two years before. On 2 June 1609, he set sail from Plymouth on the , the flagship of the seven-ship fleet, (towing two additional pinnaces) destined for Jamestown, Virginia. The fleet carried a total of 500–600 colonists bound for Jamestown. On 25 July, the fleet ran into a strong storm, probably a hurricane, and the ships were separated. The Sea Venture fought the storm for three days. Comparably-sized ships had survived such weather, but the Sea Venture had a critical flaw; she had recently been constructed and her timbers had not set. The caulking was forced from between them, and the ship began to leak rapidly. All hands were applied to bailing, but the water continued to rise in the hold. The ship's guns were reportedly jettisoned—though two were salvaged from the wreck in 1612, to arm Bermuda's first fort—to raise her buoyancy, but this only delayed the inevitable. Sir George Somers was at the helm through the storm. When he spied land on the morning of 28 July, the water in the hold had risen to nine feet, and crew and passengers had been driven past the point of exhaustion. Somers deliberately drove the ship onto the reefs of what proved to be Bermuda in order to prevent its foundering. This allowed all 150 people and the dog aboard to reach shore safely, at what they later named Discovery Bay. Not seeing them again, those who continued on to Virginia presumed that Somers and the others had died in the storm, which had battered the relief fleet and damaged its supplies. Somers and his company remained in Bermuda for 10 months, living on food they could gather on the island and fish from the sea. Some commentators believe that this incident inspired William Shakespeare's play The Tempest. During their time on the islands, the crew and passengers built a church and houses, the start of the Bermuda colony. Somers and Sir Thomas Gates oversaw the construction of two small ships, the Deliverance and the Patience. They were built from local timber (Bermuda Cedar) and the salvaged spars and rigging of the wrecked Sea Venture. In May 1610, the ships set sail for Jamestown, with the surviving 142 castaways on board taking food from the island. When they reached the settlement, they found it nearly destroyed by the famine and disease of what has been called the "Starving Time". Few