 Today, we travel back in time quite a bit from our recent stories. We're going back to an incredible story covered briefly in our episodes about Colonial Virginia. Thanks go out, by the way, to Reason Magazine's Jesse Walker for letting me know about the most amazing new book on early Virginia, The Wreck of the Sea Venture in Bermuda, and the man who perhaps should be better known as the real, true founding father of America. A humble minister's clerk named Stephen Hopkins. Professor Joseph Kelly joins me now to talk about his book, Marooned, Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a new history of America's origin. Welcome to Liberty Chronicles, a project of Libertarianism.org. I'm Anthony Comegna. So I'd like to approach this interview sort of as the story of Stephen Hopkins, the guy that I now at least like to think of as America's real, true founding father. Tell us about Stephen Hopkins. Well, Stephen Hopkins is, as you mentioned, kind of an unlikely hero. He's not a university educated person, certainly did not go to the ends of courts and that kind of thing. We don't know a ton about him, just as we don't know a ton about anyone who is really a commoner in England at the time. The records that we have, of course, are the kind of things that remain, are going to be birth records, death certificates, inheritance things. Anytime he comes into contact with court, we get a little bit of information about him. And then there's the narratives. So there's just a little bit in the, about 600 words really, directly about Stephen Hopkins and the true reporter by William Strachey. But within that 600 words is just as a powerhouse of information about him there. So we don't know a whole lot about his personal life. He grew up near Winchester. His dad was a yeoman farmer. He probably got a little bit of education. He might have been the reader of the Psalter and the Church of England, a local parish. So he might have been kind of very low level church official, which may be one of the reasons that contributed to him to going to Jamestown in the first place. He might have been, you know, aiding Reverend Hunt, who is the official minister that went along with the third supply in 1609. But even that's kind of speculation. There's one biography that was written about him by a guy named Caleb Johnson, who has pretty much made Stephen Hopkins his life study. And that book is a wealth, you know, it weaves together a pretty good story out of these little bits of information that we have about Stephen. But a lot of that book is, you know, sort of filling in, you know, this is what life was like in this village in the late 16th century and that kind of thing. So ultimately, you know, there's just not a whole lot of information, you know, I made the comparison we know about as much about him as we know about Shakespeare, which is to say not a whole lot. So it's been pieced together, but remarkably, he's been neglected. I mean, what we should have is a lot of people studying the little bit of information we have about Stephen Hopkins. And hopefully this book will help kind of trigger people to do that. Because they haven't done it in the past. And I certainly think he's one of the most important neglected figures in American history. Now, can you tell us how would somebody like Hopkins have gotten caught up with something like the Virginia Company? And how did this guy find himself in Bermuda? Well, the Virginia Company after the first two years of James Hammer were something of a disaster. And the Virginia Company knew this. And they, you know, they're getting regular reports from Captain Newport who has been back and forth several times. When he's in Jamestown, he's pretty much in charge. But when he leaves Jamestown, there's always a power struggle. The last time he came back to England, he carried with him a letter from John Smith who's just excoriated company policy and company officers over there in Virginia. So they knew things were going poorly. And what they did in the fall and the early spring, fall of 1608 and early spring of 1609 was completely reconceived how they were going to do things. They were going to ramp things up considerably. I mean, they really hoped to send 800 to 1,000 settlers in the third resupply of Jamestown. It didn't end up being that much, but it was still a pretty significant increase. About 500 settlers probably were in among a fleet of seven to nine ships, depending on how big a ship needs to be to be counted as a ship. Nine vessels went. But for that effort, there was a gigantic propaganda effort beginning in spring of 1609 to recruit people and also to recruit dollars. I mean, they sent out circulars all across England, all throughout London. All the various tradesmen's guilds had meetings about how much money that they were going to pool together to buy shares in the company. So it was just an amazing media blitz. The equivalent today would be the savviest kind of social media slash TV advertisement. Of course, nothing equivalent to that kind of media existed, but it was still just a tremendous effort through pamphlets, through sermons in churches, through these guilds, as I said, to get the word out. So you would have been pretty checked out of things, especially if you're living in the south of England, which is kind of where maritime activity was taking place, to not be aware of what was going on. Now, with that said, I think it still took quite a bit of courage for those 500 people to get