Buy the book by Dean Snow on Amazon now (note, this is an affiliate link, so you won’t pay more, but I’ll get a cut of the purchase)

Rough Transcript: David Ingram Takes a Long Walk

Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora Podcast Network. I’m your host, Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and being more deeply in touch with our own humanity. This episode is all about a new book by Dean Snow that just came out this week called The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram: An Elizabethan Sailor in Native North America – he was a sailor who traveled all over the world in the mid 16th century, and contributed to the growing knowledge of the New World in Elizabethan England. 

Before we get started, though, your reminder about Tudorcon! If you missed the live Tudorcon Q&A session on Friday the 24th, I put up a recording at englandcast.com/Tudorcon so you can check it out.  We talked about all kinds of things including including meals, and accessibility options. Tudorcon this year is September 8-10, in Lancaster County Pennsylvania, a wonderful three days with all your new Tudor loving best friends. 

So now, let’s talk about David Ingram. 

Back in the fall of 1569, a French trading ship called the Gargarine was hanging out off Cape Breton in what’s now Nova Scotia, when its captain, M. Champaign, heard a ruckus outside. Turns out, three English men in a native canoe were begging to come aboard. Their names were David Ingram, Richard Brown, and Richard Twyde, and they had a pretty wild story to tell. It all started the year before in Mexico, where they were caught up in a battle called the battle of San Juan de Ulúa. That battle was between a bunch of English privateers led by John Hawkins and Francis Drake, and Spanish forces under Francisco Luján. When Hawkins’ ship, the Minion, was damaged, he took the crew and put them on shore across the Gulf of Mexico. There weren’t many European settlements along the Atlantic coast at the time, so some of the guys decided to walk back to San Juan. Others, like Ingram, Brown, and Twyde, wanted to follow the coast north to find some English communities. After many of the men died or went back south, those three sailors kept wandering up the eastern coast of North America for over a year. Finally, they accidentally stumbled upon the fishing village at Cape Breton, Canada – which means, if their story is true, that they were the first Europeans to cross North America.

A decade later, in the 1580s, people in England were getting excited about the idea of setting up colonies in North America. Adventurers and merchants, like Walter Raleigh, tried to get Queen Elizabeth I on board with their plans. Then, in the summer of 1582, the queen ordered her main secretary and spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, to question the only English person who had actually explored parts of North America in person – David Ingram. Ingram was one of the sailors on the Gargarine, and he claimed he had made his way across the continent over a decade before Walsingham talked to him. 

There are two ways to look at Ingram and his crew’s journey. If you believe the story recorded by Sir George Peckham later on, then it marks the end of a strange and little-known chapter in North American history. But if you’re not so sure, it becomes the start of another story that’s even weirder because of how it taps into Elizabethan England’s visions of empire and how they played out in North America.

We do know for sure that Ingram was a real person – several people said they met him, and there’s no reason to think they were making that up. But beyond that, we don’t know much about him except that he was born in Barking, Essex. If he was like other sailors in Elizabethan times, then he probably couldn’t read or write. This means that when he later gave his story to Peckham, he didn’t write it down – he just answered Peckham’s questions, all of which had a specific purpose that Ingram might not have realized. He was religious, most likely Protestant, so his interactions with the indigenous people were probably influenced by his own belief system and he might not have been open to theirs.

Compared to the vast majority of Elizabethans, Ingram was well-traveled. He probably saw a lot of the Atlantic coasts of Europe and the Mediterranean, and the African and American coasts. But just because his ship stopped in a certain place, like Constantinople, that doesn’t mean he got off the ship and went into the city. Sometimes it was safer to stay on board because international negotiations were delicate. So, he only saw some places from a distance and he didn’t have much to compare what he saw in North America to what he’d seen elsewhere. That helps explain some of the wilder things he claimed.

