We cannot doubt that reports about voyages to the New World in general, and about the colonization of Virginia in particular, contributed something to the production of The Tempest in 1611. In 1607, after the collapse of Ralegh's colonies in Virginia, a new settlement had been founded, precariously, at Jamestown. By 1609, while Spain's international power was temporarily checked, the Dutch and the French were sending expeditions to North America; and in the same year King James granted a new charter to the London Virginia Company, as a joint-stock enterprise – with several of whose leaders Shakespeare was almost certainly acquainted: the Earl of Southampton, Sir Edwin Sandys, Sir Dudley Digges and possibly the Company's Secretary, William Strachey. Through 1609 and the following years the Company poured out a stream of promotional sermons and pamphlets. In October 1609, however, the news reached London that the flagship of an expedition which had set out in June, headed by Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers, had apparently been overwhelmed, with the commanders on board, in a terrible storm; and this appeared to be confirmed – as a contemporary wrote, ‘we therefore yeelded [them] as lost for many moneths together’, – until September 1610, when the Company's Council received the letter, or True Reportory, from William Strachey, recounting the wreck of Gates and Somers and their companions on the fearsome Bermudas (‘the still-vex'd Bermoothes’), their amazing survival or ‘redemption’ there, and the sorry, though reformable, state of ‘misgovernment’ they found at Jamestown subsequently.