on the ships and go. I mean, it was still basically going into terror incognita. But the media blitz, the propaganda certainly would have reached somebody like Stephen Hopkins and given the hard sell, if you will, for what was going on in Virginia. Can we talk for a minute about the different types of consent that you mentioned throughout the book? There are all these different people signing up from different social strata, essentially agreeing to different types of colonization, and it doesn't always work out. One of those things, the information about this has been out there forever, and it has been strangely neglected by historians. So in the third supply, to take a look at that one in particular, the Virginia Company rewrote the charters, the original charters, which actually are several different documents, some by the King, some by the Virginia Company itself, and then other ordinances that are established by the local colonial council in Jamestown. But they recognized that this method of government wasn't really working. It was a council with a president, so they were going to establish a new form of government where you had a governor that basically had dictatorial powers. So they put together this charter, but they were still writing it and did not even have the King's approval for it as they were recruiting people. So it's kind of an odd situation in which people are signing on to go on this adventure without even having the document that was going to be the Constitution governing them in place yet. Now, even with that said, they had a good idea. The Virginia Company, the council, had a very good idea of what was going to be in that document, and they certainly expected it to get approved. So as they were signing people on, they knew what their recruits were signing on to. The recruits themselves didn't have a great idea, but here's the particular thing that is really remarkable about the Virginia Company. So it's based on the other overseas trading companies, the East India Company, the Muscovy Company, the Levant Company that are groups of merchants who each buy shares in this joint stock company, and they pool their resources and also then pool the risk. What's different about this particular, about the Virginia Company is that people can buy shares with their bodies. So you did not need to have money to buy a share in the company. Now, just in those other merchant companies, owning a share meant that theoretically, at least you had a vote in the council, and this is what even the second charter said this. So theoretically, each of the people who went on the ships to Jamestown in 1609 should have had, at least to some degree, a democratic voice in the governance of the company. Now, in practice, that didn't work out because this, of course, is something that the company officials were careful to do. I don't know if the king knew this or not. We don't have any evidence of whether he did or not. But it seems to be the case of what they wrote into their own provisions that you had to own two shares in the company in order to have a vote on who was going to be a counselor. So essentially, what was in the second charter itself, setting up kind of as a democracy, was right from the beginning getting undermined by the executives of the Virginia Company itself. Because the only people who could have two shares in the company are people who are going to have the money to buy a share. And that was 10 pounds called shillings. And most of the settlers, the common settlers are not going to be able to buy those shares. Now, the gentlemen who went on the ships, which is roughly 40, 50% of the people who are going to settle Virginia are able to buy shares. So those, right from the beginning, you have two kind of classes of people who are heading to Virginia. You have the gentlemen who have a share because their physical body is going and they also were able to buy one or more shares themselves. And in the company documents, we can see that they are given special status. It's unlikely, and again, we don't know, but it seems very unlikely from the circumstantial evidence. It's unlikely that the common laborer who was going to Virginia recognized when they were signing on that there were two classes of people who were going. I mean, they knew gentlemen were going, but they didn't know that the gentlemen were going to be a completely different class of people. Now, this is going to have really great consequences after the shipwreck that, you know, ends up depositing Stephen Hopkins in Bermuda. And also, it's already had consequences for two years for people in Jamestown as well. So let's also talk about the sort of obedience regime that comes along with being a member of these different classes. I mean, you mentioned that people with military experience, especially in a place like Ireland, they're well used to the kind of work regime and military discipline that they were going to find in Virginia. So of course, they were sort of consenting to this. They were well used to it, but not somebody like Stephen Hopkins. Right. And again, we're speculating from circumstantial evidence, but our best guess is that people like Stephen Hopkins or any tradesperson or any of the people who didn't have any trade skill, and we're just going as a common laborer, they probably expected to encounter something similar to the plantations of Ireland, not the garrisons that were in hostile territory in Ireland, but plantations in Ireland where entire sections