William Strachey, Secretary of the Colony of Virginia

http://www.williamstrachey.com/

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. (Wikipedia)

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https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Strachey_William_1572-1621

William Strachey was a member of the Virginia Council, served as secretary and recorder for the colony from 1610 until 1611, and was one of the first historians of the Jamestown settlement. Educated at Cambridge and Gray's Inn, he wrote verse and befriended poets Ben Jonson and John Donne before serving a brief stint as secretary to the English ambassador at Constantinople (1606–1607). Strachey then returned to England, purchased two shares in the Virginia Company of London, and in 1609 sailed on the Sea Venture, the flagship of a resupply fleet bound for the colony. When a storm ran the ship aground on the Bermudas, he and his shipmates were stranded for nearly a year, but eventually managed to construct two small vessels, Patience and Deliverance, and arrived at Jamestown in May 1610. Strachey's account of the adventure, published in 1625 as A true reportory of the wracke, and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates Knight, probably had served, years earlier, as source material for William Shakespeare's play The Tempest. In Virginia, Strachey was appointed to the Council and made its secretary and recorder, in which capacity the company requested that he produce an extensive account of the colony and its future prospects. When he completed The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia in 1612, the company declined to publish it. In the years since, however, it has become one of the most important sources of information on early Virginia Indian society, politics, and religion. Strachey died in poverty in London in 1621.

Early Years

Strachey was born on April 4, 1572, in Saffron Walden, Essex, in the southeast of England, on an estate that his grandfather, also named William Strachey, had purchased a decade earlier. He was the oldest son of four sons and three daughters born to William Strachey and Mary Cooke Strachey. The Strachey family had long been prosperous farmers in Saffron Walden, while the Cookes were wealthy London merchants with property in Kent. On July 4, 1587, William Strachey (the elder) was awarded a coat of arms, making him—and by extension his sons—a gentleman. Mary Cooke Strachey died in 1587, and in August of that year Strachey (the elder) married Elizabeth Brocket of Hertfordshire. They had five daughters.

William Strachey (the younger) enrolled at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, on February 14, 1588, and on June 9, 1595, he married Frances Forster, a distant relative of his mother and the daughter of a wealthy landowner in Surrey. They had two sons: William, who was baptized on March 30, 1596, and Edmund, baptized on February 26, 1604, both at Crowhurst, Surrey. William Strachey (the father) died in November 1598, leaving his estate to his wife Elizabeth Brocket Strachey and then, upon her death in 1602, to his son William Strachey. The inheritance appears to have supported Strachey and his family for the next few years, and by 1605 he was a member of Gray's Inn, the largest of the Inns of Court. No evidence exists that he ever practiced law; instead, he pursued interests in literature and the theater.

Strachey contributed a prefatory sonnet to a 1604 publication of Ben Jonson's Sejanus His Fall, a play first performed at the Globe in 1603 by William Shakespeare and his company. The journalist John St. Loe Strachey later called the poem "one of the most cryptic things in the whole of Elizabethan literature." A shareholder in the Blackfriars Theatre in London, William Strachey apparently was friends with Jonson, the poet John Donne, and perhaps even Shakespeare.

With his inheritance running low, in 1606 Strachey drew upon his wife's connections to gain a post as secretary to Sir Thomas Glover, who represented both the Levant Company and King James I at the Ottoman Empire's capital at Constantinople. Traveling aboard the Royal Exchange, the party stopped in Algiers and Greece before arriving in Constantinople on December 23, 1606. Soon after, however, Strachey fell out with Glover, who described him as "that most malicious knave" and who fired him on March 17, 1607. The Levant Company wrote Strachey that he had "much overshott" himself by communicating too freely with the former ambassador, Henry Lello. With a letter of introduction from John Donne, Strachey sailed to Venice but was unable to secure a job, and finally returned to England.

Bermuda

On May 23, 1609, James I granted the Virginia Company of London a second charter, the publication of which included the name of shareholder "William Strachey, gentleman." Strachey's friend Donne, meanwhile, sought the position of secretary but the company instead appointed Matthew Scrivener, who was already in Virginia. When the fleet of ships left Plymouth for Virginia on June 2, Strachey was aboard the flagship Sea Venture (or Sea Adventure); neither his wife and young sons nor his friend Donne joined him.

On July 24, the ships were separated by a storm, and the Sea Venture, which carried much of the colony's new leadership, including Lieutenant Governor Sir Thomas Gates and Admiral Sir George Somers, was thought lost. In fact, it was blown off course and ran aground on a fishhook-shaped group of islands known as the Bermudas. Strachey vividly described the storm in A true reportory of the wracke, and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates Knight, writing that "we could not apprehend in our imaginations any possibility of greater violence." He suggested their survival was miraculous: "The Lord knoweth, I had as little hope, as desire of life in the storme, & in this, it went beyond my will."

