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139 hen Adm. Sir George Somers sailed away from Virginia on July 19, 1610, he left a colony perilously near collapse, but Bermuda’s star was about to rise. But for the wreck of the Sea Venture, Bermuda might have remained what it had been for centuries: an uninhabited speck of land thought to be haunted by devils. But for the castaways’ unlooked-for arrival at Jamestown, starvation would have killed many of Virginia’s frail colonists. Both Bermuda’s colonial beginnings and Virginia’s continued survival were unexpected consequences of a fateful shipwreck in the summer of 1609. Within a decade, one of these colonies was giving “great contentment and incouragement,” while the other was languishing from “misgovernment, idlenesse, and faction.”1 What happened to England’s first two colonies in the New World is a tale of greed, deception, misunderstanding, espionage—and incredible good fortune. In September 1610, while Sir George Somers was battling rough seas on his way to Bermuda aboard the Patience, two of Lord De La Warr’s ships, the Blessing and the Hercules, returned to England with unwelcome, disturbing news about Virginia.All of London was abuzz: after so much fanfare and so many pounds sterling, the Virginia Company’s Jamestown settlement still was full of sick and hungry colonists, and, worse yet, there were no profits in sight. Investors looked in vain for their returns. Some grumbled that wealthy folks like Sir Thomas Smith, the Virginia Company’s treasurer, and others like him could afford to wait for longterm gains, but ordinary people expected something sooner to show for their money. The Spanish spy network in London was full of predictions that England’s failing colony would soon be dead. On September 30 Ambassador Velasco wrote to King Philip about news he had from one 6 A Tale of Two Colonies W A Tale of two colonies 140 of his key London sources, one “Guillermo Monco.” This was Sir William Monson, former privateer, veteran of the battle of the Spanish Armada, onetime prisoner of the Spanish in Lisbon, and, since 1604, Admiral of the Narrow Seas (English Channel). He was also a spy, handsomely paid for leaking English plans to the Spanish ambassador. Monson told Velasco that the English were desperate to recoup their investments in Virginia and were planning to send another large expedition there early in 1611. Spain needed to move now to “drive out the few people that have remained there, and are so threatened by the Indians that they dare not leave the fort they have erected.”2 Enclosed with Ambassador Velasco’s letter was a Spanish translation of a report from an Irishman, one Francisco Maguel (McGill?), who purported to have been a spy in Virginia for eight months. Who was he? How did he get there? There is no name resembling his on any of the lists of Virginia colonists. But Maguel somehow found his way to Madrid and to a meeting with Florencio Conryo, who claimed to be the archbishop of Tuam, a town near Galway, Ireland. (Ireland was then under English control, and the Irish Catholics hoped to serve their cause by aiding Spain against their common enemy.) In Madrid Maguel’s report was translated into Spanish, and he signed that document on July 1, 1610. The Irish spy’s report gave a detailed account of Virginia’s geography, including the best way to get there by sea. He described bays and rivers, the Jamestown fort, and the land’s resources—but much of the account is sprinkled with falsehoods (there are pearls, coral, and perhaps diamonds in Virginia; the English plan to settle twenty or thirty thousand colonists there) and halftruths (Indians are devil worshipers). Maguel warned that the English “want nothing more than they want to make themselves masters of the South Sea, so as to have their share of the riches of the Indies and be in the way of the traffic of the King of Spain, and to seek other new worlds for themselves.”3 Whether the mysterious Francisco Maguel, who hoped “to serve his Catholic Majesty,” ever did so is not known, but his report was enough to make Ambassador Velasco nervous. It had a similar effect on King Philip III. Before 1611 was out, Spanish authorities devised a plot to find out firsthand what the English were up to in Virginia, and in the summer of that year a Spanish caravel would sail into Chesapeake Bay. Meanwhile, the Virginia...

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