pitiful murmurings and outcries of our sick men, without relief every night and day for the space of six weeks; some departing out of the world, many times three or four in a night, in the morning their bodies trailed out of their cabins like dogs to be buried."1

II.

During the first decade of American literature a little book was written in Virginia, which, as is believed by some authors, soon rendered an illustrious service to English literature by suggesting to Shakespeare the idea of one of his noblest masterpieces, "The Tempest." It was in May of the year 1610 that sixty tattered and forlorn coloniststhe last remnants of five hundred who were alive there six months before-crawled out from the block-house at Jamestown, and moved toward the river-bank to greet with a sickly welcome the unexpected arrival of Sir Thomas Gates. This brave commander with two small vessels and a hundred and fifty companions, had at last found his way into the James River after a voyage of almost incredible difficulty and peril. Just eleven months before, he had set sail from England for Virginia, with a fleet of nine ships and in charge of five hundred emigrants. On their passage, when they had been seven weeks at sea and were drawing near to the Virginia coast, they encountered a frightful tempest in which the fleet was scattered; and the admiral's ship, the Sea-Adventure, containing Sir Thomas

1 Purchas, IV. 1690. Among the manuscripts of the English State Paper Office are three anonymous tracts relating to the same period as that covered by the American writings of Captain John Smith and of George Percy. These tracts were evidently written by one of their companions. They are the rough jottings of an inexpert diarist, and are too crude in expression to attract us on account of any literary merit. From copies made for George Bancroft, the American Antiquarian Society printed them in Vol. IV. of its Transactions. They were edited by Edward Everett Hale. They do contain one rather graphic and amusing passage, a description of the sturdy Indian Queen Apumatec.

Gates, Sir George Somers, and other distinguished and undistinguished company, was driven ashore upon one of the Bermudas. Not being heard from for many months, that ship with all on board was given up for lost. Indeed the ship itself was lost, battered to pieces upon the rocks; but out of its fragments the passengers constructed the two clumsy pinnaces in which, as just related, they at last completed their voyage to Jamestown. Among those who had borne a part in this ghastly and almost miraculous expedition was William Strachey, of whom but little is known except what is revealed in his own writings. He was a man of decided literary aptitude. Soon after his arrival here he was made secretary of Virginia, and, as he tells us, he "held it a service of duty .to be remembrancer of all accidents, occurrences, and undertakings" connected with the colony during the time of his residence in it. Accordingly in July, 1610, when he had been in Virginia less than three months, he wrote at Jamestown and sent off to England "A True Reportory of the Wrack and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt., upon and from the islands of the Bermudas; his coming to Virginia; and the estate of that colony then and after under the government of the Lord La Ware." Whoever reads this little book will be quite ready to believe that it may have brought suggestion and inspiration even to the genius of William Shakespeare. It is a book of marvellous power. Its account of Virginia is well done; but its most striking merit is its delineation of his dreadful sea-voyage, and particularly of the tempest which, after the terror and anguish of a thousand deaths, drove them upon the rocks of the Bermudas. Here his style becomes magnificent; it has some sentences which for imaginative and pathetic beauty, for vivid implications of appalling danger and dis

1 Preface to "Laws, Divine, Moral, and Martial," in Force, Hist. Tracts, III. 2.

2 Reprinted in Purchas, IV. 1734-1758.

aster, can hardly be surpassed in the whole range of English prose. It was upon St. James's day, July the twentyfourth, 1609, "the clouds gathering thick upon us, and the winds singing and whistling most unusually," that "a dreadful storm and hideous began to blow from out the north-east, which, swelling and roaring as it were by fits, some hours with more violence than others, at length did beat all light from heaven, which, like an hell of darkness, turned black upon us, so much the more fuller of horror as in such cases horror and fear use to overrun the troubled and overmastered senses of all. . . . For surely, as death comes not so sudden nor apparent, so he comes not so elvish and painful to men

as at sea.