Ingram’s tales included some wild creatures, like elephants, giant eagles, and a beast even bigger than an ox. Some illustrations based on his stories showed huge human figures with faces on their chests. But, it turns out, a lot of these descriptions were just misunderstandings of what Ingram said. Still, his journey was likely a true adventure, with lots of juicy details about the people, landscapes, and wildlife of North America before it was taken over by European colonizers. 

So let’s talk about his journey. In 1567, he joined up with John Hawkins’ third slaving expedition. They had around 400 sailors on six ships and headed to West Africa. The mission was pretty horrible – enslaving people and shipping them off to the Caribbean to be sold like they were cattle to Spanish colonists.

Things were going great for the expedition – it was a profitable trip until their luck ran out. A hurricane drove them into the Spanish harbor of San Juan de Ulúa, which was not a friendly place for them. Plus, they were pirates, so they couldn’t exactly complain about things not being fair. 

Fighting broke out on September 24, 1568, and Francis Drake (who was Hawkins’ cousin) took off with one of the smaller ships to make his escape. All but one of the remaining English ships sank, and half of the crew were either captured or killed. The rest, including Ingram, got away on the Minion with Hawkins. The problem was that the ship was very badly damaged and they had very little food, so Hawkins knew there was no way he could get all of the men back home. In early October, a lot of the men decided to take their chances on land, near modern-day Tampico – about 240 miles north of Veracruz. 

Hawkins said, “We quickly set these hundred men on land in this little place.” Most of them gave themselves up to the Spanish colonists, but Ingram and about two dozen others decided to make a run for it up north. Most of those guys never turned up again, but Ingram, Richard Browne, and Richard Twide survived.

When you read Ingram’s story, it often sounds like he’s just answering questions rather than telling his own tale. There’s no real timeline – he just jumps from describing the people and plants to the animals he saw, with no real order. In some parts, it’s hard to tell if he’s talking about the South or the North, and when he describes a “clowde” that turns into a tempest, he’s probably talking about a tornado – something more likely to be seen in Kentucky than Florida or Maine.

He talks about a beast twice the size of a horse with tusks that’s an “enimyes to the horse”. While that’s interesting, what’s more important is that he appears to have seen horses north of Florida. This could either support the idea that horses were domesticated by Indigenous peoples before Europeans arrived or it could just show how quickly the horse population spread once it became wild.

But one of his most outlandish claims is that he saw elephants in North America. Since Ingram probably had never seen an elephant before and only knew that they were big animals, he may have just assumed a bison in the distance was an elephant. Or maybe he made it up to please Sir George Peckham, who was really invested in the idea of England colonizing North America.

Ingram and his friends thought they would come across European settlements along the coast, but they didn’t. They were out of contact with other people for a year – much longer than they expected. It’s easy for us to forget that, even though England wouldn’t make any official attempts at colonization for another decade, its privateers were already visiting the area pretty regularly. The French and Spanish had been there for most of the century, and the coast had been on maps since the 1530s.

Peckham and Walsingham conducted their interview with Ingram in 1582, approximately 13 years after his journey took place. Their account was published in Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation in 1589. However, it was removed from the second edition published in 1598, as Hakluyt considered it to lack credibility. Although it is unclear whether he found Ingram’s claims of fantastic creatures to be unbelievable, the inland regions of North America were still largely uncharted and Hakluyt may not have had the means to disprove them.

It is more likely that Hakluyt’s campaign for the colonization of North America had hardened by the time of the second edition. With the French colonizing the north and the Spanish the south, England risked being squeezed out and there was a sense of urgency to establish colonies. Hakluyt was interested in building a rational case for imperial expansion based on facts rather than speculation. The inclusion of John Mandeville’s fanciful Travels in the first edition, as well as the uneducated account of Ingram, did not align with Hakluyt’s pragmatic approach.

