''True Reportory'' is the short-title of a 24,000 word early American colonial narrative, ''A true reportory of the wracke, and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates Knight; vpon, and from the Ilands of the Bermudas: his comming to Virginia, and the estate of that Colonie then, and after, vnder the gouernment of the Lord La Warre, Iuly 15. 1610''. The author

William Strachey 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. He is best remembered today as the eye-witness reporter of ...

was a passenger on the ''

Sea Venture ''Sea Venture'' was a seventeenth-century English sailing ship, part of the Third Supply mission to the Jamestown Colony, that was wrecked in Bermuda in 1609. She was the 300 ton purpose-built flagship of the London Company and a highly unusual ...

'', the

flagship A flagship is a vessel used by the commanding officer of a group of naval ships, characteristically a flag officer entitled by custom to fly a distinguishing flag. Used more loosely, it is the lead ship in a fleet of vessels, typically the fi ...

of the supply fleet that sailed to the English

colony of Virginia The Colony of Virginia, chartered in 1606 and settled in 1607, was the first enduring English colonial empire, English colony in North America, following failed attempts at settlement on Newfoundland (island), Newfoundland by Sir Humphrey GilbertG ...

from Plymouth in June 1609. During a hurricane it wrecked off the coast of Bermuda, where the survivors built two

pinnace Pinnace may refer to: * Pinnace (ship's boat), a small vessel used as a tender to larger vessels among other things * Full-rigged pinnace The full-rigged pinnace was the larger of two types of vessel called a pinnace in use from the sixteenth c ...

s, ''Patience'' and ''Deliverance,'' to continue the journey. They arrived in Jamestown in May 1610 and found the colony suffering from

famine A famine is a widespread scarcity of food, caused by several factors including war, natural disasters, crop failure, Demographic trap, population imbalance, widespread poverty, an Financial crisis, economic catastrophe or government policies. Th ...

and Indian attacks that had reduced the 600 colonists to fewer than 70. ''True Reportory'' is Strachey's account of these incidents, first published in 1625 in an anthology of new world colonial literature assembled by

Samuel Purchas Samuel Purchas ( – 1626) was an England, English Anglican cleric who published several volumes of reports by travellers to foreign countries. Career Purchas was born at Thaxted, Essex, England, Essex son of an English yeoman. He graduated fr ...

. In 2001,

Ivor Noël Hume Ivor Noël Hume, OBE (30 September 1927 – 4 February 2017) was a British-born archaeologist who did research in the United States. A former director of Colonial Williamsburg’s archaeological research program and the author of more than 20 bo ...

published a much shorter and less literary version of the text transcribed from a manuscript discovered in Bermuda in 1983, which he suggests is a copy of a rough draft that was later revised by Strachey. Aside from its historical and literary importance, Strachey's narrative has become a subject of scholarly debate because of its alleged influence on Shakespeare's '' The Tempest''. Since the 19th century it has been generally accepted that one or more of the 1609 Bermuda shipwreck documents must have been a source for

Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...

's play, and thus was used to establish a

terminus a quo ''Terminus post quem'' ("limit after which", sometimes abbreviated to TPQ) and ''terminus ante quem'' ("limit before which", abbreviated to TAQ) specify the known limits of dating for events or items.. A ''terminus post quem'' is the earliest da ...

for its date of composition. In the 19th century Sylvester Jourdain's pamphlet, ''A Discovery of The Barmudas'' (1609), was proposed as that source, but this was superseded in the early 20th century by the proposal that "True Reportory" was Shakespeare's source because of perceived parallels in language, incident, theme, and imagery. While this theory reflects the current scholarly consensus, it is not universally accepted; some scholars think it a probable but not proven source and some flatly oppose the claim.Gabriel Egan,'Editions and Textual Matters,' in ''The Year's Work in English Studies,'' V1, Volume 90 Issue 1 2011 pp.297-471.

References

Bibliography

*Cawley, RobertR. "Shakespeare's Use of the Voyagers in The Tempest," ''PMLA'' 41 (1926), 688-726. *Gayley, Charles Mills, ''Shakespeare and the Founders of Liberty in America,'' (1917). *Hunter, Rev. Joseph. ''A Disquisition on the Scene, Origin, Date, etc. etc. of Shakespeare's Tempest'' (1839). *Jourdan, Sylvester. ''A Discovery of the Barmudas, otherwise called the Ile of Divels.'' (1610). STC #14816. Reprinted ''A Voyage to Virginia in 1609'', Louis B. Wright, ed. (1965), 105-116. *Strachey, William. "The True Reportory of the Wracke and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates" (f.p. 1625) in ''A Voyage to Virginia in 1609'', Louis B. Wright, ed. (1965), 1-101. *Vaughan, Alden. "William Strachey's 'True Reportory' and Shakespeare: a Closer Look at the Evidence" in ''Shakespeare Quarterly'' 59 (2008), 245-73. *Woodward, Hobson. ''Brave Vessel: The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare's The Tempest.'' New York: Viking, 2009. *Wright, Louis B. ''The Elizabethan's America: A Collection of Early Reports by Englishmen in the New World.'' Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA. 1965.

External links

Virtual Jamestown

True Declaration
{{Authority control 1610 books Colony of Virginia The Tempest