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The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram: An Elizabethan Sailor in Native North America
In
The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram
, author Dean Snow rights the record on a shipwrecked sailor who traversed the length of the North American continent only to be maligned as deceitful storyteller.
In the autumn of 1569, a French ship rescued David Ingram and two other English sailors from the shore of the Gulf of Maine. The men had walked over 3000 miles in less than a year after being marooned near Tampico, Mexico. They were the only three men to escape alive and uncaptured, out of a hundred put ashore at the close of John Hawkins's disastrous third slaving expedition. A dozen years later, Ingram was called in for questioning by Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth's spymaster. In 1589, the historian Richard Hakluyt published his version of Ingram's story based on the records of that interrogation. For four centuries historians have used that publication as evidence that Ingram was an egregious travel liar, an unreliable early source for information about the people of interior eastern North America before severe historic epidemics devastated them.
In The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram, author and recognized archaeologist Dean Snow shows that Ingram was not a fraud, contradicting the longstanding narrative of his life. Snow's careful examination of three long-neglected surviving records of Ingram's interrogation reveals that the confusion in the 1589 publication was the result of disorganization by court recorders and poor editing by Richard Hakluyt. Restoration of Ingram's testimony has reinstated him as a trustworthy source on the peoples of West Africa, the Caribbean, and eastern North America in the middle sixteenth century. Ingram's life story, with his long traverse through North America at its core, can now finally be understood and appreciated for what it was: the tale of a unique, bold adventurer.
In the autumn of 1569, a French ship rescued David Ingram and two other English sailors from the shore of the Gulf of Maine. The men had walked over 3000 miles in less than a year after being marooned near Tampico, Mexico. They were the only three men to escape alive and uncaptured, out of a hundred put ashore at the close of John Hawkins's disastrous third slaving expedition. A dozen years later, Ingram was called in for questioning by Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth's spymaster. In 1589, the historian Richard Hakluyt published his version of Ingram's story based on the records of that interrogation. For four centuries historians have used that publication as evidence that Ingram was an egregious travel liar, an unreliable early source for information about the people of interior eastern North America before severe historic epidemics devastated them.
In The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram, author and recognized archaeologist Dean Snow shows that Ingram was not a fraud, contradicting the longstanding narrative of his life. Snow's careful examination of three long-neglected surviving records of Ingram's interrogation reveals that the confusion in the 1589 publication was the result of disorganization by court recorders and poor editing by Richard Hakluyt. Restoration of Ingram's testimony has reinstated him as a trustworthy source on the peoples of West Africa, the Caribbean, and eastern North America in the middle sixteenth century. Ingram's life story, with his long traverse through North America at its core, can now finally be understood and appreciated for what it was: the tale of a unique, bold adventurer.
336 pages, Hardcover
Published February 21, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 12, 2023
You couldn’t make this story up. It’s stunning. While Snow has made a historiographical intervention and rehabilitated Graham’s story, most of us never had heard it in the first place. Learning about a European in the Americas before the great demographic devastation when Europeans were the ones in danger and living in dependence on Native nations. This would be first rate as a book only there is heavy handed going back and forth inserting in other stories and providing context but in a way that seeks really added on and sometimes unnecessarily so. It feels like the author is using the story as an excuse to also educate the reader about Sir Walter Raleigh or other people/ explorers. Still, the world ther is revealed is so much more exciting than most folks think of the 16th century.
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August 14, 2023In August 1582 an English sailor, David Ingram, sat before a panel of gentlemen who were very interested in what he had to say. The men included Queen Elizabeth I’s principal secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the wealthy Catholic investor Sir George Peckham. Both were gathering information on whether colonisation of the ‘New World’ could be successful; Ingram, unlike the rest of the room, had actually been to North America.
He also had an incredible story to tell, retold in Dean Snow’s new book. Ingram had joined Sir John Hawkins’ third slaving expedition, which left Plymouth on 2 October 1567. They spent two months on the Guinean coast and departed from what is now Freetown in Sierra Leone on 3 February 1568. After a few months in the Caribbean Sea, stopping at various islands and coastal towns in what is now Venezuela and Colombia, they made their way between the Yucatán Peninsula and Cuba in order to pass out of the Gulf of Mexico and through the Strait of Florida back into the Atlantic.
