For the Colony in Virginea Britannia: Lavves Diuine, Morall, and Martiall, &c. ... London, Printed for W. Burre, 1612
(
This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia; Expressing the Cosmographie and Comodities of the Country, Together with the Manners and Customes of the ... Library Collection - Hakluyt First Series)
(The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846)...)
The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited (and sometimes translated) early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. Volume 6 (1849) is the first published edition of a collection of manuscript records gathered by William Strachey (1572?-1621), the first Secretary of the English colony of Virginia. It includes Strachey's own account of a shipwreck, which is believed by some scholars to have inspired passages in Shakespeare's The Tempest, and a list of words in Powhatan which is the only source of information about that language apart from the account of Captain John Smith.
A Voyage to Virginia in 1609: Two Narratives: Strachey's "True Reportory" and Jourdain's Discovery of the Bermudas
(
To celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, the University o...)
To celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, the University of Virginia Press reissues its first-ever publication. The volume’s two accounts of the 1609 wreck of a Jamestown-bound ship offer a gripping sea adventure from the earliest days of American colonization, but the dramatic events’ even greater claim to fame is for serving as the inspiration for William Shakespeare’s last major work, The Tempest.
William Strachey was one of six hundred passengers sailing to Jamestown as part of the largest expedition yet to Virginia. A mere week from their destination, the fleet’s flagship, Sea Venture, met a tropical storm and wrecked on one of the islands of Bermuda. Strachey’s story might have ended there, but the castaways survived on the tropical island for eleven months and―in an act of almost incomprehensible resourcefulness―used local cedarwood, along with the wreckage of their own ship, to construct two seaworthy boats and continue successfully on their voyage.
Strachey’s frankness about his fellow travelers, mutinies on the island, and the wretched condition in which they finally found Jamestown kept his document from being officially published initially, but it circulated privately in London, where one of its early readers was William Shakespeare. The second narrative in this volume, by Strachey’s shipmate Silvester Jourdain, covers the same episode but includes many fascinating details that Strachey’s does not, including some that made their way into The Tempest.
Presented with modern spelling and punctuation, this great maritime drama and unforgettable firsthand look at the profound struggle to colonize America offers today’s reader the raw material that inspired Shakespeare’s masterpiece.
William Strachey was an English historian and first secretary of the Virginia colony. He was a writer whose works are among the primary sources for the early history of the English colonisation of North America.
Background
William was born in Saffron Walden, Essex, England, United Kingdom. The date of his birth is unknown. He was descended from the honorable and ancient Strachey family of Essex. He appears not to have been the son of William who married Mary Cook (as is sometimes stated), but of John Strachey, whose son William was baptized in Saffron Walden church, March 16, 1567/8. There are other conjectures which point towards him as the William Strachey who matriculated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1588; who married Frances Foster, 1588, and had a son William; and who died in 1634.
Career
In the dedication to Bacon (some time after July 11, 1618) of his Historie of Travaile, Strachey designates himself "one of the Graies-Inne Societe, " but his name does not appear in the index to Joseph Foster's Register of Admissions to Gray's Inn (1889). Save that he contributed a second-rate sonnet to the commendatory verses of Ben Jonson's Sejanus (1604), there is little specific fact bearing on his career prior to the summer of 1606, when he accompanied Sir Thomas Glover to Constantinople as secretary.
His name next appears among the grantees under King James's second charter to the London Company of Virginia, to which he paid a subscription.
On June 2, 1609, he sailed for Virginia; but his ship, the Sea Adventure (having aboard both the new governor, Sir Thomas Gates, and Sir George Somers, admiral of the little fleet), became separated from the others in a severe storm late in July and was wrecked on the Bermudas. There the party wintered, constructing two small vessels, and on May 23, 1610, reached Jamestown, to find matters so desperate that only the opportune arrival of Lord De La Warr prevented the abandoning of the colony.
De La Warr appointed Strachey to his council, as secretary and recorder, and when Gates left for England in July he carried with him two interesting papers from the secretary's pen. One was De La Warr's dispatch (obviously drawn up by Strachey) to the patentees in England, announcing his arrival, the safety of the shipwrecked party, and the state of the colony; the other was Strachey's more detailed letter to an "excellent lady, " which was repressed by the Company in consequence of its outspoken account of the settlement and was first printed by Samuel Purchas in 1625 as "A True Reportory of the Wracke, and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates . "
Late in 1611 Strachey returned to London, where at his "lodging in the blacke Friers" he edited the first written code of laws for the Virginia settlement, For the Colony in Virginea Brittania: Lavves Diuine, Morall, and Martiall (1612; reprinted in Force, Tracts, vol. III), the military part based on Dale's enlargement of the Lawes for governing the Armye in the Lowe Countreyes and the civil code being his own compilation.
The tract entitled The Proceedings of the English Colonie in Virginia, by "W. S. ," printed at Oxford the same year and long attributed to Strachey, even to the point of confusing it with his True Reportory, is now recognized as the work of the Rev. Dr. William Symonds, who had delivered the sermon Virginea Britannia to the prospective colonists in April 1609 at Whitechapel.
Before the close of 1613 Strachey completed the first two books of his most ambitious literary undertaking, The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia, Expressing the Cosmographie and Comodities of the Country, Togither with the Manners and Customes of the People, and inscribed the manuscript to Sir Allen Apsley.
Neither Apsley nor the Virginia Committee encouraged him to publish (although it has been said that the Historie induced Apsley to advise the Pilgrim emigration to America), nor did he meet with better success five or six years later when he inscribed it afresh to Francis Bacon.
He died in 1621.
Achievements
William Strachey 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.
His writings attest that he was a pious anti-papist, a man of considerable culture and learning, a keen, scientific, and dependable observer, as well as the master of a prose style which, if at times pedantic, possesses dignity and power and occasionally eloquence; while it may be assumed from knowledge of the other incumbents of the Virginia secretaryship that he was considered one of the most prominent citizens of the colony, of competent fortune, superior talents, and experience in public affairs.
Connections
On 9 June 1595 Strachey married Frances Forster, 'the daughter of a prosperous Surrey family with political connections'. Frances Forster was the daughter of William Forster and Elizabeth Draper (died 22 April 1605), widow of John Bowyer (died 10 October 1570) of Shepton Beauchamp, Somerset, and daughter of Robert Draper of Camberwell, Surrey, Page of the Jewels to King Henry VIII, by Elizabeth Fyfield. Strachey lived in London while Frances remained at her father's estate in Crowhurst, Surrey.
They had two children, William Strachey (died 1635), born nine months after the marriage in 1596, and Edmund Strachey, born in 1604. Frances died before 1615, and at some time before that date Strachey married a widow whose first name was Dorothy, by whom he does not appear to have had any issue.
