An incredibly gripping retelling of the wreck of the Sea Venture.

As the subtitle notes, the Sea Venture, part of a 1609 relief convoy for the Jamestown colony, was intentionally wrecked on Bermuda after barely surviving a hurricane.

Hobson Woodward devotes the first pages of his book to detailing the life circumstances of William Strachey, a formerly well-to-do aspiring writer who saw the Jamestown colony as a chance to become famous as a New World chronicler.

The majority of the book mostly rephrases Strachey's account of the storm, the time spent on Bermuda, and the year or so Strachey spent in Jamestown, following the self-redemption of the castaways.

Woodward's ability to paint a vivid picture of these events -- calling upon Strachey's words sparingly and appropriately, bringing in supporting facts and arguments ably and intelligently -- is truly impressive.

It's as much good journalism as good prose, and it makes it close to impossible to put down the roughly 200 pages of actual narrative.

The only disappointment I found in this work -- and the only reason I can't give it five stars -- is near the end of the book, when William Shakespeare's The Tempest is introduced to us.

Woodward chooses to take flights of fancy here, placing Strachey in the Blackfriars Theater of London, and narrating his possible thoughts as he watched the play unfold. That's a radical departure from the tone of the previous narrative, and the most charitable term I can find for some of the parallels Woodward draws between The Tempest and Strachey's diaries is "equivocal."

That aside, taken as a history, A Brave Vessel is an exceptional work, one that can easily be devoured in an afternoon; or, broken up into short chapters, consumed in a week's worth of bedtime reading.