Sir George Somers had been selected as admiral of the great fleet which dropped down the Thames from London on May 15 and sailed from Plymouth on the second of June with a full complement of nine vessels. Somers rode aboard the _Sea Adventure_, whose master was Newport and whose passengers included Sir Thomas Gates and William Strachey, the newly appointed secretary of the colony. Ahead of them had gone Captain Samuel Argall, to find a new route to Virginia running north of the Spanish West Indies, and to make a test of the Chesapeake fisheries. Somers guided his ships along a route that had long been familiar to him, the route discovered by Columbus for Spain and the route that Newport and other English adventurers had consistently followed to the more southern parts of Virginia, but he tried to stay above the channels regularly followed by the ships of Spain. Such, at any rate, were his instructions, and for seven weeks out of Plymouth all went well. But then a storm struck, no doubt an early hurricane of the sort so familiar to residents of the east coast today, a storm which separated the _Sea Adventure_ from the other vessels and carried it to destruction off the coast of Bermuda. Providence brought crew and passengers, all 150 of them, safely ashore to begin an idyll that would be celebrated in Shakespeare's _Tempest_ and would be turned to advantage by the adventurers in their later propaganda. In Bermuda they found food in plenty--fish, fowl, and hogs that ran wild--and a most healthful climate. But for almost a year Virginia would struggle without the leadership of Somers, Newport, or Gates, and without the sure authority of instructions and commissions they had carried aboard the _Sea Adventure_.
After ten months the shipwrecked colonists had fashioned from the cedars of Bermuda, which reminded them of the cedars of Lebanon, two small vessels named the _Patience_ and the _Deliverance_. The ships were stoutly enough built to carry the full company to Virginia in May 1610, but at Jamestown they found only want and confusion. The other vessels in Somers' fleet had straggled into the bay the preceding summer with their storm-tossed passengers, but the following winter had been a nightmare. This was the winter that was destined long to be remembered as the starving time, the time when one man was reported even to have eaten his wife. Only a handful of the settlers, new and old, had survived, and Somers and Gates saw no choice but to abandon the colony. It was saved by the providential arrival early in June of Lord De la Warr, who brought with him 150 new colonists and a commission as the colony's governor. Somers went back to Bermuda in the hope of laying in a stock of pork for Virginia, but there he died and his seamen ran for England.