of the country had been depopulated of the native Irish and were getting planted by English. And in those cases, essentially what would happen is an entire town would get established or a cluster of farms. And what would be established from the very get-go would be something that resembled typical town life or village life in England. So that's probably what they expected. They did not expect to be essentially foot soldiers in a garrison, but that's the, you know, that's the governing model that was obtaining in Jamestown already. And that's certainly the governing model that was enshrined in the second charter that was written in the spring of 1609. So when they stepped foot on the ships, you know, in London or in Plymouth, the settlers knew that they were putting themselves under the jurisdiction of the Virginia Company, but they did not really understand what that meant. They didn't understand, for instance, that to talk ill of the company could mean a death sentence if the governor thought it was warranted, and yet that's what it was. That's, you know, that's the circumstances that they found themselves in. So they felt that they were giving consent as they signed into this contract. What they were giving consent to, they certainly didn't know. And I think it's really, we can pretty well conclude from the evidence that we have that the Virginia Company purposely kept them in the dark about that. Now Hopkins goes aboard the ship, the Sea Venture, along with the leader of the fleet and the leader of the colony, who's, you know, supposed to take over when he gets there. They're sort of struggling for power and authority on the ship. At the same time, they're making the trek across the Atlantic. Then what happens? Okay, so the Sea Venture is the flagship in this fleet. You know, they leave England with crowds cheering, banners flying. This is the biggest overseas plantation that England has ever mounted. You know, and this is England, you know, the English recognize this as their attempt to get into the empire game that Spain and Portugal and even France have already been playing. So this is, you know, it's a big deal. And this is the flagship. And the flagship is containing not only the second charter and all copies. This is just hard to believe, but every single copy of the second charter is on the flagship, as well as the new governor, Thomas Gates, as well as the admiral of the fleet, Admiral Summers. Now the fleet sails into a hurricane. You know, I mean, you couldn't make these things up, right? This is true stranger than fiction. All of the ships survived the hurricane except for the Sea Venture and the other ships eventually limp into Jamestown and tell John Smith who's running the show in Jamestown that he's basically been deposed, but they don't have the documents and they don't have the governor to prove it. So what immediately happens in Jamestown is a struggle for power. Now what happens in to the Sea Venture, you know, everybody in Jamestown think the Sea Venture is lost at sea. They think it's sunk. And it basically would have been. It was filling up with water slowly. They're struggling for three days and three nights and this really difficult struggle against the storm. And at the last minute when they decide to close up the hatches and consign themselves to the deep, they're all going to drown and they're just kind of giving up. They sight land, which seems miraculous in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. They sight land and they're managed to ram the ship on a reef about a half mile to a mile offshore. And this is the Bermuda Islands, which at the time were reputed to be Devil's Islands completely uninhabited and incredibly dangerous to mariners because of the submerged reefs that are surrounding it. So it's a place that is generally avoided by sailors. But everybody gets ashore. There's 153 people on board and all of them make it ashore as the waves are pounding the Sea Venture stuck on this reef. Immediately there's two Native Americans among them, Machamp's and Namantak, who are emissaries of Wahoo Sonnecock known as we know him as Palhoutan really in popular American culture. They were emissaries to King James's court coming back and when they get ashore, they immediately run off into the Wilderness Center and are not seen again until, you know, nine, 10 months later. At least we don't have a record of them. Everybody else watches them disappear and they struggle ashore, get up to the high ground, make some huts and immediately are confronted then with what do you do next? Which any shipwreck, anyone who suffers a shipwreck has to go through, right? You go through the immense struggle of the shipwreck and getting ashore and then you're standing on the sand, blinking at the sun, looking around at everybody. You look at who else has survived. You look at the debris that has survived, the material debris that's coming up on shore. And the next order of business is how do you survive? What happened in Bermuda is really remarkable. I mean, it's more compelling than any of the survivor TV shows or, you know, the fictional tales of shipwreck, you can imagine. Almost immediately, the rebellions start taking place. There's power struggles in Bermuda just as there are in Jamestown. The first fissure happens between the governor and the admiral. And it doesn't take long. But pretty much once they realize that they're not going to get rescued, the sailors and the admiral completely leave the