The castaways spent about ten months on the uninhabited islands, and Strachey appears to have insinuated himself into the company of the Sea Venture's captain, Christopher Newport. On February 11, 1610, he and Newport served as witnesses to the christening of John Rolfe's daughter, named Bermuda, and on March 25, he, Newport, and James Swift became godfathers to a baby boy called Bermudas. (Rolfe's wife and daughter both died.) Strachey served on Gates's crew, building one of two pinnaces out of the Sea Venture's wreckage, and his account notes "dangers and divellish disquiets" that overcame some of the men. Somers and Gates clashed, a sailor was murdered, and multiple mutinies were quashed, with one colonist executed.

Once the pinnaces Deliverance and Patience were built, the colonists set sail for Virginia, arriving at Point Comfort in the Chesapeake Bay on May 21, 1610. On May 24, they arrived in Jamestown and there, according to Strachey, found "all things so contrary to our expectations, so full of misery and misgovernment."

Virginia

In Virginia, Strachey and his fellow castaways were greeted with surprise and relief by a colony on the verge of collapse. Over the winter, the settlers, under the command of Captain George Percy, had suffered through the Starving Time. The Indians' siege of the Jamestown fort, exacerbated by drought and cold weather, had made hunting, fishing, and foraging nearly impossible; of about 240 English colonists at the fort in November 1609, only about 60 skeletal survivors remained the following May. Having brought no extra food from Bermuda, Gates decided to abandon Virginia, but as the colonists sailed down the James River, they encountered a resupply mission accompanied by the new governor, Thomas West, baron De La Warr.

De La Warr soon convened the Council, which included Strachey, who also was chosen to be its secretary and recorder. (Matthew Scrivener had drowned in January 1609.) One of De La Warr's first actions was to expand a set of rules, instituted by Gates, that governed the colony. The persistent and widespread perception was that, in Strachey's words, "sloath, riot and vanity" had been to blame for the famine. Strachey complained that "the headlesse multitude, (some neither of qualitie nor Religion) [were] not imployed to the end for which they were sent hither, no not compelled (since in themselves unwilling) to sowe Corne for their owne bellies." As such, a new, stricter regime, "an absolute command," was established, using these rules as a foundation for order.

When Gates left for England on July 20, he took with him two manuscripts penned by Strachey: a report on the state of the colony and his account of the Bermuda shipwreck. The Virginia Company, in turn, addressed Strachey a letter—dated December 14, 1610, and signed by Sir Richard Martin—requesting his elaboration on life in Virginia, and, in particular, "how the Barbarians are content with your being there."

Little is known of Strachey's specific activities in the colony from 1610 until 1611, although he clearly had repeated contacts with the Algonquian-speaking Indians of Tsenacomoco, who were engaged with the English in the First Anglo-Powhatan War (1609–1614). He extensively interviewed two Indian men, Kemps and Machumps, both of whom spoke English. And he visited the Quiyoughcohannock and the Kecoughtan Indians. In September 1611, Strachey returned to England.

Writing

Living in the Blackfriars section of London, Strachey immediately set to work compiling for the Virginia Company the colony rules instituted by Gates and expanded by De La Warr. On December 13, 1611, he entered for publication For the Colony in Virginea Britannia. Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall, &c., and the edition was printed in London the next month.

By contrast, the Virginia Company declined to publish Strachey's account of the Sea Venture. Although he praised Gates and Somers, Strachey was forthright about the mutinies in Bermuda and highly critical of the Jamestown colonists' "Idleness" and their leaders' "misgovernment." Ironically, he also may have been too effusive in his praise of Bermuda's prospects for colonization, the English preferring to keep this information close lest it tempt the Spanish into populating the islands.

Two versions of Strachey's account exist: a rough draft, started in Bermuda and finished at Jamestown prior to De La Warr's arrival; and a longer, more polished version begun after Strachey was appointed secretary. Dated July 15, 1610, the longer version was addressed to an anonymous "Excellent Lady," probably the wife of a company official. Both drafts likely circulated among Londoners connected to the Virginia Company, and many scholars believe that Shakespeare used one of them as a major source for his play The Tempest, thought to have been written in 1610 and 1611. In 1625, the Reverend Samuel Purchas published Strachey's longer draft as A true reportory in the fourth volume of Hakluytus Posthumus; or Purchas His Pilgrimes. He had obtained the manuscript from Richard Hakluyt (the younger).

