ARRIVING in bookstores just in time for the 400th anniversary of the founding of Bermuda, The Shipwreck That Saved Jamestown: The Sea Venture Castaways and the Fate of America offers a fresh look at the important role Bermuda played in the successful English settlement of North America.

University of Tennessee professor Lorri Glover, co-author of the book with Daniel Blake Smith, says the timing of the book was largely coincidental.

"We simply were looking for a great story that we could tell in a narrative way," she says, "and it just so happened that it aligned with (Bermuda's) 400th anniversary. It was a happy accident, not unlike the wreck of the Sea Venture!"

Glover received her Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky in 1996 and her M.A. from Clemson University. She has received several teaching awards.

The English first tried to colonise America in 1606 when Thomas Smythe launched the Virginia Company.

But Smythe's Jamestown was a disaster in every respect, including warfare with Native Americans and starvation and dissent among the settlers.

In the spring of 1609, the nearly two-year-old Jamestown company was failing miserably, so London investors launched a massive effort to save their enterprise, including adopting a new colonial charter, sending a new governor, Thomas Gates, and recruiting more colonists, including dozens of prominent names, to rescue the doomed colonists and restore order.

The fleet of nine was the largest England had ever assembled and comprised of 600 passengers and crew; its flagship Sea Venture was captained by Christopher Newport, the most experienced mariner of the age, and carried the Admiral of the Fleet Sir George Somers and Governor as well as the leadership of the colony.

The fleet left Plymouth England in the summer of 1609, and about two-thirds of the way across the Atlantic, met up with a tremendous hurricane. The flagship was separated from the fleet and driven onto the coral reefs of Bermuda, then known as "The Isle of Devils."

"It was thought to be a dangerous, diabolic place," Glover explains, "owing to the encircling coral reefs surrounding the island.

"The reefs extend as much as ten miles out, so even when they couldn't see land, ships could get hung up on the reefs.

"So mariners assumed that there were diabolical spirits in the ocean around Bermuda that stole ships and destroyed them, killing all the passengers."

Also, Glover continues, nocturnal birds called cahows, (now brought back from near-extinction), would emit their calls, which sound like human screams, so before Somers' work on the island dispelled the idea that Bermuda was inhabited with shrieking spirits, mariners avoided the island for fear of their lives and souls.

All 150 souls onboard the Sea Venture survived and spent the next ten months building two ships from its remains to continue the journey to Jamestown.

But when it was time to head to the New World, not everyone wanted to leave Bermuda, especially for the dangerous prospects in Jamestown.

Though mariners had always avoided the uninhabited "Isle of Devils," the shipwrecked colonists found it Edenic, teeming with natural resources and a temperate climate.

The bounteous environment was full of fish and wildlife, including some wild hogs who'd been marooned from a Spanish shipwreck there years before, though no dangerous wildlife to threaten the castaways.

The prospects for profit seemed limitless: They could see whales from the shore - and whaling was a big business then - and there were tall cedar trees for lumber. They quickly grew tobacco there.

There was nothing to imperil the colonists and everything to make them want to stay there, especially when they knew at least part of how bad things were in Jamestown including hard labor and difficult physical conditions plus 20,000 Indians who didn't like the English settlers who wanted to take their land.

"It was one thing to leave the squalor and plague-ridden environs of London to go to Virginia, which was known to be a dangerous place," Glover says, "but it's quite another thing to leave the beauty and bounty of Bermuda to go to a death trap."

Mutinies occurred, especially among the laboring classes, in resistance to Gates' leadership and his insistence that they go on to Jamestown.

Additionally, tensions teemed between Governor Gates and Sir George Somers (initially after Bermuda was settled by the English it became known as the Somers Island, then Summers Island, which conveyed the idyllic climate of Bermuda, before it was officially named after the 16th century Spaniard who first discovered it.)

Gates was in a hurry to get off Bermuda, Glover says, because he believed his destiny lay in Virginia, while Somers was seeing Bermuda's potential as a colony. He and his company sailed around Bermuda and mapped it, as well as planting seeds retrieved from the Sea Venture, which lay wrecked on a coral reef off today's St. Catherine's Beach. Glover says she and Smith feel the mapping "symbolised his commitment to Bermuda. Making a map says, 'I'll be back'."

