PROSPERO Of the King’s ship,
The mariners, say how thou hast disposed,
And all the rest o’th’ fleet?
ARIEL Safely in harbour
Is the King’s ship, in the deep nook where once
Thou call’st me up at midnight to fetch dew
From the still-vexed Bermudas; there she’s hid,
The mariners all under hatches stowed,
Who, with a charm joined to their suffered labour,
I have left asleep. And for the rest o’th’ fleet,
Which I dispersed, they all have met again,
And are upon the Mediterranean float,
Bound sadly home for Naples,
Supposing that they saw the King’s ship wrecked
And his great person perish. (1.2.224-237)
More anticipatory tying-up of potential loose ends in the plot. The sailors are fine – they stayed on board the ship – and now it’s safely anchored, with the mariners in an enchanted sleep, which they have surely earned with their suffered labour, their exertions during the storm. (We might think back, briefly, to those moments of chaos and shouting and desperation, ropes and sails and drenching – enter Mariners wet – that opened the play.) Ariel, like their master Prospero, can charm with sleep. A detail that a modern audience might not consider, but that would seem obvious to an early seventeenth century one: of course this was not a single ship, carrying a King, but a fleet, appropriate to the status of a monarch and his entourage. Those on board the other ships were scattered by the storm, but also thought that they saw the wreck of the flagship with the King on board. So no one else is going to arrive on the island; there will be no delayed rescue party – they’re all bound sadly home for Naples. The still-vexed Bermudas is a nice touch, at once mysterious and topical. Ariel had been in the same deep nook of the island where the ship has now found safe harbour when, one midnight, Prospero had sent them on an expedition to bring dew, presumably as an ingredient for something magical, from these notorious islands in the north Atlantic, still largely uninhabited in 1612 but known to Europeans since the early sixteenth century. They were known for wrecks and ferocious storms (still-vexed, unremittingly wild and restless); a ship called the Sea Venture had been wrecked there in 1609, en route to the Jamestown settlement (there were seven ships in that fleet), and material relating to that episode is often cited as a possible source for Shakespeare’s play. In this context, though, the midnight errand to the Bermudas suggests both Ariel’s strength and swiftness, their mastery of time and space, and Prospero’s total control of them: it’s much more dangerous than anything Puck is called on to do by Oberon, although not unrelated.
