John Pory

author

John Pory

1572–1636

A traveler, translator, and colonial official, he helped bring news of Africa and the early English Atlantic world to readers in the seventeenth century. He is also remembered for his years in Virginia, where his letters captured some of the colony’s most important early moments.

1 Audiobook

Three Visitors to Early Plymouth Letters about the Pilgrim settlement in New England during its first seven years

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

Baptized in 1572, John Pory was an English writer and geographer with a strong interest in the wider world. He worked with the great compiler Richard Hakluyt and is especially known for translating Leo Africanus’s A Geographical Historie of Africa into English in 1600, a book that introduced many English readers to detailed descriptions of Africa and its peoples.

Pory also moved in political circles. He served in Parliament and later crossed the Atlantic to Virginia, where he became secretary of the colony. In 1619 he was part of the new colonial government at Jamestown, and his surviving letters are important records of early Virginia because they describe everyday conditions, tobacco, government, and the arrival of the first Africans recorded in English Virginia.

He seems to have died in the 1630s, though some sources differ on the exact year. What makes him stand out today is the range of his life: he was at once a man of books, a political observer, and a witness to the first decades of England’s colonial world.