Admiral Sir George Somers

Admiral Sir George Somers was born in Lyme Regis in 1554. He was a distinguished professional seaman, naval leader and Elizabethan privateer - seizing Spanish ships at sea and making off with their bounty, sanctioned by the British monarch. He was the founder of Bermuda.

Rising from an obscure background, he became a distinguished mariner earning a reputation as a swashbuckling buccaneer of the ocean waves. He participated in the Anglo-Spanish War of 1595 and later commanded several English ships, including HMS Vanguard, HMS Swiftsure, and HMS Warspite. In 1603 he was knighted for his service to the crown by King James I and in 1604 became mayor and MP for Lyme Regis.

With decades of experience, he was a natural choice for the Virginia Company to lead a 1609 mission on board the ship Sea Venture to replenish the starving colonists in England's first North American colony at Jamestown, Virginia.

The Sea Venture was the flagship of a relief fleet of eight ships carrying food and other supplies which set sail from Plymouth on 2nd June 1609. On July 24th, approximately 1,000 miles west of the Azores, the Sea Venture sailed into a hurricane and became separated from the other ships. For the next four days, passengers and crew battled the extreme conditions and worked around the clock, bailing out their leaky vessel. With the ship close to sinking, Somers spotted land and intentionally steered the Sea Venture onto a reef in what is now known as Bermuda. All the crew and passengers on board survived and while ashore, the crew built a church and houses, laying the foundations of the colonisation of the island.

Tools and materials were salvaged from the shipwrecked Sea Venture and these were used along with Bermuda cedar to build two new vessels, the Deliverance and the Patience. In 1610 Somers sailed on to the beleaguered settlement at Jamestown, arriving on 23^rd May to deliver much needed supplies.

Somers died aged 56 just a few months later on 9^th November 1610 in Bermuda on a return visit to the island to collect more food. His heart was buried in Bermuda but his body, pickled in a barrel, was landed on the Cobb in Lyme Regis in 1611. A volley of muskets and cannon saluted his last journey to the church a few miles away at Whitchurch Canonicorum where his body is buried.

In 1996 St. George’s, Bermuda and Lyme Regis were linked together by twinning and in 2015 St. George’s and Lyme Regis were joined by Jamestown through a “tripling” to form the ‘Historic Atlantic Triangle’.

In 2016 a bronze statue of Somers overlooking the Cobb was unveiled in Langmoor and Lister Gardens by Lyme Regis Town Crier Alan Vian accompanied by the Mayor of St George’s, Quinell Francis and Lyme Regis Mayor Owen Lovell. Members of the St George’s Twinning Committee were also in attendance.

Each year Lyme Regis celebrates its trans-Atlantic friendship with twin town St George’s, Bermuda, with the annual Somers Day parade. The event sees a procession move through the town, along the seafront, and ends with the annual ceremony commemorating Sir George Somers on the Cobb. Every year, a party from Bermuda visits Lyme for the special occasion.