William Strachey - Böcker

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 colonisation, 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 tropic 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 travellers, 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 colonise America offers today’s reader the raw material that inspired Shakespeare’s masterpiece.

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 The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India.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.