The winter of 1609 was known in Jamestown as 'The Starving Time.' While the Virginia colonists reportedly degenerated into cannibalism, owing in part to the absence of supplies that were to have been delivered to them on the Sea Venture, the castaways on Bermuda were living in miraculous bounty.

Fewer than 100 Jamestown colonists survived that winter, and they joined the former castaways when they arrived and soon met up with Lord De La Warr, who'd brought three supply ships to fortify the distressed colony.

Three of Somers' men had stayed in Bermuda when the rest of the castaways went on to Virginia, partly because of the mutinies against Governor Gates and, some sources indicate because they were working in league with George Somers who wanted to maintain a permanent English presence in Bermuda.

When the expedition anchored at Cape Henry one year to the day after their initial departure, the news excited England's interest in Bermuda. The story of the Sea Venture was interpreted as evidence of God's will: Only God, it was believed, could have kept the Sea Venture's passengers and crew from dying in the hurricane, surviving on Bermuda, being granted safe passage to Jamestown and having the coincidental meeting with Lord De La Warr, according to Glover.

Certain that God was on the side of British colonisation and its fight against Spain to acquire dominion in the New World, British leaders also realised Bermuda was the colony they had been dreaming of, though the dream had been thwarted, in Jamestown.

So Bermuda became the second English colony in the New World and the first to turn a profit and be successful as well as guaranteeing that the English would persist and secure their presence in the New World. Quickly colonised, Bermuda was profitable within a year, while the Virginia company never turned a profit in 24 years; all its investors lost everything, whereas Somers Island investors found it profitable, productive and safe.

Somers returned to Bermuda from Virginia in 1610 to gather further provisions for the Jamestown settlement. He died shortly after arrival following a short illness. His heart is buried in what is now called Somers Gardens in St. George's.

Glover says that historians who specialise in colonial British America know the story her book explores "generally, but the significance of Bermuda to the success of the English empire, as well as the independent history of Bermuda, is not very well understood, and I think that's because people who study the history of colonial America think in terms of the 13 colonies, and they forget how vital Bermuda was to that story."

"When you think of colonial America," Glover continues, "you think of Jamestown as the first settlement, and then the Pilgrims and the Puritans came to New England. There's such a massive disjuncture between the Jamestown settlement and the New England settlement, until you realise that that's not the order at all. The second colony is Bermuda, and as they gear up the Somers Company, there's a very heavy Puritan influence (in Bermuda), and it's also very commercially successful and profitable.

"So Bermuda is a fascinating link between Jamestown and Plymouth because it's profit-driven but also religiously centered. So if you understand that Bermuda came after Jamestown and before Plymouth, it makes a lot more sense in terms of the English colonisation of the Americas."

The English came to see the island as a remarkably important strategic position: Up to 90 percent of the ships from Europe traveled within ten miles of Bermuda, and one of the promoters of Bermuda said, "This will be a great bit to rule a powerful horse," the horse being rival Spain. Bermuda was used to supply English ships coming across the Atlantic and also to raid Spanish ships coming from the Old World into the Caribbean and back again.

So Bermuda was of terrific importance to the English to counter the Spanish, to make their colonisation of the Americas successful, and as a jumping off point to colonise the Caribbean in the 17th century. Glover emphasises that before her study, she and most other people in her field didn't realise how significant Bermuda was to the England's long-term presence in the New World and English imperialism generally.

This is probably because of Bermuda's small size, which allowed only a finite amount of growth, so that in the late 17th and 18th century, Bermuda's value to the English was eclipsed by the vast expanse of North America that the English claimed, and by the lucrative sugar producing islands of the Caribbean,

Bermuda became less significant over time than colonies like Barbados, South Carolina, and New York, though Glover emphasises that "That's true as far as looking back t history from the present, but if you're on the ground in the 17th century, looking forward, it's hard to overestimate the importance of Bermuda in securing England's place in the New World."

Glover and Smith were in Bermuda three times when doing research for the book.

From their first visit, Glover says they fell in love with the natural environment and notes that there are not a lot of documents on Bermuda from this period; most were generated in London or Jamestown and have been preserved there.

But walking along St. Catherine's Beach, she says, allowed them "to empathise with why the Sea Venture castaways might find Bermuda to be both a fearful place and yet so inviting and desirable that they never wanted to leave."