True Reportory

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.

[1] The author William Strachey was a passenger on the Sea Venture, the flagship of the supply fleet that sailed to the English colony of Virginia from Plymouth in June 1609.

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.

In 2001, Ivor Noël Hume 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.

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's play, and thus was used to establish a terminus a quo for its date of composition.