In this 90-minute film, producer Andrew Giles Buckley, creator and host of Hit and Run History, and his crew follow the story of Stephen Hopkins, the only passenger who had previously been to North America before traveling on the Mayflower. A decade earlier, in 1609, Hopkins had been aboard a Jamestown-bound ship called the Sea Venture, which wrecked on Bermuda.
Along with the other colonist castaways, Hopkins sailed to Jamestown on a newly constructed ship. In a fascinating intersection of history, Hopkins’s attendance at the marriage of Pocahontas and John Rolfe led him to escape from Jamestown and travel back to England with Pocahontas and her husband. It was this happenstance in its entirety that may have led to Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest.