Sea Venture

Sea Venture was a seventeenth-century English sailing ship that wrecked in Bermuda. Sea Venture's wreck is widely thought to have been the inspiration for Shakespeare's play, The Tempest. She was the flagship of the London Company, and a highly unusual vessel for her day.

The Virginia Company

The proprietary London Company had established the settlement of Jamestown in Virginia in 1607, and delivered supplies and additional settlers in 1608, raising the English colony's population to 200, despite many deaths. The entire operation was characterized by a lack of resources and experience. The Company's fleet was composed of vessels that were less than optimal for delivering large numbers of passengers across the Atlantic Ocean, and the colony itself was threatened by starvation, diseases, and warfare with native peoples.

Despite the delivery of supplies in 1608 on the First and Second Supply missions of Captain Christopher Newport, it seemed certain, at that time, that without a major relief effort, the colony at Jamestown would meet the same fate as two earlier failed English attempts to settle in North America, the Roanoke Colony and the Popham Colony.

MS Pacific

MS Pacific was a cruise ship owned and operated by the Brazil-based Viagens CVC. She was built for Flagship Cruises in 1971 by the company Nordseewerke in Emden, West Germany, and named Sea Venture. She operated cruises between the United States and Bermuda, which had been settled by the survivors of the wreck of the original Sea Venture in 1609. Between 1975 and 2002 she sailed for Princess Cruises as Pacific Princess, becoming famous for appearing in the romantic comedy anthology TV series The Love Boat.

In 2008, Pacific was chartered by the newly established Quail Cruises to operate cruises out of Valencia, Spain, but was retired from service when renovation work proved more expensive than had been anticipated, and was sold in 2012 to a company specializing in ship breaking. After that sale fell through, she remained laid up in Genoa for an extended period before being towed to Aliağa where she arrived on 6 August 2013 for breaking. Before she was dismantled, on 10 August 2013, there was a fatal accident in which there was a flood in the compartment below the engines. While electrical pumps were operating, two men were killed and nine injured from toxic exhaust gases.