author
John Pory
1572–1636
A globe-trotting writer and colonial official, he moved between London politics, early journalism, and the first years of English Virginia. His letters and reports offer a vivid window into the ambitions and anxieties of the early seventeenth century.
1 Audiobook
Three Visitors to Early Plymouth Letters about the Pilgrim settlement in New England during its first seven years
by Emmanuel Altham, John Pory, Isaack de Rasieres
About the author
Born in 1572 in Norfolk, John Pory studied at Cambridge and became associated with the geographer Richard Hakluyt. Early in his career he translated Leo Africanus's A Geographical Historie of Africa, a work that helped introduce English readers to a wider view of the world.
Pory was a traveler, administrator, Member of Parliament, and a writer of newsletters at a time when organized news writing was still taking shape. He has often been described as an early English news correspondent, and his career shows how closely politics, exploration, and information networks were tied together in Jacobean England.
He is especially remembered for his work in Virginia. As secretary of the colony and the first Speaker of the first General Assembly at Jamestown in 1619, he played an important part in shaping the colony's early political procedures. Sources differ on the exact year of his death, but records connected with Virginia's House of Delegates and other reference works place it in 1636.