camp, go to their own island and set up their own camps. So we have rival camps, you know, within a couple of months. The people, the settlers who remained in the governor's camp watched the sailors disappear just as they watched the two Native Americans disappear into the wilderness. And almost immediately, the disgruntlement among those settlers sets in as well. So the governor, Governor Gates, he is intent, you know, fiercely intent on getting to Jamestown because this is his big chance. This is his chance to make it big, to make a lot of money, to make a big splash. He's got to get to Jamestown to be governor and he's really got a small window to be governor because he knows the fourth resupply is going to bring another governor. So if he's going to get anything done, you know, for his personal ambitions, he's going to have to get to Virginia as quickly as possible. So he immediately sets about building a ship. They have a shipwright who came with them and from the salvage of the sea venture and from the cedars of Bermuda trees that they saw down and start queuing into lumber. He sets about building a ship that's going to bring them to Virginia. But he knows the ship is not going to be big enough. So he gathers everybody together and says, OK, some of you are going to be able to come with me. Some of you are not going to be able to come with me. But everybody, you know, let's work on this ship together. Essentially what he does is he enters into a new contract with the settlers. The settlers themselves have been hearing stories now. You know, they signed on with all that propaganda back in England, right? They thought Virginia is going to be a wonderful place to get to. But as they're sailing, you know, before they got into the hurricane even, the sailors who have been to Jamestown are telling them what's really going on in Jamestown. And what's really going on is in the first summer half the people died. You know, so Jamestown is a dystopia. It's not a utopia and the settlers become disillusioned with their contract. So they begin to rethink the whole situation that they signed on to. They begin to realize what, in fact, the Virginia Company thinks their contract says and doesn't line up with what they think the contract says. So this is where people like Stephen Hopkins come to the fore. And what's remarkable about Hopkins is we have, we actually have his words because, you know, all the narratives are told to us through the executives of the Virginia Company. You know, John Smith is an executive Virginia Company. The tail that we have of the shipwreck and what happens in Bermuda for 10 months is these people are cast away there. That comes to us through the words of William Strachey, who becomes the secretary of the governor. So he's an executive of the company as well. All of our narratives come from the official company line. But so people like Stephen Hopkins are going to be the villains within these tails. But William Strachey telling the tail of Stephen Hopkins actually records some of his arguments. And so that's what makes Stephen Hopkins so exciting to us today, I think, is that we have actually his own words, the kind of argument that he was making. So in Bermuda, as people are beginning to realize that what they're in for in Virginia is basically a slave labor camp. And most of them are probably going to die under the incompetent backbiting leadership of the Virginia Company. What Stephen Hopkins begins to come to a realization of the argument he begins to make is that the Virginia Company contracted to bring them to Virginia. And they didn't fulfill their part of the bargain. And the language he says, the very fact of the shipwreck has ended their contract with the Virginia Company. It's as if the salt water that they encounter in the shipwreck dissolved the contract itself. So what that made the settlers in Bermuda is essentially made them political free agents. And he doesn't use that term, of course, but this is exactly what Stephen Hopkins is arguing. We here in Bermuda have the ability to or have the right to decide for ourselves what we are going to do. We are bound to the governance of no man is what he says. And basically what he's saying is we don't have to do what Governor Gates is telling us to do. We don't have to build this ship and get on it and go to Virginia if we don't want to. So he starts and actually he's the second version of this. There's four separate mutinies or conspiracies. And what each of these conspiracies are are merely to absent themselves from the Virginia Company's jurisdiction to have settlers go off to their own island in Bermuda and begin their own village. The reason they want to do this is because Bermuda is basically a paradise. Fish, fowl, fruit, swine enough to eat barbecue for the rest of their lives. There's no reason for them to leave Bermuda. Bermuda is just a spectacular place. And they know what waits for them in Virginia. So they want to go off to their own island, start their own village, start their own community and enter into a new contract of mutual consent. And that term mutual consent from the Virginia Company is a bad word, you know, and they just may invoke it saying this is how evil Stephen Hopkins is. He's promoting this doctrine of mutual consent. But of course, that's why we ought to be revering Stephen Hopkins. He's a villain of the tale from the point of view of the Virginia Company, but from the point of view of us today. He's the first one who is