John Pory (1572–1636) was an English government administrator, traveller, and author of the Jacobean and Caroline eras; he is widely considered to have been the first news correspondent in English-language journalism.
Pory was educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge; he earned his Bachelors degree in 1592 and his Masters in 1595. He was elected a member of Parliament from the borough of Bridgewater in 1605, and served until 1610. In 1607 Pory travelled through France and the Low Countries, and was involved in a plan to introduce silkworm breeding to England. He spent the years 1611–1616 travelling through Europe, to Italy and as far as Constantinople, where he was the secretary of English ambassador Sir Paul Pindar; for a portion of 1617 he served as the secretary to the English ambassador to Savoy, Sir Isaac Wake. Late in 1619, Pory travelled to the new English colony in Virginia as secretary to the governor, Sir George Yeardley. Pory spent the years 1619–1621 and 1623–1624 in Virginia; he served as the first Speaker of the Virginia Assembly, and explored Chesapeake Bay by boat in 1620. He returned to England and settled in London in 1624. Pory had accumulated a widespread acquaintance with influential people in a range of positions and locations, and maintained a vigorous letter-writing correspondence with them over the later years of his life.. Contemporaries described him as being addicted to both gossip and alcohol.
Early in his career, around 1597, Pory became an associate and protégé of the geographer and author Richard Hakluyt; Hakluyt later termed Pory his "very honest, industrious, and learned friend." Pory was also a friend of Sir Robert Cotton, William Camden, Sir Dudley Carleton, and other members their circles. It was at Hakluyt's urging that Pory engaged in his first literary effort, a translation of a geographic work by Leo Africanus that was published as A Geographical Historie of Africa (1600). Pory also produced significant documents about the Jamestown colony in Virginia and the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts.
In London from the early 1620s on, Pory was associated with Nathaniel Butter in his efforts to create news periodicals for the English public.. Headquartered at Butter's shop at the sign of the Pied Bull, Pory was a "correspondent" in the literal sense, who maintained exchanges of letters with the wide variety of prominent people he had met and cultivated in his earlier public career. Other similarly-situated men of his generation, like John Chamberlain, played comparable roles in such correspondences and exchanges of news; Pory was atypical and perhaps unique in that he channelled his knowledge and contacts into commercial news ventures, Butter's early newspapers. Pory also ran his own manuscript news service, charging patrons for regular news reports; Viscount Scudamore paid Pory £20 for an annual subscription of weekly bulletins for the year 1632.
In some respects, Pory was the first to do what many modern public figures do, moving among official posts, journalism, and positions in the private sector.
Modern scholars who have studied Pory's published works and his correspondence have unearthed a range of linkages with important figures of his era, like John Donne and John Milton. Shakespeare may have borrowed from Pory's book on Africa for his Othello;. For the text apparently relied on by Shakespeare from Pory's book, see Ben Jonson used it for The Masque of Blackness. Pory's extant correspondence provides researchers with a wealth of detail about London and Court society in the period. He describes, among other things, the last hours of Sir Walter Raleigh, and brawls between nobles at the Blackfriars Theatre.