Furthermore, Hakluyt did not trust the word of an ordinary sailor like Ingram, who was illiterate and had difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction. He had to make a rational case for colonization and did not want to add to the number of eccentric individuals surrounding Queen Elizabeth, such as John Dee. Dee, who was part of Elizabeth’s inner circle during the 1570s and constructed the intellectual framework for colonizing North America, had expressed interest in meeting Ingram in 1582. He is known today as an Elizabethan astrologer, who invented a language for communicating with angels and was believed in the merits of wife-swapping, and is considered the first to use the term “British Empire.”

If Hakluyt considered the colonization of North America crucial to expanding English power, Dee sought moral justification through Elizabeth’s lineage. Dee traced a line from Elizabeth through her father, Henry VIII, to King Arthur, which supposedly gave her an unquestioned right to rule the New World. As Elizabethan expansion gained momentum, two legends, allegedly ancient but difficult to verify, took hold. One claimed that King Arthur sailed to America and conquered it. The other claimed that the Welsh Prince Madoc sailed to America in the twelfth century and lived there for several years. Arthur was a Welsh king, so it was argued that Elizabeth, as his descendant and through Madoc, had rights to North America.

On November 1, 1582, Ingram went with Mr. Clement to Mortlake for an audience with Dee. Dee recorded the visit in his diary but not the conversation. However, it is likely that he was interested in whether Ingram had heard any Welsh during his conversations with the indigenous people. A few words would have sufficed.

Hakluyt’s decision to remove Ingram’s story from the second edition led to its virtual erasure from the historical record. When it was occasionally recovered, his statements, such as seeing elephants, ensured its dismissal. Nevertheless, there are enough plausible statements in Ingram’s account, scattered among the inventions, to suggest that the three men did indeed cross North America in 1569.

What matters today is not whether they were the first Europeans to accomplish this feat but the value of Ingram’s account. The immediate impact is unrecorded, but if we accept that the journey took place, Ingram left one of the earliest accounts of indigenous societies along the north Atlantic corridor. Notable among his repeated assertions were the presence of large, settled communities, perhaps similar to Hochelaga, which Jacques Cartier described in present-day Montreal in 1535. If such communities existed in the 1560s but not in the seventeenth century when French and English explorers began charting the interior, it is likely further evidence, if any were needed, of the havoc European diseases wreaked.

Similar to the case of Orellana’s descriptions of towns along the Amazon that later disappeared, Ingram’s descriptions of large, settled communities in North America may have also been affected by the devastating impact of European diseases. It is not uncommon for descriptions of towns to be invented or exaggerated to encourage settlement. However, recent archaeological and aerial surveys have revealed a network of roads and field systems in the areas Orellana described as heavily populated, suggesting that his descriptions may have had some basis in reality. It is possible that Ingram saw something similar along the tributaries of the Mississippi.

Ingram did leave one lasting legacy:

There is alsoe another kynde of fowle in that Countrye (which) hantethe the (rivers) near unto the islandes, they are of the shape and (deleted) of a goose, but their wynges (have) callowe feathers and cannot flye … They have white heads, and therefore the Countrye men call them penguins.

According to the etymologies of the word “penguin”, it was initially used to refer to the auks found in the northern hemisphere, rather than the penguins found in the south. Ingram, possibly trying to impress, was the first known person to suggest that the word’s origin came from a term used by Indigenous North Americans that sounded like the Welsh words for “white head” (pen gwyn). This was because the now-extinct great auk was easily recognizable by the white spot on its head.

For now, we’re going to stop it here. Hop in to the Tudor Learning Circle (TudorLearningCircle.com) to discuss this and other things Tudor. I’ll add the book – again, it’s by Dean Snow, and it’s called The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram, to the show notes at englandcast.com/Ingram. That’s Englandcast.com/Ingram. 

And remember to learn more about Tudorcon, and reserve your spot for September 8-10, at englandcast.com/Tudorcon.

Talk with you again soon!

free webinar

Join the Tudor Learning Circle. The only Social Network for Tudor nerds!