William Strachey was an english writer whose works are among the primary sources for the early history of the english colonization of North America.
He is best remembered today as the eye-witness reporter of the 1609 shipwreck on the uninhabited island of Bermuda of the colonial ship Sea Venture, which was caught in a hurricane while sailing to Virginia. The survivors eventually reached Virginia after building two small ships during the ten months they spent on the island, and his account of the incident and of the Virginia colony is thought by most Shakespearean scholars to have been a source for Shakespeare’s play The Tempest.
Biography
Early Life
William Strachey was born on April 4, 1572, in Saffron Walden, a small market town in Essex, England, to William Strachey (d. 1598) and Mary Cooke (d. 1587) on an estate purchased by his grandfather in the 1560s. At the age of 16, he entered Emmanuel College at Cambridge University in 1588. He later studied at Gray’s Inn, but there is no evidence he practiced law.
Family and Career
In 1595 William married Frances Forster and settled near her home in Crowhurst in Surrey. William supported his family from his inheritance from his father, which he obtained after a legal battle with his stepmother, Elizabeth Brockett. He also kept a residence in London, where he regularly attended plays, eventually becoming a shareholder in the Blackfriars Theatre, and became friends with the city’s poets and playwrights, including Thomas Campion, John Donne and Ben Jonson. William wrote a commendatory poem for Jonson that was published in Jonson’s play Sejanus His Fall (1605), in which Shakespeare had acted in 1603.
Photograph of William Strachey’s House
But William soon found himself in a precarious financial condition, a state from which he spent the rest of his life trying to recover, and in 1606 he used his wife’s family’s influence to obtain the positions of secretary to the English Levant Company and to Thomas Glover, the english ambassador to Turkey. He traveled to Constantinople, but he quarrelled with the ambassador and was dismissed in 1607 and returned to England. He then decided to mend his fortunes in the New World, so he purchased two shares in the Virginia Company and sailed to Virginia on the Sea Venture with Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers in the summer of 1609.
Shipwreck of the Sea Venture
William was aboard the flagship Sea Venture with the leaders of the expedition when the ship was blown off course by a hurricane. Leaking, and with its foundering imminent, the ship was run aground of the coast of Bermuda, accidentally beginning England’s colonisation of that Atlantic archipelago.
The survivors spent 10 months on the island building 2 new boats the Patience and the Deliverance from the salvage of the Sea Venture.
William wrote an eloquent letter dated July 15, 1610, to an unnamed “Excellent Lady” in England about the Sea Venture disaster and his time at Jamestown, but it wasn’t until 1625 that it was published by Samuel Purchas as A True Reportory of the Wracke, and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates Knight. It is thought to be one of the sources for Shakespeare’s The Tempest because of certain verbal, plot and thematic similarities.
Sea Venture Video
The Church at Jamestown
This description of the church constructed within the palisade at Jamestown, along with the account of the Sunday procession of the governor and his company, was written by Strachey in 1610. It was included in Strachey’s letter to an unknown noble lady in England and contains a vivid description of Strachey’s shipwreck in Bermuda in route to Virginia in 1609.
To every side, a proportioned distance from the palisade, is a settled street of houses that runs along, so as each line of the angle hath his street. In the midst is a market place, a store-house, and a corps de garde, as likewise a pretty chapel, though (at this time when we came in) as ruined and unfrequented. But the lord governor and captain general hath given order for the repairing of it, and at this instant many hands are about it. It is in length three-score foot, in breadth twenty-four, and shall have a chancel in it of cedar and a communion table of the black walnut, and all the pews of cedar, with fair broad windows to shut and open, as the weather shall occasion, of the same wood, a pulpit of the same, with a front hewn hollow, like a canoe, with two bells at the west end. It is so cast as it be very light within, and the lord governor and captain general doth cause it to be kept passing sweet and trimmed up with divers flowers, with a sexton belonging to it. And in it every Sunday we have sermons twice a day, and every Thursday a sermon, having true preachers, which take their weekly turns; and every morning, at the ringing of a bell about ten of the clock, each man addresseth himself to prayers, and so at four of the clock before supper.
Every Sunday, when the lord governor and captain general goeth to church, he is accompanied with all the councilors, captains, other officers, and all the gentlemen, and with a guard of halberdiers in His Lordship’s livery, fair red cloaks, to the number of fifty, both on each side and behind him; and, being in the church, His Lordship hath his seat in the choir, in a green velvet chair, with a cloth, with a velvet cushion spread on a table before him on which he kneeleth; and on each side sit the council, captains, and officers, each in their place; and when he returneth home again he is waited on to his house in the same manner.
William’s writings are among the few first-hand descriptions of Virginia in the period. His list of words of the Powhatan is one of only two records of the language. (the other being Captain John Smith’s)
Jamestown Colony Video
Later Life and Death
William remained at Jamestown for less than a year, but during that time he became the Secretary of the Colony.
He returned to England probably in late 1611, and published a compilation of the colonial laws put in place by the governors.
(For The Colony In Virginia Britannia 1612)
He then wrote an extended manuscript about the Virginia colony (The Historie of Travaile Into Virginia Britannia) he could not find a patron to publish his work.
The parish register of St. Giles, Camberwell, in Southwark records his burial on June 21, 1621. He died in poverty, leaving this verse:
Hark! Twas the trump of death that blew
My hour has come. False world adieu
Thy pleasures have betrayed me so
That I to death untimely go.