some

For four and twenty hours the storm, in a restless tumult, had blown so exceedingly as we could not apprehend in our imaginations any possibility of greater violence; yet did we still find it, not only more terrible but more constant, fury added to fury; and one storm, urging a second more outrageous than the former .. times 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 officers; nothing heard that could give comfort, nothing seen that might encourage hope. It is impossible for me, had I the voice of Stentor, and expression of as many tongues as his throat of voices, to express the outcries and miseries, not languishing, but wasting our spirits. . . Our sails wound up lay without their use; the sea swelled above the clouds and gave battle unto heaven. It could not be said to rain : the waters like whole rivers did flood in the air. And this I did still observe that, whereas upon the land, when a storm hath poured itself forth once in drifts of rain, the wind, as beaten down and vanquished therewith, not long after endureth; here the glut of water

was no

sooner a little emptied and qualified, but instantly the winds, as having gotten their mouths now free and at liberty, spake more loud, and grew more tumultuous and malignant. What shall I say? Winds and seas were as mad as fury and rage could make them. . . . There was not a moment in which the sudden splitting or instant oversetting of the ship was not expected. Howbeit, this was not all. It pleased God to bring a greater affliction upon us; for in the beginning of the storm we had received likewise a mighty leak; and the ship, in every joint almost having spewed out her oakum, . . was grown five foot suddenly deep with water above her ballast, and we almost drowned within whilst we sat looking when to perish from above. This, imparting no less terror than danger, ran through the whole ship with much fright and amazement, startled and turned the blood, and took down the braves of the most hardy mariner of them all, insomuch as he that before happily felt not the sorrow of others, now began to sorrow for himself. . . . Once so huge a sca brake . . upon us, as it covered our ship from stern to stem, like a garment or vast cloud; it filled her brimful . . . from the hatches up to the spardeck. . . . During all this time the heavens looked so black upon us that it was not possible the elevation of the Pole might be observed; nor a star by night, nor sun-beam by day, was to be seen. Only upon the Thursday night, Sir George Somers being upon the watch, had an apparition of a little round light, like a faint star, trembling and streaming along with a sparkling blaze, half the height upon the main mast, and shooting sometimes from shroud to shroud, tempting to settle as it were upon any of the four shrouds; and for three or four hours together, or rather more, half the night, it kept with us, running sometimes along the main-yard to the very end and then returning. . But it did not light us any whit the more to our known way, who ran now, as do hoodwinked men, at all adventures. East and by south we steered away

as much as we could to bear upright, . . . albeit we much unrigged our ship, threw overboard much luggage, many a trunk and chest, . . and staved many a butt of beer, hogsheads of oil, cider, wine, and vinegar, and heaved away all our ordnance on the starboard side, and had now purposed to cut down the main mast. . For we

were much spent, and our men so weary as their strengths together failed them with their hearts, having travailed now from Tuesday till Friday morning, day and night, without either sleep or food. . . And it being now Friday, the fourth morning, it wanted little but that there had been a general determination to have shut up hatches, and, commending our sinful souls to God, committed the ship to the mercy of the sea. But see

the goodness and sweet introduction of better hope, by our merciful God given unto us. Sir George Somers, when no man had dreamed of such happiness, had discovered and cried land. Indeed the morning, now three quarters gone, had won a little clearness from the days before; and it being better surveyed, the very trees were seen to move with the wind upon the shore-side. . . . By the mercy of God unto us, making out our boats, we had ere night brought all our men, women, and children ... safe into the island. We found it to be the dangerous and dreaded island, or rather islands, of the Bermudas. They be so terrible to all that ever touched on them, and such tempests, thunders, and other fearful objects are seen. and heard about them, that they be called commonly the Devil's Islands, and are feared and avoided of all travellers alive, above any other place in the world; . . . it being counted of most that they can be no habitation for men, but rather given over to devils and wicked spirits."

III.

At the very time when William Strachey, in some rude. cabin near the banks of the James River, was writing his