William Strachey (4 April 1572 – 21 June 1621 (buried)) was an English writer whose works are among the primary sources for the early history of the English colonisation 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.
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Strachey was born 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, Cambridge in 1588.[1] He later studied at Gray's Inn, but there is no evidence he practiced law.
On 9 June 1595 Strachey married Frances Forster and settled near her home in Crowhurst in Surrey. They had two children, William, born 1596, and Edmund, born 1604. Strachey supported his family from his inheritance from his father, which he obtained after a legal battle with his stepmother, Elizabeth Brockett.
Strachey 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, Ben Jonson, Hugh Holland, John Marston, George Chapman, and Matthew Roydon, many of them members of the "Fraternity of Sireniacal Gentlemen" who met at the Mermaid Tavern.[2] 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 travelled to Constantinople, but he quarrelled with the ambassador and was dismissed in March 1607 and returned to England. He then decided to mend his fortunes in the New World, so in 1609 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 that year.
Strachey was a passenger 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. The group was stranded on the island for almost a year, during which they constructed two small boats in which they eventually completed the voyage to Virginia.
Strachey wrote an eloquent letter dated 15 July 1610, to an unnamed "Excellent Lady" in England about the Sea Venture disaster, including an account of the precarious state of the Jamestown colony. Being critical of the management of the colony, it was suppressed by the Virginia Company. After the dissolution of the company it was published in 1625 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.[3] [4] Other scholars have questioned it as a source for The Tempest.[5]
Strachey's writings are among the few first-hand descriptions of Virginia in the period. His list of words of the Powhatan[6] is one of only two records of the language (the other being Captain John Smith's).
Strachey remained at Jamestown for less than a year, but during that time he became the Secretary of the Colony after the drowning death of Matthew Scrivener in 1609. He returned to England probably in late 1611 and published a compilation of the colonial laws put in place by the governors.[7]
He then produced an extended manuscript about the Virginia colony, The Historie of Travaile Into Virginia Britannia, dedicating the first version to the earl of Northumberland in 1612. The work included his eyewitness account of life in early Virginia, but it borrowed heavily from the earlier work of Richard Willes, James Rosier, John Smith, and others. He produced two more versions during the next six years, dedicating one to Francis Bacon and the other to Sir Allen Apsley. It too was critical of the Virginia Company management of the colony, and Strachey failed to find a patron to publish his work, which was finally first published in 1849 by the Hakluyt Society.
Following the death of his wife sometime before 1615, he remarried to a widow named Dorothy. Strachey died of unknown causes in June 1621 and the parish register of St. Giles, Camberwell, in Southwark records his burial on 21 June 1621. He died in poverty, leaving this verse:
In 1996, Strachey's signet ring was discovered in the ruins of Jamestown, identified by the family seal, an eagle.