In the meantime, Strachey labored on a history of his time in Virginia as suggested by Sir Richard Martin. He complained that "many impediments, as yet must detaine such my observations in the shadow of darknesse," not least of these being disinterest on the part of the Virginia Company. Put off by Strachey's criticisms, the company could also point to work published by Captain John Smith and about to be published by Purchas on the same subjects. Strachey's writing would be redundant and perhaps even counterproductive. As a result, Strachey looked elsewhere for support. In 1612 he dedicated his manuscript—The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia; expressing the cosmographie and commodities of the country, togither with the manners and customes of the people—to the former colony president George Percy's older brother, Henry Percy, ninth earl of Northumberland. Northumberland was close to Sir Walter Raleigh and Thomas Hariot, both of whom had been instrumental in the Roanoke voyages. Soon afterward, Strachey dedicated another copy to the wealthy merchant Sir Allen Apsley, who in 1620 became a charter member of the New England Company. In 1618, he dedicated a third version to Sir Francis Bacon. Strachey's connection to all three dedicatees appears to have been minimal.

Finally published by the Hakluyt Society in 1849, Strachey's Historie has since proved to be a rich source of information about early Virginia Indian society, politics, and religion. "He was not prepared to be an ethnographer in the modern sense," the anthropologist Helen C. Rountree has written about Strachey, "but he had a wider and more detailed curiosity about Indian life than any other writer of his time." Strachey directly copied some of his material on Virginia Indians from Smith's A Map of Virginia (1612), suggesting that, according to Rountree, "either he is corroborating Smith's information or he does not know any better than to repeat it."

Later Years Little is known of Strachey's apparently impoverished final years in London. On February 8, 1613, a London court ruled against him for an unpaid debt, and a letter survives in which Strachey, about to meet friends "returned from Virginia," begs from an anonymous "Sir" twenty shillings "to pay for my dinner." A poem by Strachey, "To the Cleane Contrary Wife," was appended to a 1616 edition of A wife, a long poem by Sir Thomas Overbury, who in 1613 had been poisoned in one of the most sensational crimes of the day. Strachey's wife Frances Forster Strachey died, probably sometime before 1615, and he married a woman named Dorothy. Nothing else about her or their marriage is known.

During these years, Strachey kept a commonplace book, filled with various notes, book lists, and private thoughts, which is now in the possession of the University of Virginia. Three verses on death also survive, the first beginning: "Harke! Twas the trump of death that blewe / My hower is come false world adewe / That I to death untymely goe."

Strachey died of unknown causes and was buried on June 21, 1621, in the parish church of St. Giles in the Camberwell district of the Southwark borough, London. He left no will, probably because he left no estate to be administered. In 1996, archaeological excavations at James Fort in Virginia uncovered a brass signet finger ring used to impress wax seals on documents. It is engraved with an eagle, the Strachey family symbol dating back to the coat of arms issued to his father in 1587.

Major Works

For the Colony in Virginea Britannia. Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall, &c. (1612)

A true reportory of the wracke, and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates Knight; upon, and from the Ilands of the Bermudas: his comming to Virginia, and the estate of that Colonie then, and after, under the government of the Lord La Warre, July 15, 1610. (1625)

The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia; expressing the cosmographie and commodities of the country, togither with the manners and customes of the people (unpublished)

Time Line

April 4, 1572 - William Strachey is born in Saffron Walden, Essex, to William Strachey and Mary Cooke.

1587 - Mary Cooke Strachey, mother of William Strachey, dies.

July 4, 1587 - William Strachey is awarded a coat of arms, making him—and by extension his sons, including the future colonist and writer William Strachey—a gentleman.

August 1587 - William Strachey, father of the colonist and writer William Strachey, marries his second wife, Elizabeth Brocket of Hertfordshire. They will have five daughters.

February 14, 1588 - William Strachey enrolls at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge.

June 9, 1595 - William Strachey marries Frances Forster, a distant relative of his mother and the daughter of a wealthy landowner in Surrey.

March 30, 1596 - William Strachey, the son of William Strachey and Frances Forster Strachey, is baptized at Crowhurst, Surrey.

November 1598 - William Strachey, father of the writer and colonist William Strachey, dies. He leaves his estate to his wife Elizabeth Brocket Strachey and then, upon her death, to his son William Strachey.

1602 - Elizabeth Brocket Strachey, second wife of William Strachey, dies, allowing for the transfer of an inheritance to her stepson, William Strachey.

1604 - William Strachey contributes a prefatory sonnet to a publication of Ben Jonson's play Sejanus His Fall.

February 26, 1604 - Edmund Strachey, the son of William Strachey and Frances Forster Strachey, is baptized at Crowhurst, Surrey.

1605 - William Strachey is listed as a member of Gray's Inn, the largest of the Inns of Court in London.

