A Stranger Among Saints: Stephen Hopkins, the Man Who Survived Jamestown and Saved Plymouth

Summary

Sometime between 1610 and 1611, William Shakespeare wrote The Tempest. The idea for the play came from the real-life shipwreck in 1609 of the Sea Venture, which was caught in a hurricane and grounded on the coast of Bermuda during a voyage to resupply England's troubled colony at Jamestown, in present-day Virginia.

A lesser known passenger was Stephen Hopkins. During the ten months the Sea Venture passengers were marooned on Bermuda, Hopkins was charged with trying to incite a mutiny and condemned to die, only to have his sentence commuted moments before it was to be carried out. In 1620, Hopkins signed on to another colonial venture, joining a group of religious radicals on the Mayflower.

The Pilgrims encountered their own tempest, a furor that started when they anchored off Cape Cod and lasted for their first twelve months in the New World. Disease and sickness stole nearly half their number, and their first contacts with the indigenous Americans were contentious. The entire enterprise hung in the balance, and it was during these trials that Hopkins became one of the expedition's leaders, playing a vital role in bridging the divide of suspicion between the English immigrants and their native neighbors.