Somers Islands Company

The Somers Isles Company (fully, The London Company of The Somers Isles or the Company of The Somers Isles) was formed in 1615 to operate the English colony of the Somers Isles, also known as Bermuda, as a commercial venture. It held a royal charter for Bermuda until 1684, when it was dissolved, and the Crown assumed responsibility for the administration of Bermuda as a royal colony.

Bermuda had been settled, inadvertently, in 1609 by the Virginia Company when its flagship, Sea Venture, was wrecked on the reefs to its east. The Admiral of the Company, Sir George Somers, was at the helm as the ship fought a storm that had broken apart a relief fleet destined for Jamestown, the Virginian settlement established by the Company two years earlier. Somers had deliberately driven the ship onto the reefs to prevent its foundering, thereby saving all aboard.

The settlers and seamen spent ten months in Bermuda while they built two new ships to continue the voyage to Jamestown. During the building, Sea Venture's longboat was fitted with a mast and sent to find Jamestown. Neither it, nor its crew, was ever seen again. When Deliverance and Patience set sail for Jamestown, they left several people behind, some to maintain Somers' claim to the islands for England, some dead. Those aboard the two ships included Sir Thomas Gates, the military commander and future governor of Jamestown, William Strachey, whose account of the wrecking may later have inspired Shakespeare's The Tempest, and John Rolfe, who would found Virginia's tobacco industry, and who left a wife and child buried in Bermuda. Rolfe would find a new bride in the Powhatan princess Pocahontas.

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