What Happened to the Sea Venture?

The Sea Venture was the flagship of a fleet sailing from England to resupply the struggling Jamestown colony in Virginia when it encountered a powerful hurricane in July 1609. After several days battling the storm and taking on water, Admiral Sir George Somers deliberately steered the damaged ship onto Bermuda’s reefs to prevent it from sinking. The ship struck the reef within sight of present-day Fort St. Catherine Beach in St. George’s, where the survivors first came ashore.

Remarkably, all of the approximately 150 passengers and crew aboard survived the wreck. The castaways spent about nine months in Bermuda, where they found plentiful food and used Bermuda cedar and salvaged materials from the Sea Venture to build two smaller vessels, the Deliverance and the Patience.

In May 1610, most of the survivors continued to Jamestown, arriving at a critical moment in the colony’s history. The wreck also ultimately led to the permanent English settlement of Bermuda in 1612 and inspired accounts that are widely believed to have influenced William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Today, the story of the Sea Venture remains one of the defining events in Bermuda’s history and an important chapter in the early history of English settlement in North America.