Everything about William Strachey totally explained
William Strachey (
1572 – before
June 21,
1621) 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
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's no evidence he practiced law.
Family and career
In 1595 Strachey married Frances Forster and settled near her home in Crowhurst in
Surrey. Strachey 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. Strachey wrote a commendatory poem for Jonson that was published in Jonson’s play
Sejanus His Fall (1605), in which
Shakespeare had acted in 1603.
But Strachey 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 quarreled 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
Strachey 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.
Strachey 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.
Strachey'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).
Later life and death
Strachey 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. He then wrote an extended manuscript about the Virginia colony (
The Historie of Travaile Into Virginia Britannia), but he couldn't 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.
Archeological record
In 1996, Strachey's signet ring was discovered in the ruins of Jamestown, identified by the family seal, an eagle.
Strachey's works
Further Information
Get more info on 'William Strachey'.
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