When William Shakespeare sat down to write The Tempest he had fresh in his memory a vivid description of a hurricane and shipwreck from the pen of a passenger on the ill-fated ship, the “Sea Venture,”1 that foundered, en route to Virginia, in a tropical storm off the Bermuda Islands on July 28, 1609. The author was William Strachey, a gentleman-adventurer, one of a company of more than 600 colonists bound for Jamestown, who set out from Plymouth, England, on June 2, 1609, in seven ships and two pinnaces. The flagship of the fleet was the “Sea Venture,” commanded by Captain Christopher Newport, who had led the first expedition to Jamestown two years before. On board the “Sea Venture” were Sir Thomas Gates, who had been appointed governor of the colony of Virginia pending the arrival of Lord De La Warr, and Sir George Somers, who held the title of admiral of the flotilla. Using timbers and materials from their wrecked ship, supplemented by cedarwood from Bermuda, the castaways managed to build two seaworthy vessels in which they eventually reached Virginia. Strachey wrote an account of their experiences, in the form of a long letter addressed to an unidentified noble lady, and sent it back from Virginia. It was this letter that Shakespeare had obviously read before writing The Tempest. The letter was not published in Shakespeare’s lifetime but first appeared in print in Samuel Purchas’ Pilgrims (1625) with the title, “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. written by William Strachey, Esquire.”2
The identity of the noble lady is a matter of conjecture. Dr. S. G. Culliford in an unpublished dissertation, “William Strachey, 1572-1621,” suggests that the recipient of the letter was Sara, wife of Sir Thomas Smith, treasurer of the Virginia Company of London. This is plausible, for Strachey was himself obviously in the good graces of officials of the company and a little later was made secretary of the colony at Jamestown. It would be reasonable for him to address an account of the shipwreck and of the subsequent adventures of the castaways on the island to the wife of his prospective patron.
Shakespeare also had connections with members of the Virginia Company. His own patron, the Earl of Southampton, was one of the promoters of the enterprise, as were two other noblemen who befriended him, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery. Strachey himself had moved in the literary circle that included Shakespeare. He was a friend of Ben Jonson and was a shareholder in an acting company known as the Children of the Queen’s Revels, which had rented the Blackfriars playhouse from Shakespeare’s colleague Richard Burbage. In a small group of this sort Strachey’s erstwhile friends would have heard something of his adventures. If the letter addressed to the noble lady did not circulate in manuscript in this group, they would at least have known about the substance of it. The expedition led by Gates was the largest that had yet gone out to Virginia, and news of the disaster that befell it created great excitement throughout London, particularly among the shareholders in Shakespeare’s circle who stood to lose large sums on their investment.
Strachey, who wrote so dramatically of the wreck of the “Sea Venture,” was a native of Saffron Walden in Essex, where his family belonged to the minor gentry.3 He was born in 1572; in 1588, the year of the Armada, he entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Records do not show whether he graduated. In 1595 he married Frances Forster of Crowhurst in Surrey. By 1605 he was living in London and was a member of Gray’s Inn, where he had an opportunity of meeting many rising young lawyers and men of letters. He himself dabbled in literature, and we have a few evidences of his interest in poetry at this time. Among his verses is a sonnet prefatory to Ben Jonson’s tragedy Sejanus. Thomas Campion, a fellow member of Gray’s Inn, addressed to him an epigram, Ad Guglielmum Stracheum.
In 1606 Strachey obtained a post as secretary to Thomas Glover, then about to sail for Constantinople as ambassador to the Sublime Porte. The ambassador whom Glover succeeded was Henry Lello, a scholarly man of letters, who claimed that Glover had displaced him by underhanded means and declined to leave Constantinople. Strachey on the voyage outbound quickly discovered that Glover was a disagreeable person and on arrival in Constantinople he made friends with Lello. Finding such disloyal conduct impossible to forgive, Glover dismissed Strachey, who made his way to Venice, where he sought in vain to find employment with the English ambassador, Sir Henry Wotton.
Strachey got back to London about a year before Sir Thomas Gates’s expedition set out for Virginia. Since no gainful employment offered itself, he volunteered to go and took passage on the “Sea Venture.” There is no evidence that he had been promised any office in the colony, but he evidently enjoyed the companionship and favor of the leaders. Later at Jamestown, Strachey was given the post of Matthew Scrivener, the secretary of the colony, who had drowned in January, 1609.
