Kathman refutation - The Oxford Authorship Site

FALSE PARALLELS IN DAVID KATHMAN’S ‘DATING THE TEMPEST’ 32
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Soon after arriving in Bermuda the survivors of the shipwreck remodelled the longboat
which had been on the Sea Venture, and on the 28 th of August Henry Ravens, Thomas
Whittingham, and six sailors sailed for Jamestown to let the colony there know that the
Sea Venture had been wrecked in Bermuda. (Wright, pp. 35-6)
On the first of September a plot was discovered, and the six men involved (John Want,
Christopher Carter, Francis Pearepoint, William Brian, William Martin, and Richard
Knowles) were exiled to another of the islands. Upon their repentance shortly thereafter,
they were allowed to rejoin the main group. (Wright, pp. 41-2)
When nothing had been heard from Virginia, and Ravens was feared lost, on the 27th of
November Sir George Somers, with two carpenters and twenty men, went over to the
main island to build another boat in addition to the one Robert Frobisher was building on
the island on which the main group lived during the entire time in Bermuda. (Wright, pp.
38-9)
On the 18th of March, another group of men, involved in a plot with one Henry Paine
(who was hanged for his part in it), took to the woods and lived like outlaws. (p. 49)
Eventually all but two of these men (Christopher Carter and Robert Waters) rejoined the
main group. Carter and Waters were left behind when the survivors of the Sea Venture
later sailed for Jamestown. (Wright, p. 53)
Two main groups? Absolutely not. Neither in The Tempest, nor in Bermuda.
David Kathman's false parallel can thus be analyzed as follows:
A shipwrecked party splits into two groups.
Not true for The Tempest.
Not true for the Strachey letter.
Ergo: a false parallel (or rather, a completely non-existent parallel).
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(18) David Kathman writes:
Strachey writes about how it had been thought that the Bermudas were "given over to
Devils and wicked Spirits" (14); Jourdain calls it "the Ile of Divels" (title page) and "a
most prodigious and enchanted place" (8); A True Declaration says that "these Islands of
the Bermudos, have ever beene accounted as an enchaunted pile of rockes, and a desert
inhabitation for Divels; but all the Fairies of the rocks were but flocks of birds, and all
the Divels that haunted the woods, were but heards of swine" (10-11).
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