_The voyage of Sir George Sommers_ to the Bermudas in the year 1609 has been already noticed with a view of ascertaining the _time_ in which _The tempest_ was written; but the important particulars of his _shipwreck_, from which it is exceedingly probable that the outline of a considerable part of this play was borrowed, has been unaccountably overlooked. Several contemporary narratives of the above event were published, which Shakspeare might have consulted; and the conversation of the time might have furnished, or at least suggested, some particulars that are not to be found in any of the printed accounts. In 1610 Silvester Jourdan, an eyewitness, published _A discovery of the Barmudas, otherwise called the_ ISLE OF DIVELS: _By Sir Thomas Gates, Sir Geo. Sommers, and Captayne Newport, with divers others._ Next followed Strachey's _Proceedings of the English colonie in Virginia_ 1612, 4to, and some other pamphlets of less moment. From these accounts it appears that the Bermudas had never been inhabited, but regarded as _under the influence of inchantment_; though an addition to a subsequent edition of Jourdan's work gravely states that they are _not inchanted_; that Sommers's ship had been _split_ between two rocks; that during his stay on the island several _conspiracies_ had taken place; and that a _sea-monster in shape like a man_ had been seen, who had been so called after the _monstrous tempests_ that often happened at Bermuda. In Stowe's Annals we have also an account of Sommers's shipwreck, in which this important passage occurs, "Sir George Sommers sitting at the stearne, seeing the ship desperate of reliefe, looking every minute when the ship would sinke, hee espied land, which according to his and Captaine Newport's opinion, they judged it should be that dreadfull coast of the _Bermodes_, which iland were of all nations said and supposed to bee _inchanted and inhabited with witches and devills_, which grew by reason of accustomed monstrous thunder, storm, and _tempest_, neere unto those ilands, also for that the whole coast is so wonderous dangerous of rockes, that few can approach them, but with unspeakable hazard of _ship-wrack_." Now if some of these circumstances in the shipwreck of Sir George Sommers be considered, it may possibly turn out that _they_ are "the particular and recent event which determined Shakspeare to call his play _The tempest_,"[1] instead of "the great tempest of 1612," which has already been supposed to have suggested its name, and which might have happened after its composition. If this be the fact the play was written between 1609 and 1614 when it was so illiberally and invidiously alluded to in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew-fair. SCENE 2. Page 30. PRO. What is't thou can'st demand? ARI. ... My liberty. PRO. Before the time be out? no more.