Kyle Mendes               Sean Siino               Bernt Strom               Daniel Ghelfi               Jacob Wilcox

Past Members:
Chris Vantuyl
Marat Hafizov


The cooperation among the sailors and the crew during the hurricane that shipwrecked the Sea Venture 'can be recounted as a microcosm of various forms of human cooperation.' The colonialists were marooned on an uninhabited island, and cooperative labor was soon organized 'in part by the leaders of the Virginia Company, in part in opposition to them.' Various types of people were involved in the effort to construct new ships to continue the voyage to Virginia, including 'sailors, laborers, craftsmen, commoners, Native Americans, and women.' Before long 'the rabble...like a monstrous Hydra, erecting their shapeless heads, poised to destroy the state and social order, began to hiss against their Sovereigns regal power and authority,' while various strikes, mutinies, and separations threatened the Virginia Company leaders, who reasserted class discipline by declaring martial law and instituting capital punishment on the island. Throughout the empire, this hydra symbolized the growing disorders of capitalism, and Francis Bacon advised that the only 'chance of healing the growing breach was to engage the country in some popular quarrel abroad' - a call for genocide sanctioned in biblical and classical antiquity. The hydra was seen as a 'powerful threat to the building of state, empire and capitalism,' and through the 'metropolitan industrialization of the nineteenth century...rulers referred to the Hercules-hydra myth,’ of Geryon to strike fear in the simple minded by describing ‘the difficulty of imposing order on increasingly global systems of labor,' through mythological language. Over time the many heads became variously designated as 'dispossessed commoners, transported felons, indentured servants, religious radicals, pirates, urban laborers, soldiers, sailors, and African slaves,’ the dissident groups that had succeeded in bringing 'together the primitive communism of the New World and the plebian commonism of the Old.'