Marooned by Joseph Kelly

Author:Joseph Kelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

SALVAGE

Whether or not he understood that democracy lurked on the shore of shipwrecks, Thomas Gates immediately began asserting his authority. His first order of business was salvage. As the first day dawned over the waters of the cove, the beach would have begun to liven in activity. The boats were carrying every last provision that could be salvaged from the ship: the sea chests belonging to individuals; weapons, tools, charts; the Company’s matériel and papers and the ensigns of command. Pigs. Chickens. Rowing from shore to wreck, then back again to shore, went on for days until the ship was emptied of everything not ruined by seawater. And then they cannibalized the ship itself: the sails, the tackle and cordage, the wooden superstructures, were pried apart and reduced to lumber, then the planks of the decks themselves and the iron fittings were removed. Piles onshore grew steadily, hour by hour, day by day. Gates selected the men of his guard and gave them arms, and the chosen men began to watch the piles in shifts.

Competing with what we might call the norms of authority was the settlers’ sense of wonder. The sailors who had seen more of the world might not have been so affected, but as that first day dawned on Bermuda, the settlers, both gentlemen and commoners, awoke to a most “strange” and “enchanted place,” as Jourdain described it. A true wilderness, inhabited by no one. If the ferocity and duration and cyclonic winds of the storm exceeded anything their imaginations could tame, if they felt they had escaped the jaws of a savage sea, then to be castaway on this exotic shore must have been wondrous. They blinked at these exotic tropical trees. The smell of fecund vegetation filled their nostrils. Flocks of birds reeled in the sky. The name Devil’s Island seemed, perhaps, a misnomer. On what magical place had the sea coughed them up?24

But work prevailed. Stomachs growled with a three-day hunger. Faces so long in the dark first welcomed the warmth of the sun and then shrank from it into the shade. Their skin and clothes dried to a crust of salt and sand. According to Sylvester Jourdain, who was a minor and largely unsuccessful merchant from the same hometown as Admiral Somers, every man fended for himself on that first morning, searching the island for food. A young woman named Elizabeth Persons had come on the voyage as the servant of a gentlewoman, Mistress Horton. In this extremity of hunger and exhaustion, after passing through the storm and wreck, did Elizabeth Persons, at the dawn of day, look first to her mistress’s needs or to her own? We don’t know. Several families were among the settlers, and fathers and mothers surely attended to their children. John Rolfe was onshore with his wife, who was pregnant. William Strachey was not one of these: he left his family behind and intended to return to them once his fortune was mended. Hopkins’s family was not there, either: he planned for them to join him in Virginia once he was well situated.

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