voicing the very principles of democracy that are going to end up underpinning the Declaration of Independence. And one Hopkinsite even tells the governor to kiss my arse. Tell us that story about that uncommon revolution. Yeah, this is Henry Payne. And this is, well, I guess to get to that story, I ought to tell the story of Stephen Hopkins's rebellion. So I said there's four separate ones. The first one, the governor gets wind of very quickly. And he discovers that people want to, you know, what they think of as marooning themselves, they want to escape into the woods the way slaves under in Spanish possessions in the world would escape into the hinterland into the swamps into the mountains and establish their own government. But the governor gets wind of it and he finds out who the six ring leaders are and he actually maroons them and humiliates them. They're basically suffering a death penalty sentence because they're sent into the wilderness with no tools or anything. So he foils that first one and then Stephen Hopkins is the second revolution, if you will. And it gets discovered, of course, more than half the people were part of the Stephen Hopkins Revolution. He was going to lead more than half of the 151 remaining settlers. Well, I guess you have to take the sailors out of that. So about 120 were remaining and he was going to take more than half of them out into the wilderness, but he gets discovered. And he gets hauled in chains before the entire community gathered by by the governor and the governor tries him, convicts him, sentences him to death. And Stephen Hopkins talks his way out of the death penalty. But basically he's humiliated as well and discredited. And yet the idea that he's articulating continues on and the disgruntlement increases as the ship gets closer and closer to its completion as people know they're going to be transported to Virginia. So the Kiss My Arts Revolution is started accidentally by Henry Payne, who is actually, he's a gentleman, a couple of the gentlemen. We don't know how many, but at least some of the gentlemen had been persuaded by Stephen Hopkins arguments and were part of this cabal. So even after Stephen Hopkins got humiliated, the idea did not die. It continued to live. And the new conspiracy was actually going to be much more dramatic. We were going to seize the store of arms and tools and run off into the wilderness, but they were going to have the means of their own defense if the governor wanted to come and try to take them back. They were going to fight their way to prevent it. So this was even a more serious rebellion than Stephen Hopkins had had suggested. And as it was approaching, but before it was ready to hatch, this guy Henry Payne just had enough. The governor caught wind of it, but what he did is he doubled the guard on the storehouse and the gentlemen who were part of his loyal corps to guard were doing double duty for days and days on end. And this guy Henry Payne was one of those, but he himself was also a co-conspirator. And he got to the point where he was just so frustrated and couldn't put up with it. He basically broke, psychologically broke under the pressure and his captain gave him some order to report for guard duty and he just blew up at him and said he was no longer going to take orders. And then his captain said, well, you better do it or I'm going to tell the governor and Henry Payne said the governor can kiss my arse. And that, you know, those words were potent enough that, you know, everybody, people heard it and they looked to see what happened and he actually even struck this captain. So everyone is watching the development to see what's going to happen. And everything seems pretty quiet overnight. Eventually the governor hears that he has been cursed out by Henry Payne and he knows that he has to do something, but he has to be very careful about it because he knows most of the people are actually in sympathy with Henry Payne rather than in sympathy with himself. So he handles it pretty delicately, but he ends up arresting Henry Payne. And again, trying him publicly condemning him to death and Payne goes to the scaffold expecting to be to be rescued, expecting everyone to rise up and and they don't they don't have the courage to rise up and he ends up getting getting executed. And this, for the rest of the settlers, the kiss my arse revolution is kind of the death blow to their hopes of establishing a government of mutual consent in Bermuda. And eventually the ship is finished. They, they launch it, they rig it. And basically at gunpoint they that the settlers are made to get on the ship and sell off to Virginia. In essence that the kiss my arse revolution is the, I would guess the one act of open, open defiance that took place in Bermuda that ends up in an execution and really proving to everybody the lethal power that the Virginia company held over everyone. So it was the crucial, crucial revolution and the Democrats, the people who wanted to establish a government that we would describe as democracy, unfortunately were cheated. Today was just part one of our interview with Professor Kelly, so be sure to check back in next week for the exciting conclusion to the saga of Stephen Hopkins. Liberty Chronicles is a project of Libertarianism.org. It is produced by Test Terrible. If you've enjoyed this episode of Liberty Chronicles, please rate, review and subscribe to us on iTunes. For more information on Liberty Chronicles, visit Libertarianism.org.