This is the sixth in a series of occasional articles on the shared histories of Bermuda and the United States, which celebrates the 250th anniversary of its independence this year. The articles, by Heritage Matters author Edward Cecil Harris, will run throughout the year.

In late 1858, one of the last great vessels built by Bermudians, the Pearl, vanished in the eastern Atlantic when bound for Madeira to collect agricultural workers for the island.

After all that time, the ship remains on the record as “Not Cancelled Out”, an expression used by insurance agents to indicate a vessel and its cargo were still active, in the days when voyages took months, even years, to complete.

However, not to connect to modern usage, the Pearl, like the Sea Venture, was indeed “cancelled”, not by some internet troll but by that greatest dragon of Mother Nature, the “ocean seas”. Unlike Sea Venture, the Pearl, and possibly the Malaysian Airlines plane MH370, “remain permanently unrecovered”, for insurance and other purposes.

Like the Pearl, but in contemporary circumstances, that ship of the sky, the MH370, we are left with a mystery, perhaps one day to be solved by evidence on the ocean floor. In the case of the Sea Venture, cancellation was pending for some nine months following its disappearance, but the appearance in May 1610 of most of its crew and passengers became one of the great rescue stories of worldwide shipping.

People in Virginia and Britain would then have been amazed, as we would likely be today if MH370 was found on Andrew Selkirk’s deserted “Robinson Crusoe” island. That miraculous rescue caused Shakespeare, the greatest of the great lyrists, to wax lyrical about the Sea Venture “happening” in his last play, published in 1623.

Upon arrival in paradise on 28 July 1609, Sir George Somers and the other 150 souls surviving the wreck of the Sea Venture probably thought briefly, as the 18th-century poet, William Cowper, wrote of Selkirk:

I am monarch of all I survey,

My right there is none to dispute;

From the centre all around to the sea,

I am the lord of the fowl and the brute.

Perhaps they would also have considered the more recent, tongue-in-cheek, lines of the Irish poet, Patrick Kavanagh:

Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew the plight

Of being king and government and nation.

A road, a mile of the kingdom, I am king

Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.

Whatever thoughts that did cross their minds, the fact is that they disembarked on a “desert island” with no human habitation, but a blooming tourism welcoming committee of Spanish swine, who doubtless headed for what hills there were upon the realisation that their extinction after a century on Bermuda was nigh at hand. As Jonathan Evans has clearly stated of that fateful day: Bermuda’s uninhabited days were over.

Perhaps these days, not least — perhaps, allegedly — in political arenas, we see descendants of the Sea Venture and others as thinking as “monarchs of all they survey”, but we are looking at a world much degraded from that of July 1609.

It is hard to imagine the un-humanised Bermuda of August 1609, but it must have been the most miraculous place in the eyes of the English and Native Americans rowing to shore from their vessel perched atop a couple of reefs offshore “Gate’s Bay”, or St Catherine’s Beach in St Regis parlance.

One imagines a few trunks of domestic and personal goods on the pink sands, but over the course of their time in Bermuda, the hurricane survivors must have removed every possible useful item from the Sea Venture.

Not only were the bones picked bare, but the hard skeleton, the carcass, of the ship itself would have lost much of its metalwork, timbers, rigging etc, as none such could be obtained from the chandlery at Godet & Young, down on Water Street, St George’s Town in those days.

The story of the Sea Venture would redound down the years and couple of centuries on, the southern American historian and writer of some 52 books, Major General Dabney Herndon Maury (Confederate Army) constructed an image of the event, shown here.

Meanwhile, as the holiday began in Bermuda, back in ole Virginia, the settlers at James Fort were going from worse to very bad, particularly on the food front. Thus, in May 1610, it may well be suggested that the cahow birds and swine from Bermuda saved their bacon, and indeed the origins of the “constitutional republic”, embodied in the United States of America.

• Dr Edward Harris is the founding executive director emeritus of the National Museum of Bermuda