Read A Brave Vessel: The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare'sThe Tempest for Free Online Page A

list survives.
    A servant woman named Elizabeth Persons was among those riding the flagship. Persons had left her family behind in England to travel to the New World in the employ of a Mistress Horton, one of the elite adventurers. As usual her chores would include tending to the needs of her employer, though in the unusual circumstances of the expedition her dealings with her would be less formal than usual. She would look after her clothing and luggage as best she could, fetch her water and other necessities from the general supply, and keep her sleeping area clean. The children on the vessel already tended to gravitate to the sides of young servants like Elizabeth, and would do so during the weeks ahead on the water.
    John Rolfe, twenty-four, would also voyage on the Sea Venture . Rolfe would later marry Pocahontas as his second wife, but in 1609 his first wife (whose name is not known) was still living and would ride with him on the Sea Venture . Though the couple were probably not yet aware of it, they had conceived a child about two weeks before the fleet left Woolwich. Goodwife Rolfe would face both morning sickness and seasickness when the Third Supply set sail.
    The expedition’s minister, Reverend Richard Buck, twenty-seven, rode the Sea Venture as well. Buck was educated in the halls and courts of Caius College, Cambridge. A fellow minister called him accomplished and painstaking in his theology—“an able and painful preacher.” Buck’s time at sea would be taken up with writing sermons to be delivered daily and providing counseling to any colonist who was feeling anxious. A voyager named Stephen Hopkins, a vociferous shopkeeper from Hampshire who frequently quoted the Bible, spent a lot of time with Buck. Strachey called Hopkins “a fellow who had much knowledge in the scriptures and could reason well therein, whom our minister therefore chose to be his clerk to read the psalms and chapters upon Sundays at the assembly of the congregation under him.”
     
    Flint ballast from the Devon coast went first into the hold of the Sea Venture , to provide stability for the rough waters of the Atlantic. Large stones and scrap iron were placed in the bilge of the ship, then covered with gravel to provide a bed into which casks and crates could be nestled. The most important supplies in those containers were food and drink. The steward’s room, bread room, and hold were all stocked from the Plymouth warehouses. Plenty of Newfoundland salt cod went onto the ship. Strachey listed additional edibles needed for such a voyage as “butter, cheese, biscuit, meal, oatmeal, aquavitae, oil, bacon, any kind of spice, or such like.” John Smith went into greater detail, noting that transatlantic vessels carried ginger both dried and fresh, almonds, aged English and Dutch cheeses, wine from the Canary Islands, rashers of bacon, dried beef tongue, roast beef preserved in vinegar, minced mutton packed in butter, “the juice of lemons for the scurvy,” and candied fruit in the form of “suckets” and “comfits.”
    Much of the food taken on in Plymouth was stored in earthenware containers made by potters in nearby Devonshire villages. Other utensils came from farther away: porcelain plates from China with painted images of hornless dragons; a calculating tool called a casting counter made in Nuremberg; ceramic Bartmann bottles molded by Germanic artisans with an image of a bearded man on each stem and the mottled coloration of tigerware; and Spanish olive jars filled with wine, wheat, and other foods. Foreign-made containers and implements were the exception, however. Most of the utensils were British-made: earthenware tankards, pewter spoons, knives, combs, thimbles, pins, padlocks, seals, and apothecary weights. The cookroom on such a ship, according to Smith, would have been stocked with all manner of eating and drinking vessels: “quarter cans, small cans, platters, spoons, lanterns, etc.” A carpenter’s chest would