The voyage of the fleet of nine vessels was uneventful until they were within a week’s sailing time of the Virginia coast. Then, on the night of July 23, heavy clouds foretold a storm of unusual intensity. The morning brought a hurricane from the northeast, “which,” says Strachey, “swelling and roaring as it were by fits, some hours with more violence than others, at length did beat all light from Heaven; which, like an hell of darkness, turned black upon us.” The fleet was scattered. After battling winds and waves for four days and nights, the “Sea Venture” was at last driven upon the shore of an island, which to the horror of superstitious sailors turned out to be one of the Bermudas, already ill-famed as the “Isle of Devils.” By sheer luck the ship was wedged between two rocks so that it did not capsize or sink. Manning their boats, the crew and passengers got ashore safely. Furthermore they salvaged such stores as had not been spoiled by sea water, and they brought ashore all their tools and implements. These were to prove their salvation, for during their stay of eleven months in the islands they were able to fashion timbers and planks with which they built the two vessels, the “Deliverance” and the “Patience,” that took them to Virginia.
Strachey made his description of the hurricane, the wreck, and life on the islands factually accurate without diminishing its vividness. Nor did he gloss over unpleasant details. His narration of the shortcomings of some of the group and the mutinies that nearly ruined their prospects of escaping from the Bermudas were not matters that the Virginia Company of London would want to publish abroad. These comments are sufficient to explain why Strachey’s report had to wait until 1625 to see print. That does not mean, however, that the officials of the company did not read carefully all that he had written and give heed to the implications between the lines. Strachey makes clear that the quality of some of the emigrants helped to explain the difficulties experienced in trying to establish a successful base at Jamestown. The mutinies described by Strachey also provided suggestions to Shakespeare for the mutinous sailors in The Tempest.
When the castaways in their two vessels reached Jamestown, they were pleased to learn that all the other vessels in the fleet except one pinnace had avoided complete disaster and had at last limped into port. But they were appalled at the state of the colony. Most of the emigrants had died of disease and near-starvation during the preceding winter when the crew and passengers of the “Sea Venture” were living comfortably and well in the sunny Bermudas. Besieged by Indians, who kept the settlers penned within their stockade, the colonists could neither hunt nor fish successfully. They could not even venture out to gather wood without the risk of death from an Indian’s arrow or tomahawk. On his arrival Gates had accepted the resignation of George Percy, brother of the Earl of Northumberland, who had been serving as a less than successful governor. Gates did his best to salvage the depressed colony, but the shortage of food and the scarcity of competent men at last forced him to conclude that they must abandon Jamestown. In two pinnaces and the two vessels built in Bermuda they would try to reach Newfoundland, where they could hope to obtain passage home in the fishing fleet. Accordingly they embarked on June 7, 1610, but before they arrived at the open sea they met a longboat from the fleet of Lord De La Warr, who was coming with reinforcements and supplies. At this news Gates put about and returned to Jamestown. The colony was saved.
Lord De La Warr brought his fleet to anchor at Jamestown and immediately set to work to reorganize the colony. On June 12 he made a public announcement of his council and officers. These included William Strachey as secretary and recorder. Lord De La Warr made plain his condemnation of indolence and incompetence, for, Strachey reported, he “delivered some few words unto the company, laying many blames upon them for many vanities and their idleness, earnestly wishing that he might no more find it so lest he should be compelled to draw the sword of justice to cut off such delinquents.”
The colony at Jamestown was not yet a success, but it would never again fall to the low state that it reached prior to Lord De La Warr’s arrival. From this time onward the Virginia enterprise would slowly gain momentum. Strachey’s letter was taken to London by Sir Thomas Gates, who sailed about the middle of July, 1610. Perhaps the unvarnished truths that Strachey reported helped to open the eyes of officials at home to the necessity of better planning and a more discriminating selection of prospective settlers.
