A Brave Vessel: The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare'sThe Tempest (2 page)

CHAPTER ONE

Thou hast howled away twelve winters.

—Prospero,
The Tempest

 

 

 

F
ew read the markings of William Strachey’s quill. The thirty-two-year-old from the English countryside had spent more than a decade in London trying to become a writer, but few beyond his immediate circle knew his name. That his initials were the same as the most successful literary man of his time, William Shakespeare, was an ironic coincidence. In many ways the two were similar—both came from modest stock, both were educated in classical literature, and both of them had wives and children living in distant villages—but in the most important respect they could not be more different. Few had ever heard of William Strachey, whereas William Shakespeare was renowned throughout the kingdom.

Now in 1604 the unknown William S. had an opportunity to be noticed. The playwright Ben Jonson had invited Strachey to contribute one of eight introductory sonnets to a new publication of his drama
Sejanus: His Fall
. The plays of Jonson were second in popularity only to those of Shakespeare, so the invitation was a true opportunity. Strachey’s sonnet would circulate among the literary elite of the city. This was a major advance in his quest to become a writer, and he worked hard to make the verse his best work.

The family of William Strachey had not always been wealthy enough for the eldest son to lead a literary life in London. That only became possible when William’s grandfather raised enough sheep and finished enough wool to become the richest man in his ancestral town of Saffron Walden. The new affluence had allowed William’s father to go to school fifty miles away in London and to meet and marry the daughter of a city merchant. William the sonnet writer had spent a childhood divided between country and city, growing up in the household of a father whose goal was to attain a higher place in life. A month after grandfather William had died in 1587, father William had been granted a coat of arms by the College of Heralds, the first act of a newly liberated yeoman who longed to live the life of a gentleman. William the writer would emulate his father rather than his grandfather, maintaining minimal ties to the countryseat and pursuing a life in the city that his ancestors would have considered irresponsible.

Strachey the aspiring writer had attended Emmanuel College in Cambridge and Gray’s Inn in London without earning a degree from either institution. At twenty-three he had married Frances Forster, the daughter of a prosperous Surrey family with political connections. Frances resided at her father’s estate at Crowhurst while Strachey lived in London. Two children had been born over the previous decade—William Jr., delivered nine months after the marriage, and Edmund, still an infant. Strachey’s wife and children were all in Crowhurst while he labored in London to produce the sonnet for Jonson’s book, the work he was sure would be the first of many publications in his name.

The sonnet Strachey produced was a meditation on the life of the Roman soldier protagonist of Jonson’s play. The metaphor he chose to illuminate Sejanus’s rise and fall was a storm of thunder and lightning that produces fury but passes with little effect. The theme of “On Sejanus” was laid out in the final line—“nothing violent lasts.” Strachey wrote of “swift lightning” and “ruinous blasts” of thunder. He then added a second metaphor, comparing both the lightning and Sejanus to a
vaunt-courier,
or a soldier in an advance guard who delivers an impressive first strike but ultimately falls to the enemy.

Upon publication of the book Strachey’s theme proved disappointingly prophetic, as the work itself produced a momentary flash that soon faded. Friends complimented him, but the notice did little to change his prospects. As usual the only thing that seemed to advance his goal of gaining literary friends was spending money, and the money he spent was generally on the theater. While Strachey hoped to publish sonnets and travel narratives rather than plays, he loved the work of playwrights and the culture of London theaters. One of his strategic purchases was a share in the Children of the Revels, a troupe of children that performed in a converted room in the former Blackfriars monastery. Owning an interest in a theater company gave him credibility, but it also proved to be an expensive proposition. While he was entitled to a share of the profits, the investment ended up costing him money because he had to pay for food for the boy actors and theater repairs. Strachey had money, but it was growing short. As the eldest son among seven full siblings and five half-sisters, he had assumed control of the family holdings when his father died in 1598, selling much of the property immediately to distribute legacies to his brothers and sisters. Now six years later the inheritance was running thin.

Strachey had made many friends during his time in London, though he always wondered whether it was due to his generous spending habits. Poet John Donne was his closest companion. They were the same age and shared a love of verse and a thinly veiled anxiety about money, though Donne was more adept at both writing and cultivating patrons. There were others, too. At Gray’s Inn, Strachey had associated with writer Thomas Campion, who would later call him “my old companion Strachey.” Ben Jonson also professed himself a loyal friend. Strachey was also acquainted with Shakespeare, but the two were hardly close. Frankly it was not a very ample return on a dozen years and an inheritance spent in pursuit of literary success. Strachey was almost out of money, so something would have to change soon.

A break came two years after the publication of
Sejanus
, in 1606, when a cousin recommended Strachey for the position of secretary to the new ambassador to Turkey. Thomas Glover would soon depart for Constantinople and needed a reliable scribe. In August, Strachey departed with Glover’s party aboard the
Royal Exchange
. After a stop in Algiers, the ship reached Constantinople in December. The Turkey assignment started well but would ultimately end badly. Glover was the former secretary of outgoing ambassador Henry Lello and had acquired the job by convincing officials to assign him the post even while Lello labored in Turkey. The two would-be ambassadors met in Constantinople, and during an ensuing power struggle Strachey sided with Lello and was abruptly fired. Cast in the streets of a foreign land without an income, the former secretary eventually returned to England with the deposed ambassador. When Strachey arrived back in London in June 1608, his first act was to borrow thirty pounds from Dutch moneylender Jasper Tien. He was home again, but poorer than ever and embittered by his overseas adventure. A friend told Glover in December that “one Strachey is making a book against you, which if it should be so, it peradventure may cost him both ears.” Strachey never published his diatribe or suffered the punishment for libel, but he told everyone he knew that Glover was a scoundrel.