They did not make it. In September, a fierce hurricane forced the fleet to take harbour at the hostile Spanish port of San Juan de Ulua at Veracruz on the Mexican coast. A deadly battle ensued, and half of Hawkins’ fleet were killed or captured. Once they were out of immediate danger, Hawkins told the remaining men that they had a difficult choice to make: they only had the provisions to keep half the crew alive for their journey across the Atlantic.
In October 1568, David Ingram was one of 112 men left on the shore of Tampico, Mexico, then the coastal territory of the Huastecs. Eleven months later, Ingram and two other survivors, Richard Browne and Richard Twide, were rescued, thousands of miles away, at the mouth of the Saint John River on the Bay of Fundy in Canada. The only record of their experiences are Ingram’s responses to the questions from his 1582 interrogation.
Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.
Emilie Murphy is Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of York.
He also had an incredible story to tell, retold in Dean Snow’s new book. Ingram had joined Sir John Hawkins’ third slaving expedition, which left Plymouth on 2 October 1567. They spent two months on the Guinean coast and departed from what is now Freetown in Sierra Leone on 3 February 1568. After a few months in the Caribbean Sea, stopping at various islands and coastal towns in what is now Venezuela and Colombia, they made their way between the Yucatán Peninsula and Cuba in order to pass out of the Gulf of Mexico and through the Strait of Florida back into the Atlantic.
They did not make it. In September, a fierce hurricane forced the fleet to take harbour at the hostile Spanish port of San Juan de Ulua at Veracruz on the Mexican coast. A deadly battle ensued, and half of Hawkins’ fleet were killed or captured. Once they were out of immediate danger, Hawkins told the remaining men that they had a difficult choice to make: they only had the provisions to keep half the crew alive for their journey across the Atlantic.
In October 1568, David Ingram was one of 112 men left on the shore of Tampico, Mexico, then the coastal territory of the Huastecs. Eleven months later, Ingram and two other survivors, Richard Browne and Richard Twide, were rescued, thousands of miles away, at the mouth of the Saint John River on the Bay of Fundy in Canada. The only record of their experiences are Ingram’s responses to the questions from his 1582 interrogation.
Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.
Emilie Murphy is Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of York.
May 3, 2023
What was North America like before European colonization in the 1600s? This is a common question with unfortunately few reliable answers for non-experts. Professor Dean Snow's archeological work has been long admired by scholars of the Northeast and in this book he provides an accessible tour of North America just before European settlement.
The book revolves around David Ingram's account of walking from Mexico to Nova Scotia in 1568-69. Ingram was long dismissed as a liar primarily because the people who recorded and published their interview with him mixed up his accounts of Africa with those in America. Snow does a convincing job correcting the record and establishing the validity of the Ingram account, which is an exciting new find that provides a rare glimpse of a Native American world that would be rendered unrecognizable by disease and colonization.
This book is ideal for people with little background on 16th-century America because much the narrative at the beginning and end covers standard Elizabethan politics and basic biographical information of famous explorers like Sir Francis Drake. The best part of "The Extraordinary Journey" is when we follow Ingram's northward route. Snow is an expert on this topic and corroborates Ingram's narrative with the archeological and anthropological findings scholars have made over the last 60 years. What you get is a picture of a thriving Native American world replete with cities, highways, and complex social structures. American history often begins with 1607 in Jamestown or 1620 in Plymouth. This book has a lot of great stories and gives you an accessible crash course on North American history in the 1500s...a history too few people know about.
The book revolves around David Ingram's account of walking from Mexico to Nova Scotia in 1568-69. Ingram was long dismissed as a liar primarily because the people who recorded and published their interview with him mixed up his accounts of Africa with those in America. Snow does a convincing job correcting the record and establishing the validity of the Ingram account, which is an exciting new find that provides a rare glimpse of a Native American world that would be rendered unrecognizable by disease and colonization.
This book is ideal for people with little background on 16th-century America because much the narrative at the beginning and end covers standard Elizabethan politics and basic biographical information of famous explorers like Sir Francis Drake. The best part of "The Extraordinary Journey" is when we follow Ingram's northward route. Snow is an expert on this topic and corroborates Ingram's narrative with the archeological and anthropological findings scholars have made over the last 60 years. What you get is a picture of a thriving Native American world replete with cities, highways, and complex social structures. American history often begins with 1607 in Jamestown or 1620 in Plymouth. This book has a lot of great stories and gives you an accessible crash course on North American history in the 1500s...a history too few people know about.
March 30, 2023
I really enjoyed envisioning pre-Colonial America as David Ingram’s adventure is presented. His experience is captivating and deserves to become better known.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews