Third Supply

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The Third Supply was the first truly successful wave of colonization in the first British settlement in the Americas, at Jamestown. It also resulted in the settlement of Bermuda (as an un-intended side-effect).

It consisted of five to six hundred people, in a fleet of eight ships, with Admiral George Somers, Samuel Jordan and Sir Thomas Gates.

All of these were on the flagship, the Sea Venture, when she ran aground off Bermuda after becoming separated from the rest of the fleet in a storm. The rest of the fleet continued on to Jamestown.

Somers and his officers managed to land everyone safely from the wreck, and they built two new ships -- Patience and Deliverance -- using hardware salvaged from the Sea Venture. Their struggle to survive may have been the inspiration for Shakespeare's play, The Tempest.

Without the leadership, who had been in the shipwreck off Bermuda, the rest of the group floundered, but recovered and prospered when the officers showed up less than a year later in their replacement vessels.

John Rolfe was one of the surviving colonists who had been shipwrecked; he went on to Virginia, and later married Pocahontas, a Native American leader's daughter.