multipliers of western development in general, and Britain's role in particular - dogged written communication. Here at the threshold of discovering the whole world, when voyages were dangerous and traumatic, when paper was still capital expense, when publishing was uncertain and copyright non-existent, these early venturers compulsively wrote and wrote, spreading knowledge at a faster rate, to a greater degree, and to a larger audience than at anytime in human history.

William Strachey was one of the eye-witness chroniclers of the adventures of the Sea Venture and its crew and passengers. The insatiable curiosity, diligent observation, and capture in written form is obvious in this passage.

The work of William Strachey attracted new attention in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well. The comprehensive history of Virginia that Strachey wrote (and to a large extent copied from John Smith) after returning to England was finally published after more than two centuries in 1849 as The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia. Fifty years after that his True Reportory was reprinted in a 1907 edition of Purchas His Pilgrimes, and scholars began to recognize Strachey’s importance as an observer of colonial life. While Historie of Travaile owes much to John Smith, True Reportory is largely original and has earned its author a reputation as an unflinching observer (despite his bias in favor of colonial leaders). One modern scholar calls True Reportory “magnificent—it has some sentences which for imagination and pathetic beauty, for vivid implications of appalling danger and disaster, can hardly be surpassed in the whole range of English prose.” Another designates it “one of the finest pieces—clear, specific, descriptive, critical—in the literature of the whole period of seventeenth-century American enterprise.” Strachey is said to be “notably good as an interpreter of Indian life, being both shrewd and sympathetic in his comments.” His original dictionary of the Powhatan language included in Historie of Travaile has particular importance: “The large Strachey vocabulary of Powhatan Indian words—with six times as many as are to be found in Smith’s writings—is invaluable for modern students of Algonkian languages.”

Woodward tracks the echoes of The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia down through time, beyond Shakespeare's The Tempest. Discovery leading to observation leading to art.

The stories that Strachey and his fellow Sea Venture chroniclers told inspired writers and artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, just as they did those of the seventeenth. In 1840 Washington Irving wrote two essays on the wreck, noting that his interest was especially drawn to the founding of the Bermuda islands because he “could trace, in their early history, and in the superstitious notions connected with them, some of the elements of Shakespeare’s wild and beautiful drama of The Tempest.” Irving unfortunately slipped once and identified the wrecked ship as the “Sea Vulture” and made the exaggerated claim that a “bitter feud” on the island resulted in “a complete schism” between Gates and Somers. The Irving essays are best known for their depiction of the men Matthew Somers left behind as “the three kings of Bermuda.”

Rudyard Kipling learned of Shakespeare’s connection to Bermuda when he took a cruise to the island in 1894. In 1896 he wrote a letter to the editor of the Spectator suggesting that the playwright might have overheard the Sea Venture story from a sailor in a London tavern. Kipling believed that the wind in the Bermuda coral caused the strange sounds of Prospero’s island and a particular cave on the shore near Hamilton was a likely model for the magician’s cell. Kipling went on to imagine that a castaway taking refuge under the ribcage of a whale skeleton inspired the scene of Trinculo hiding under Caliban’s cloak. Thirty-four years later Kipling incorporated his ideas into a poem entitled “The Coiner.” In it he pictured Shakespeare meeting Sea Venture sailors at a tavern in 1611 and hearing about the Bermuda shipwreck. Shakespeare buys them drinks to keep them talking about their “seven months among mermaids and devils and sprites, and voices that howl in the cedars o’ nights.” The sailors eventually fall asleep and awake the next morning to find that coins had been left in their pockets. They congratulate themselves on their luck, without realizing that Shakespeare—the “coiner” of the title—got the better of the deal by acquiring a story he would turn to gold on the London stage.

The Sea Venture and The Tempest bewitched another twentieth-century literary great as well. In 1924 James Joyce mentioned both in his monumental novel Ulysses. Episode Nine of the stream-of-consciousness work is thick with allusions to Shakespeare and includes the following line: “The Sea Venture comes home from Bermudas and the play Renan admired is written with Patsy Caliban, our American cousin.” Joyce was referring to Ernest Renan, who wrote Tempest criticism. Our American Cousin was a nineteenth-century work of the American theater, but the play lacks a character named Patsy and Joyce’s reason for joining it to the name of Shakespeare’s servant monster remains obscure.