Strachey himself returned to England in the early autumn of 1611 and was doubtless called into consultation by officials of the Virginia Company of London. His first literary task after his return was to edit a body of laws proclaimed at Jamestown by Gates, Lord De La Warr, and Sir Thomas Dale, who succeeded De La Warr. The compilation bearing the title For the Colony in Virginia Britannia: Laws Divine, Moral, and Martial was published in 1612. It was dedicated to the officers and members of the Virginia Company and dated from the editor’s lodgings in the Blackfriars. Strachey expressed his willingness to serve the company either at home or by returning to Jamestown, but there is no evidence that he ever went back to Virginia. Instead he immediately set about compiling The History of Travel into Virginia Britannia, which he planned to make into a great anthology of narratives of English exploration along the Atlantic littoral, but he changed his mind at some point, and near the end of 1612 he brought the manuscript to an abrupt conclusion. He borrowed from various earlier travel narratives and added some observations of his own but missed the opportunity of giving a full account of what he himself saw and experienced. In this narrative Strachey did not repeat the story he had related in the “True Reportory.” The manuscript, which exists in three states, was never published until the Hakluyt Society version edited by R. H. Major appeared in 1849. A new edition was published by the Hakluyt Society in 1953.
Strachey lived out his life in London but never succeeded in obtaining any substantial advancement or recognition. He married a second wife, but all we know about her is her first name, Dorothy. On June 21, 1621, the parish register of St. Giles, Camberwell, records the burial of William Strachey. In his later years Strachey had given himself to moralizing piety, and the Bodleian Library possesses a manuscript listed as “Mr. Strachey’s Hark” which begins:
Hark! ’Twas the trump of death that blew.
My hour is come. False world adieu.
Thy pleasures have betrayed me so
That I to death untimely go.4
Strachey died unaware that his letter to a noble lady would live in aftertime because it inspired one of Shakespeare’s most fascinating plays.
Another account of the wreck of the “Sea Venture” that deserves preservation is Silvester Jourdain’s A Discovery of the Bermudas, Otherwise Called the Isle of Devils, printed in London by John Windet for the bookseller Roger Barnes in 1610.5 It confirms Strachey’s account of the trials of the Virginia-bound voyagers and, like Strachey’s work, was read by Shakespeare before he wrote The Tempest. Jourdain was also a passenger in the “Sea Venture” and his narrative has a few colorful details not mentioned by Strachey. For example, he records that some of the ship’s company, after four days of pumping and bailing, gave up hope of saving themselves from sinking and, “having some good and comfortable waters in the ship, fetched them and drunk one to the other, taking their last leave one of the other until their more joyful and happy meeting in a more blessed world.” The solace of these “comfortable waters” may have suggested the consolation that Trinculo and his companions found in their cache of liquor in The Tempest.
Jourdain’s work was the first published account of the disaster and served to whet the public interest in this episode. Since he did not elaborate upon unfavorable details of the stay in Bermuda or the plight of the Jamestown colony, the Virginia Company allowed his narrative to be printed. It ends with the departure of Sir George Somers in his Bermuda-built pinnace on a return journey to the islands to procure hogs and other food for the settlers. From this journey Somers never came back.
Jourdain’s account appeared in a second edition without his name entitled A Plain Description of the Bermudas Now Called the Summer Islands (1613). This edition had a pious preface by the preacher William Crashaw, one of the great propagandists for the Virginia Company, and it added a further description of the resources of Bermuda “lately sent from thence.” It also included a “Copy of Articles” adopted by recent settlers on Bermuda to ensure good behavior.
Jourdain was a native of Lyme Regis in Dorsetshire. His brother Ignatius was a well-to-do merchant of Exeter and a member of Parliament. Silvester Jourdain himself may have been a merchant of sorts, for the Port Book of Poole lists a shipper of that name in 1603. Jourdain seems to have been a partisan of Sir George Somers, himself a native and resident of Lyme Regis. Of Jourdain’s later career little is known. There is a record of the death of a man of his name in the parish of St. Sepulchre, near Newgate, London, in 1650. The present printing of his Discovery is based on a copy of the first edition in the Folger Shakespeare Library.
1. The name of the ship is given in contemporary documents as both the “Sea Venture” and the “Sea Adventure.”
2. The letter or “True Reportory” is printed in the modern edition of Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrims (Glasgow, 1906), XIX, 5-72.
3. For a brief account of Strachey’s career, see the introduction to The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania (1612), edited by Louis B. Wright and Virginia Freund (London: Hakluyt Society, 1953), pp. xvii ff. The most detailed study of Strachey is that by Culliford cited earlier, a doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of London in 1950.
4. The Bodleian MS is Ashmole MS 78i.f.i35. See Charles R. Sanders, “William Strachey, the Virginia Company, and Shakespeare,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, LVII (1949), 115-132.
5. Jourdain’s work, with an introduction by Joseph Quincy Adams, was reproduced by Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints (New York, 1940).