Upon his return from Turkey, Strachey was surprised by one development in literary London. He was amused to find that William Shakespeare had been impressed enough with his sonnet “On Sejanus” to use a version of one of its lines in his new play
King Lear
. Strachey discovered Lear himself comparing lightning to a
vaunt-courier
—the very term he had used in his sonnet. Strachey may have noticed, too, that three lines earlier Lear used a new word that voyagers had brought back from the West Indies. The word was
“ hurricano,”
a term derived from the name of a Caribbean deity with a stormy disposition. Shakespeare, it seems, was as partial to storm imagery as the man from whom he borrowed the lightning line. Strachey was flattered to have even an uncredited line in a play by London’s leading dramatist, but he realized that few in the audience would ever be aware of the debt. Strachey’s unheralded debut on the London stage only made him long more keenly to write something in his own name that all England would want to read.

 

The Turkey debacle had not reduced Strachey’s taste for adventure. For a while, though, he would content himself with reading travel narratives. He loved the chronicles of New World explorers that appeared regularly in London bookshops. Richard Willes’s classic
History of Travayle in the West and East Indies
was a favorite. One narrative Strachey may have read was an account by Antonio Pigafetta, a member of Ferdinand Magellan’s crew and one of the few who survived the famous circumnavigation of the globe a century earlier. At the southern tip of Patagonia some people were lured aboard ship and captured, Pigafetta said, and “in time when they saw how they were deceived, they roared like bulls and cried upon their great devil Setebos to help them.” The story was exotic and poignant at the same time.

Another popular travel book was Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation
. Among the stories in its pages was an incredible tale by an Englishman named Job Hartop, who had crossed the Atlantic on a Spanish ship. “When we came in the height of Bermuda,” Hartop wrote, “we discovered a monster in the sea, who showed himself three times unto us from the middle upwards, in which parts he was proportioned like a man of the complexion of a mulatto or tawny Indian.” What a peculiar story indeed—a monster with attributes of a fish and a New World man seen about an island far at sea.

Despite remaining in London, Strachey had an opportunity to see living individuals from the New World. Several indigenous people had been captured by early explorers and forced to come to the Old World, but a man named Namontack of Tsenacomoco was the first to cross the ocean from Virginia to England as an emissary of a New World nation. He had come in 1608 as a representative of Wahunsenacawh, known as “Powhatan” to the English, the leader of the people of Tsenacomoco who were collectively called Powhatans by the colonists. Wahunsenacawh ruled a confederation of thirty villages with a population of fifteen thousand to twenty thousand people that surrounded the place the English had occupied in 1607 and renamed Jamestown. John Smith, the most famous colonist of all, who at the time was already in Virginia, described Namontack as Wahunsenacawh’s “trusty servant and one of a shrewd, subtle capacity.” The Powhatan envoy had come into the English colony a few months earlier when colonial official Christopher Newport and Wahunsenacawh exchanged a pair of young men for the purpose of developing language interpreters. Thirteen-year-old Thomas Savage had been sent to live with the Powhatans, while Namontack had come to live with the English. Wahunsenacawh then agreed to allow his representative to travel to England with Newport, a visit the colonists hoped would generate interest and investment in the Jamestown enterprise.

Namontack became a celebrity during his time in London, in part because his English chaperones declared him to be Wahunsenacawh’s son. The people who encountered the Powhatan envoy treated him as part diplomat and part sideshow marvel. Spanish ambassador Pedro de Zúñiga was perhaps unhappy that the man from Tsenacomoco was given diplomatic status. “This Newport brought a lad who they say is the son of an emperor of those lands,” Zúñiga wrote in a dispatch home, “and they have coached him that when he sees the king he is not to take off his hat, and other things of this sort, so that I have been amused by the way they honor him, for I hold it for surer that he must be a very ordinary person.”

When Strachey first saw Namontack, the physical appearance of the New World visitor was striking. Jamestown colonist Gabriel Archer noted that the traditional hairstyle of Powhatan men was a prominent feature. Hair was grown long on one side and knotted at the bottom. On the other side it was shaved close with sharpened shells to allow the unimpeded use of bowstrings. “Some have chains of long linked copper about their necks, and some chains of pearl,” Archer said. “I found not a gray eye among them all. Their skin is tawny, not so born but with dyeing and painting themselves, in which they delight greatly.” The Powhatan envoy may have worn a mix of English and Powhatan attire. Reverend William Crashaw was probably referring to Namontack when he spoke of a Virginian visitor who “had gone naked all his life till our men persuaded him to be clothed.” Even obscured by English garb, the Powhatan elements of grooming and dress would have been visible to William Strachey.

Soon after Newport left London in July 1608 to return with Namontack to Tsenacomoco, the black plague began a sustained assault on London. Strachey had been home from Turkey for a month and was looking forward to resuming his life in London, money permitting, but he soon left the city for the countryside. The bulbous swellings of the lymph glands, the feverish sweats, the sores, and the involuntary spasms known as the danse macabre were familiar to all Londoners. A sure sign of the onset of a new epidemic were the beaked masks of the plague doctors. Anyone with enough money to leave the city fled to escape the contagion. Among them was William Strachey, who joined his family in Crowhurst.