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. 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.
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. 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. He then decided to mend his fortunes in the New World, and in 1609 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. He travelled to Constantinople, but quarrelled with the ambassador and was dismissed in March 1607 and returned to England in June 1608. In 1606 he used a family connection to obtain the position of secretary to Thomas Glover, the English ambassador to Turkey. īy 1605 Strachey was in precarious financial circumstances from which he spent the rest of his life trying to recover. Strachey 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. He gave evidence in the suit as ‘William Strachey, of Crowhurst, Surrey, gentleman, aged 34’ on 4 July 1606. Strachey, there is no manner of doubt on the evidence and from the signature of his deposition, was the well-known voyager and writer whose account of the Bermuda voyage left its marks on Shakespeare’s Tempest. But in 1606 William Strachey had a one-sixth share in the Blackfriars Theatre. Evans assigned his rights in the property and the company in two stages, first one-half in sixths to Kirkham, Kendall and Rastell, and subsequently the second half in sixths to John Marston, William Strachey, and his own wife. In 1600 Richard Burbage leased to Evans his Blackfriars property, and the Children of the Revels under Nathaniel Giles, with Evans as landlord and partner, occupied the theatre for some years. He was a shareholder in the Children of the Revels, a troupe of boy actors who performed 'in a converted room in the former Blackfriars monastery', as evidenced by his deposition in a lawsuit in 1606. Strachey also kept a residence in London, where he regularly attended plays. Strachey wrote a sonnet, Upon Sejanus, which was published in the 1605 edition of the 1603 play Sejanus His Fall by Ben Jonson. Strachey's sonnet, Upon Sejanus, published in Ben Jonson's Sejanus His Fall (1605) In 1602 he inherited his father's estate following a legal dispute with Elizabeth Brocket, his stepmother. In 1605 he was at Gray's Inn, but there is no evidence that he made the law his profession. In 1588, at the age of sixteen, he entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, but did not take a degree. Strachey was brought up on an estate purchased by his grandfather in the 1560s.
Strachey's mother died in 1587, and in August of that year Strachey's father married Elizabeth Brocket of Hertfordshire, by whom he had five daughters. īy his father's first marriage Strachey had three brothers and three sisters. Strachey's maternal grandfather, Henry Cooke (died 1551), held Lesnes Abbey in Kent he was succeeded by his son, Edmund Cooke (died 1619), while his younger son, Richard Cooke, has been identified as the author of Description de Tous les Provinces de France. William Strachey, born 4 April 1572 in Saffron Walden, Essex, was the grandson of William Strachey (died 1587), and the eldest son of William Strachey (died 1598) and Mary Cooke (died 1587), the daughter of Henry Cooke, Merchant Taylor of London, by Anne Goodere, the daughter of Henry Goodere and Jane Greene. 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. The survivors eventually reached Virginia after building two small ships during the ten months they spent on the island.
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. William Strachey (4 April 1572 – buried 21 June 1621) was an English writer whose works are among the primary sources for the early history of the English colonisation of North America.
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