The 1609 Bermuda Pamphlet and Jacobean Colonial Anxiety

🏛️ The 1609 Bermuda Pamphlet and Jacobean Colonial Anxiety

In 1609, a fleet of English ships sent to resupply the Virginia colony was wrecked in Bermuda. The survivors wrote vivid accounts of their survival on a "magical" island. William Strachey's A True Reportory of the Wreck (1610) — which Shakespeare almost certainly read — described strange sounds, abundant nature, and a land both threatening and beautiful. The Tempest's island, with its mysterious music and its contested ownership, draws directly on this material.

Jacobean audiences also knew the word "cannibal" — which entered English from Spanish Caribbean accounts of indigenous peoples. "Caliban" is widely understood as an anagram of "cannibal", and the name would have triggered that association immediately in a 1611 audience. Prospero's description of Caliban as "a thing of darkness" draws on the Jacobean idea of the "savage" — the uncivilised Other that European expansion was encountering and typically subjugating.

Some later readers — particularly post-colonial critics writing from the 1960s onwards — have argued that Caliban is the play's true hero, a figure of indigenous resistance. This is a powerful reading, but students should be clear: it is a reading shaped by 20th-century experience of colonialism, not a record of Shakespeare's intention. At Level 5-6, you can name this interpretive shift: "Later readers have argued that Caliban represents…" — without claiming it as what Shakespeare planned in 1611.