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.

The survivors eventually reached Virginia after building two small ships during the ten months they spent on the island.

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',[8] as evidenced by his deposition in a lawsuit in 1606.

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.

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.

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.

[16] 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.

After the dissolution of the company it was published in 1625 by Samuel Purchas as "A true reportory of the wracke, and redemption of Sir THOMAS GATES Knight".

The manuscript included his eyewitness account of life in early Virginia, but borrowed heavily from the earlier work of Richard Willes, James Rosier, John Smith, and others.

[10] Frances Forster was the daughter of William Forster and Elizabeth Draper (died 22 April 1605), widow of John Bowyer (died 10 October 1570) of Shepton Beauchamp, Somerset, and daughter of Robert Draper of Camberwell, Surrey, Page of the Jewels to King Henry VIII, by Elizabeth Fyfield.