William Strachey

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.

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" and hence challenges the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship,as the incident post dated the death of Edward de Vere. [ Bill Bryson; "Shakespeare"; Harper Press; 2007]

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 is 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.

hipwreck 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 off 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 [http://www.virtualjamestown.org/TR%20original.doc "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. [Thomas E. Rankin and Wilford M. Aikin. "American Literature". Harcourt, Brace (1922) pp. 8-9.]

Strachey's writings are among the few first-hand descriptions of Virginia in the period. His list of words of the Powhatan [Charles Campbell. "History of the Colony and Ancient Dominion of Virginia". Lippincott (1860), p. 106.] 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.Leslie Stephen (ed. Sidney Lee). "Dictionary of National Biography". Macmillan (1898), Vol. LV, pp. 12-13.] He then wrote an extended manuscript about the Virginia colony ("The Historie of Travaile Into Virginia Britannia"), but 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.

Archeological record

In 1996, [http://historicjamestowne.org/featured_find/strachey_ring.php Strachey's signet ring] was discovered in the ruins of Jamestown, identified by the family seal, an eagle.

trachey's works

* [http://www.virtualjamestown.org/TR%20original.doc "A true reportory of the wracke, and redemption of Sir THOMAS GATES Knight" original-spelling version] at Virtual Jamestown.
* [http://www.virtualjamestown.org/TR%20modern.doc "A True Reportory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight" modern-spelling version] at Virtual Jamestown.
* [http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/jamestown-browse?id=J1056 "For The Colony in Virginea Britannia. Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall, &c." original-spelling version] at Virtual Jamestown.
* [http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/jamestown-browsemod?id=J1056 "For The Colony in Virginia Brittannia: Laws Divine, Moral and Martial, etc." modern-spelling version] at Virtual Jamestown.
* [http://books.google.com/books?id=fYYMAAAAIAAJ&printsec=titlepage&dq "The Historie of Travaile Into Virginia Britannia"] at Google Books.
* [http://books.google.com/books?id=1bU6szgFsg0C "A Dictionary of Powhatan"] at Google Books.

References