June 23, 1605 - William Strachey mortgages his property in his hometown of Saffron Walden, Essex, to his two brothers-in-law.

August 17, 1606 - William Strachey likely appears before James I at Hampton Court as a member of Sir Thomas Glover's staff. Glover receives his credentials as the king's and the Levant Company's ambassador to Constantinople.

September 1606 - Aboard the Royal Exchange, William Strachey leaves England for Constantinople as secretary to Sir Thomas Glover, the king's and the Levant Company's ambassador to Constantinople.

December 23, 1606 - The Royal Exchange, carrying Sir Thomas Glover and his secretary, William Strachey, arrives in Constantinople. Glover is ambassador to the Grand Signor, representing James I and the Levant Company.

March 17, 1607 - Sir Thomas Glover, English ambassador to Constantinople, fires his secretary, William Strachey, charging him with being loyal to the previous ambassador, Henry Lello.

May 23, 1609 - The Crown approves a second royal charter for the Virginia Company of London. It replaces the royal council with private corporate control, extends the colony's boundaries to the Pacific Ocean, and installs a governor, Sir Thomas West, twelfth baron De La Warr, to run operations in Virginia.

June 2, 1609 - The largest fleet England has ever amassed in the West—nine ships, 600 passengers, and livestock and provisions to last a year—leaves England for Virginia. Led by the flagship Sea Venture, the fleet's mission is to save the failing colony. Sir Thomas Gates heads the expedition.

July 24, 1609 - A hurricane strikes the nine-ship English fleet bound for Virginia on a rescue mission. The flagship Sea Venture is separated from the other vessels and irreparably damaged by the storm.

February 11, 1610 - Captain Christopher Newport and William Strachey serve as witnesses to the christening of John Rolfe's daughter, named Bermuda after the group of islands on which they are stranded. The girl and her mother both die.

March 25, 1610 - Captain Christopher Newport, William Strachey, and James Swift become godfathers to a baby boy called Bermudas after the group of islands on which they are stranded.

May 21, 1610 - Having been stranded in the Bermuda islands for nearly a year, the party of Virginia colonists headed by Sir Thomas Gates arrives at Point Comfort in the Chesapeake Bay.

May 24, 1610 - The party of Virginia colonists headed by Sir Thomas Gates, now aboard the Patience and Deliverance, arrives at Jamestown. They find only sixty survivors of a winter famine. Gates decides to abandon the colony for Newfoundland.

June 8, 1610 - Sailing up the James River toward the Chesapeake Bay and then Newfoundland, Jamestown colonists encounter a ship bearing the new governor, Thomas West, baron De La Warr, and a year's worth of supplies. The colonists return to Jamestown that evening.

July 15, 1610 - William Strachey completes a revised version of a letter about the Sea Venture shipwreck and the condition of the Virginia colony. Addressed to an anonymous woman, it will be published posthumously by Samuel Purchas as A true reportory of the wracke, and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates Knight (1625).

December 14, 1610 - Sir Richard Martin of the Virginia Company of London addresses a letter to the colony's secretary, William Strachey, requesting his elaboration on life in Virginia and, in particular, "how the Barbarians are content with your being there."

September 1611 - William Strachey leaves Virginia, possibly aboard the Prosperous, and arrives in London either late in October or early in November.

December 13, 1611 - William Strachey's edition of For the Colony in Virginea Britannia. Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall, &c. is entered for publication.

1612 - In London, William Strachey publishes a compilation of all of the laws issued before he left Virginia early in the year. He titles his book For the Colony in Virginea Britannia. Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall, &c.

1612 - After the Virginia Company declines to publish his manuscript, William Strachey dedicates separate copies of The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia to Henry Percy, ninth earl of Northumberland, and Sir Allen Apsley.

February 8, 1613 - A London court rules against William Strachey for an unpaid debt of £30, charging him an additional £5 10s. in court costs.

1615 - Probably sometime before this year, William Strachey's wife Frances Forster Strachey dies, after which Strachey marries a woman named Dorothy.

1616 - William Strachey's poem "To the Cleane Contrary Wife" is appended to an edition of A wife, a long poem by Sir Thomas Overbury, who was poisoned in 1613.

1618 - William Strachey dedicates a third edition of his manuscript The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia to Sir Francis Bacon.

June 21, 1621 - William Strachey's burial is recorded in the parish register of Saint Giles in the Camberwell district of the Southwark borough, London. The cause of his death is unknown.

1849 - The Hakluyt Society publishes William Strachey's The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia.

1996 - William Strachey's signet ring, identifiable by an eagle—the family seal—is discovered by archaeologists working at the site of the first Jamestown settlement.