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sight of a whale being chased by a swordfish and a thresher, a kind of shark identifiable by the enormously extended upper lobe of its tail, which it uses to thrash its prey. ‘We might see the thresher with his flail lay on the monstrous blows, which was strange to behold. In the end these two fishes brought the whale to her end,’ he observed.²⁴

      On the morning of 27 March, they arrived at Guadeloupe. A landing party explored up to the foot of the 5,000-foot-high active volcano La Grande Soufrière (the big, sulphurous one), and found a pool of scalding hot water. Newport used it to boil up a joint of salted pork, which was ready to eat after half an hour. They returned to their ships and sailed on for a further 90 miles, in the afternoon reaching the island of Nevis. Here, Newport decided to allow the entire company ashore to make a concerted effort to gather supplies, as the ships’ stores were still disturbingly low.

      A company of men armed with muskets marched into the densely wooded interior, catching glimpses as they went of the cloud-capped central peak, over 3,000 foot high. Not far inland they found another hot spring, much cooler than the one on Guadeloupe. For the first time in nearly two months, they enjoyed a relaxing soak, as the sun set in a calm Caribbean sea.

      ‘Finding this place to be so convenient for our men to avoid diseases, which will breed in so long a voyage, we encamped ourselves on this isle six days, and spent none of our ship’s victual,’ wrote Percy. Instead, they lived off rabbits, birds, fish and fruit plucked from the trees, their peace barely disturbed by an occasional glimpse of the locals, who as soon as they were spotted ‘ran swiftly through the woods to the mountain tops’. They lost themselves in the forests, slashing through the undergrowth with hatchets and swords, until they came among ‘the goodliest tall trees growing so thick about the garden as though they had been set by art, which made us marvel very much to see it’. They saw shrubs with huge tufts of cotton wool bursting from their seed pods, gum trees, and a sort of wild fig, the sap of which made the men ‘near mad with pain’, forcing them to rush back to the hot spring for relief. They also found the source of a stream at the foot of the mountain. After drinking its sweet, clear water, ‘distilling from many rocks’, the men ‘were well cured in two or three days’ of all their ship-borne ailments.

      However, even this idyll could not cure every sickness. There was another outbreak of faction fighting, perhaps prompted by Newport’s decision to release Smith from the ship’s brig and allow him to fraternize with the other men. It seems that he now fell out with some of his former associates, who reported him to Newport. The upshot was, according to Smith, that Newport, fearing a loss of authority, ordered the construction of a ‘pair of gallows’ on the beach. But ‘Captain Smith, for whom they were intended, could not be persuaded to use them’, so he was returned to the ship. No other reference to this curious incident survives, and whatever the details, the result was a hasty departure. The ships cast off on 3 April, with water and food supplies still depleted, despite the plenitude that the island had offered.²⁵

      The fleet sailed past the neighbouring islands of St Kitts, St Eustatius and Saba before anchoring among the Virgin Isles, ‘in an excellent bay able to harbour a hundred ships’. A landing party managed to catch enough fish and turtles to feed the fleet for a further three days, but there was no fresh water to be found anywhere on the island.

      Passing Puerto Rico, they reached the tiny island of Mona on 7 April. By now, the drinking water in the ships’ tanks ‘did smell so vilely that none of our men was able to endure it’. A group of sailors managed to find a fresh water supply on the island, and set about filling up barrels to transport back to the ships. Meanwhile, a landing party marched for 6 miles in search of food. They managed to kill two wild boar and an iguana, ‘in fashion of a serpent and speckled like a toad under the belly’, but the path proved ‘so troublesome and vile, going upon the sharp rocks’, and the tropical heat so intense, that several men fainted. According to Percy, the adipose fat of Edward Brookes ‘melted within him by the great heat and drought of the country. We were not able to relieve him nor ourselves, so he died in that great extremity’, the first casualty of the expedition.

      The fleet remained at anchor for two days, while a group took a launch to a nearby rocky islet called Monito, some 3 leagues (9 or so miles) away. They had difficulty finding a landing point along the island’s cliff-lined coast, and even more trouble climbing up the ‘terrible sharp stones’ to open land. However, they were rewarded with the discovery of a fertile plain, ‘full of goodly grass and abundance of fowls of all kinds’. White seabirds dived overhead ‘as drops of hail’ and made such a noise ‘we were not able to hear one another speak’. ‘Furthermore, we were not able to set our feet on the ground but either on fowls or eggs, which lay so thick in the grass,’ and within three hours they had filled their boat, ‘to our great refreshing’.

      With new supplies of water and food safely loaded, the fleet set off, and on 10 April left the West Indies, heading north for Florida. Four days later, they crossed the Tropic of Cancer, the northerly limit of the tropics.

      The following morning, Newport started to take soundings, in the hope of finding the North American continental shelf.

      The use of soundings was the old-fashioned method of navigation. A lead weight smeared in tallow and attached to a line knotted at intervals of a fathom was dropped overboard to measure the depth of the sea. When it was hauled up, particles embedded in the tallow were used to tell what sort of seabed lay beneath.

      In familiar waters, such as the English Channel, soundings were effective, as a combination of depth measurement and seabed material (‘small shingles’, ‘white stones like broken awls’, ‘big stones rugged and black’) helped to build up a profile of the sea floor that could locate the ship to within a few nautical miles of its position, even when the shore was over the horizon. However, the ocean beneath the fleet’s current position was too deep to sound, leaving Newport with no option but to keep sailing.

      They continued north-west for ten days, carried over 1,000 miles by the Gulf Stream. Further soundings were taken, but to no avail. By 21 April, Newport had to accept that he was lost. This was probably the moment that Robert Tyndall suggested he try the mathematically based ‘new navigation’ techniques to plot their position. English mariners, apparently including the crew of the Susan Constant, were suspicious of such methods, considering them hocus-pocus. The prevailing attitude was summed up in Eastward Hoe, when Sir Petronel Flash uses ‘the elevation of the pole’ and ‘the altitude and latitude of the climate’ (garbled descriptions of the relevant techniques) to mistake the Isle of Dogs on the Thames for France.

      Nevertheless, traditional methods had failed, so it was time for Tyndall to bring out his cross-staff or astrolabe, and plot a position. Measuring the angle between the horizon and the midday sun, he announced that they had reached 37 degrees north of the Equator, believed to be the latitude of the entrance to Chesapeake Bay. All they now had to do was to use the ship’s compass to head due west, and they would eventually reach their destination. The guffaws of sceptical deck-hands probably filled the ships’ sails.

      That evening, the fleet was hit by a ‘vehement tempest, which lasted all the night with winds, rain, and thunders in a terrible manner’. Concerned that the coast was nearby, and the ships might be driven on to the shore, Newport ordered the passengers into the hulls, where they were told they would be safest if the ships collided with rocks or the seabed. They emerged the following morning into the calm, and gazed upon an unbroken horizon. A lead was dropped, to see whether they had yet reached the coastal shallows, but the ocean floor was still beyond the line’s 100-fathom reach. Food and water supplies were once again running low. The unpredictable weather threatened another battering. The need to find a safe harbour intensified.

      For three days, they aimlessly sounded the seas, doubtful of Tyndall’s assurances that their destination lay just beyond the western horizon. Unease developed into panic, and on 25 April, John Ratcliffe, captain of the pinnace, proposed that the fleet head back to England, in the hope that the Westerlies would get them there before supplies gave out.

      Then, at four in the morning of 26 April 1607, as the faintest gleam of dawn crept

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