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Stephen Hopkins was a man of many achievements. Although not a Separatist, he and his family joined the Pilgrims’ journey to the New World perhaps because Stephen had al-ready been to the colony in Jamestown and therefore had experience valuable for the Mayflower group. Stephen, along with his second wife, Elizabeth, their three children and two indentured servants, made the long and dangerous trip aboard the Mayflower in 1620.

I n 1955, when my mother, née Eileen Mary Hopkins, inherited an old, dark, beat-up wooden chest at the death of her grandmother in Santa Barbara, California, she didn’t think much about it. “It was just the piece of furniture on which Grandma kept the antique Russian Samovar,” Mom said, “which I found much more interesting.”

A s early as 1769, Thomas Mayo speculated that Stephen Hopkins of Plymouth may be the same man who ship-wrecked in Bermuda in 1609.  But it was not until my 1998 discovery of Stephen Hopkins’ origins in Hursley, that actual documents could be cited to show they were indeed the same.

I t is widely thought that the ill-starred voyage of the Sea Venture inspired Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. The real Stephen Hopkins, aboard the Sea Venture when it sailed from Plymouth for Jamestown on June 2, 1609, might even have had something to do with the character “Stephano, a drunken Butler”, in this famous play.