Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram: An Elizabethan Sailor in Native North America

"David Ingram was an ordinary seaman of the Elizabethan age. He served on a slave ship captained by John Hawkins, the Queen's slaver. After sailing first to Africa and then taking enslaved people to sell in the Caribbean, the little fleet was nearly destroyed in a furious battle with the Spanish. Ingram and two other marooned men then walked over 3600 miles from Mexico to New Brunswick in eleven months before being rescued. A dozen years later Ingram was brought in for interrogation by the Queen's spymaster, Francis Walsingham, as investors tried to learn more about America in anticipation of colonization. The contemporary historian Richard Hakluyt soon used the records of the interrogation to publish his version of Ingram's testimony. However, when editing it Hakluyt mistakenly assumed that everything Ingram described about Africa, the Caribbean, and North America applied only to Ingram's long walk through America. For over four centuries, Hakluyt's scrambled publication of 1589 has been ridiculed as the fantastic ramblings of a liar. Examination of the original documents surviving from the interrogation has revealed that Hakluyt was a poor editor, and that Ingram had told the truth about his extraordinary journey. Ingram's story can now be told as he related it, revealing things about Africa and the Americas in the age of European discovery that would otherwise be unknown to history"--
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.