William Strachey was born in Saffron Waldon, Essex in 1571, the eldest child and son of William Strachey and Mary Cooke of Hertfordshire. Hailing from an illustrious line of farmers and city merchants from London dating back to the 13th century, Strachey’s grandfather had acquired the family’s wealth from the wool industry, becoming the richest man in Saffron Walden. After his father’s death in 1598, William Strachey entered into a protracted legal battle with his stepmother, Elizabeth Brocket. A natural-born orator and wordsmith, Strachey won a coveted place to study law at Cambridge University in 1588, and became a member of Gray’s Inn, but failed to graduate from either institution. By the age of 23, Strachey had married Frances Forster, whose family had once held strong political connections to the court of Henry VIII. Frances gave birth to another William nine months after her marriage to Strachey, and a second son, Edmund, followed in 1604.

After his family moved to his father-in-law’s estate in Crowhurst, Surrey, Strachey spent over a decade in London as a struggling writer, where he indulged in his passion for the arts. He became a key shareholder of The Children’s Revel Theatre Company, dedicated to a boy troupe on the site of a former monastery in Blackfriars. Strachey failed to make any profit from his endeavours after spending most of his income on rent, heating and food for the actors. The family inheritance had quickly disappeared within a six-year period after Strachey had divided his father’s assets between his six full siblings and five half-siblings. It was during his time as a regular at The Mermaid Tavern on Cheapside that Strachey received a much-needed breakthrough after forging close friendships with the Elizabethan literati including the writers Ben Jonson, Thomas Campion and John Donne. In 1604, Strachey was invited by Jonson to write one of eight new sonnets for a new edition of his drama Sejanus His Fall, which was first performed at The Globe by William Shakespeare and the King’s Men in 1603. Strachey’s introductory sonnet, ‘Upon Sejanus’, would prove to be an inspiration for Shakespeare’s King Lear. Shakespeare borrowed Strachey’s use of the word ‘vaunt-courier’ to describe lightning, and he adopted the Caribbean term ‘hurricano’, which he incorporated into the text to conjure up striking imagery of violent thunderstorms over the heads of King Lear and the Fool in act 3, scene 2.

Yet despite Strachey’s influence on Shakespeare’s work, he was still unable to make the transition as a full-time writer. With a young family to support and little savings to fall back on, he focused instead on a career in government administration. It was through his cousin that Strachey became the official secretary to Sir Thomas Glover, a representative of King James I and The Levant Company in August 1606. However, Strachey was dismissed in March 1607 after he bitterly quarrelled with Glover for siding with Glover’s predecessor and chief adversary, Henry Lello. Glover, incensed by Strachey’s treachery, openly referred to Strachey as ‘that most malicious knave’ while The Levant Company agreed that Strachey had ‘much overshott himself’ through his allegiance to Lello. Unceremoniously dumped on the streets of Constantinople with no income, Strachey (and Lello) returned to London (and the black plague) in June 1608. Unable to visit London’s theatreland during the pandemic, Strachey found solace in Richard Willes’ History of Travayle in the West and East Indies. Greatly inspired by the arrival of the Powhatan envoy Namontack to the UK, and by the stories of untold riches in Jamestown, Strachey became a member of The Virginia Company, acquiring two shares of the Third Supply to Jamestown. On 2 June 1609, Strachey left his family behind, and boarded The Sea Venture, an English flagship leading a fleet of nine vessels with 600 passengers bound for the New World. Making its maiden voyage from Plymouth docks to Virginia, the Sea Venture expedition was led by Admiral Sir George Somers, Captain Christopher Newport and Jamestown’s governor-to-be, Sir Thomas Gates.

On 24 July 1609, after two months at sea, The Sea Venture encountered a fierce hurricane which saw the ship crash against 30ft waves. The crew pumped out buckets of water every nine seconds for 24 hours over a three-day period and resorted to stuffing dried strips of beef into the seams of the ship to support its buoyancy after a large leak in the hull. Admiral Somers decided that the best course of action was to steer the ship towards the coral reefs of Bermuda by navigating the ship in the direction of Discovery Bay, where it crashed on impact.

Miraculously all 153 passengers of The Sea Venture and the ship’s dog survived the ordeal despite sea water levels rising to 9ft in the ship’s hold. Upon his arrival on the shores of Eastern Bermuda, Strachey referred to the hurricane as that ‘most dreadful tempest’, and viewed his adoptive homeland as ‘devil’s island, which was to be feared and avoided at all costs’. After hearing stories from local sailors about primitive conditions in Jamestown, the settlers believed that the shipwreck had freed them from their contractual obligations and they fought for a new government. Accustomed to the tropical climate, the settlers built huts from palmetto leaves and cedar wood, and feasted on local delicacies including rockfish, sea turtles, wild hogs and mangoes. The crew split up into two camps, but any attempt to mutiny was quashed by Governor Gates, who built a prison camp to prevent settlers from staging a coup. Within a year, there would be several notable fatalities, including Edward Samuell, who was murdered by two sailors, and Namontack, who mysteriously vanished after a hunting expedition in Bermuda.

The New World
After ten months as a castaway on the island of Bermuda, Strachey helped to build two small vessels, Patience and Deliverance, from Bermudan cedar wood, the ship’s wreckage on Gate’s Bay and Juniper berries, which protected the boats against the threat of rot and wormwood. The castaways finally arrived at their destination in Jamestown on 24 May 1610, but they were horrified to discover that only 60 of the original 500 settlers who had preceded them had survived after the colony was devastated by famine, disease and warfare between the white settlers and the Native Americans led by the Powhatan leader Wahunsonacock. Strachey quickly realised the severity of the situation, lamenting that ‘all things are contrary to our expectations, so full of misery and misgovernment’. Settlers in Virginia experienced ‘starving time’, with Jamestown experiencing a 70% per cent mortality rate with survivors resorting to cannibalism and grave robbing. After the mysterious drowning of Matthew Scrivener in 1609, Strachey was appointed the secretary and recorder of Jamestown under its governor, Lord Thomas De La Warr, in 1610. Within a year, Strachey became only one of two historians to record the indigenous language of the Powhatan people (the second being Captain John Smith). Strachey cultivated a relationship with the Algonquin-speaking Indians of Tseriacomoco as they fought against the English in the first Anglo-Powhatan war (1609–14). He visited Quiyoughcohannock and the Kecoughtan Indians and also journalled the exploits of the cartwheeling Pochantas, who would eventually become the merchant John Rolfe’s second wife.

It was in September 1610 that Shakespeare read Strachey’s first-hand eyewitness account of The Sea Venture’s shipwreck in Bermuda to an anonymous ‘excellent lady’, believed to be the Countess of Bedford. Shakespeare incorporated elements of Strachey’s experiences as a castaway into his last major play, The Tempest. The wild, uninhibited Caliban, described as ‘a savage and deformed slave’ perhaps represented the Powhatan leader Namontack, the descendants of murderous sailors and the bloody mutineers in Bermuda. Arial can be seen as the ethereal sprite who symbolised St Elmo’s fire and the shimmering light of the Sea Venture’s masts and ropes, complimenting Strachey’s description of ‘an apparition of a little round light like a faint star’. Prospero, as the exiled governor and magician, is perhaps a reincarnation of Governor Gates, who threatened trial and retribution towards rebels on the marooned island of Bermuda.

Making its theatrical debut at The Masquing House in Whitehall Palace in the presence of King James I on All Saints Day, 1 November 1611, The Tempest was staged to a packed auditorium at Blackfriars Theatre. The king ordered The Tempest to be performed at the wedding festivities of his daughter Elizabeth on Valentine’s Day in 1613. The first edition of The Tempest was published in 1624.

An epic fall from grace
Upon his return to the UK on The Prosperous in November 1611, Strachey completed The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia in 1612, but The Virginia Company rejected the manuscript after Strachey complemented the professionalism of Gates and Somers and criticised the ‘idleness’ of Jamestown colonists.

Strachey wrote numerous book dedications to wealthy aristocrats including Henry Percy, the 9th Duke of Northumberland, Sir Allen Apsley and Sir Francis Bacon, but it came to no avail. Thanks to the diligence and commitment of the Reverend Samuel Purchas, Strachey’s posthumous 24,000-word account A true wracke of the redemption and recovery of Thomas Gates Knight was published in 1625 through the travelogue Purchas His Pilgrimes. Strachey’s downfall was ultimately down to his steadfast refusal to conceal the ineptitude of the British government’s woeful ‘mismanagement’ of Jamestown. He wrote candidly about the ‘bloudy issues and mischiefes’ of life as a castaway, which included a murder, a state execution and several attempts at mutiny. In stark contrast, Silvester Jourdain’s The Discovery of the Barmudas and Richard Rich’s Newes From Virginia served as promotional pamphlets for the British establishment ignoring the bloody battles between the white settlers and the Native Americans. Blacklisted and destitute, Strachey was forced to live out his remaining days as an exile in the slums of Southwark with his second wife, Dorothy after the death of his first wife Frances. He witnessed the marriage of his son William but grieved the loss of his four-month-old granddaughter, Helen, in April 1620. In February 1613, a London court ruled against Strachey for a debt he was unable to pay, and Strachey was forced to write a begging letter to an anonymous ‘Sir’ for 20 shillings to pay for his dinner. It was the beginning of the end, for, as Strachey conceded, ‘This last dismal arrest hath taken from all my friends something and from me all I had.’ Yet even in his darkest hours, Strachey maintained his consummate skill as a wordsmith as he chillingly predicted his impending demise through a self-penned eulogy:

“ Hark! Twas the trump of death that blew
My hour has come. False world adieu
That I to death untimely go.”

William Strachey died of unknown causes at the age of 42 and was buried in a pauper’s grave in the grounds of St Giles Parish Church in Camberwell on 21 June 1621. The Virginia Company collapsed three years later in 1624. On 18 October 1958, some 350 years after the shipwreck, artifacts were discovered by amateur divers Edmund Downing (the descendant of Sea Venture passenger George Yardley) and Floyd Heird. On the Atlantic seabed, a hidden cache of priceless objects including a gun and cannonball, Spanish jars and an assortment of German stoneware were found embedded in coral. Twenty years later, the Bermuda Maritime Museum continued its excavations, retrieving valuable items including a dagger, Chinese porcelain and Bartmann bottles which were put on display in the museum’s treasure house alongside a scale model of the Sea Venture. In 1996, Strachey’s brass signet ring, emblazoned with the family crest of an eagle, was found lying in the dusty ruins of Jamestown, near the Southwestern Bulwark of James Fort. Symbolising Strachey’s legacy, his story continues to resonate through the lines of Shakespeare, as the world recognises one man’s endurance and fortitude against insurmountable odds in the eye of the storm. {