In the fall of 1569 the crew of the Gargaryne, French vessel anchored off a fishing station on Nova Scotia observed three white men in a native canoe approach. Once aboard the strangers, David Ingram, Richard Brown, and Richard Twyde, told an astonishing tale.
Their story began in 1567 when they joined an expedition commanded by John Hawkins, a noted English sea captain, merchant, and slave trader (and later to be Treasurer of the Royal Navy, responsible for revamping and improving Queen Elizabeth's fleet and finally co-commander in 1588 against the Spanish Armada). It was Hawkin's third slave trading voyage in which he would visit Africa, buy slaves from local kingdoms, and then transship them across the Atlantic for sale in the Caribbean (also capturing any Portuguese slave ships along the way and seizing their cargo).
In September 1568, Hawkins brought his six ships (the two largest of which he had leased from Queen Elizabeth) into the Spanish port of San Juan de Ulua (in Mexico near modern Vera Cruz) for much needed repairs. Commanding one of the smaller ships was Hawkin's second cousin, Francis Drake. Unfortunately, a large Spanish fleet carrying Philip II's new Viceroy of Mexico showed up several days later. The Spanish were concerned about the English intruding on their monopoly of the slave trade in their possessions and determined to take action.
On September 24, the Spanish attacked, capturing or sinking four of Hawkin's ships and killing several hundred of his crew. Francis Drake (Hawkins' second cousin), commanding the barque Judith, escaped and sailed directly to England. Hawkins, on the large carrack Minion, also made it out of the harbor. Having picked up survivors from the other ships Minion was desperately overcrowded and short of supplies; Hawkins could not make it to England with this many on board.
Near present day Pensacola, Florida, Hawkins explained the situation to the approximately 200 men onboard and gave them the option of being put ashore and taking their chances of rescue or staying onboard and trying to reach England. About 100 men went ashore while the rest stayed with Hawkins. The sail home to England was not pleasant and only 15 were alive when Hawkins made it to Plymouth.
Of those who went ashore, many eventually surrendered to Spanish searchers. They were imprisoned and some later tortured and executed by the Inquisition. Ingram, Brown, and Twyde decided to walk to the Atlantic Coast and hope that a passing French or English vessel would pick them up. It was a risky, but not insane plan as by the late 16th century European vessels, primarily fishing and trading ships, were occasionally putting ashore. Eleven months and 2,000 miles later they reached Nova Scotia.
The only record we have of their journey is Ingram's account, given in 1582 to Sir George Peckham, and Elizabeth's Secretary of State Francis Walsingham. Their summary appeared in the first edition of Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation in 1589. Strangely, it also appears in the opening chapter of Documents Connected with the History of South Carolina, published in 1856. After an introduction in which Ingram is described as currently about 40 years of age and hailing from Barking in Essex we are given a dramatic telling of their first encounter with the natives:
The first kings that they came before dwelte in a countrye called Gizicka who caused them to be stripped naked and woundering greatlie at the whiteness of their skin let them dparte (without) further harm.According to the account, the three men rarely stayed anywhere more than three nights, with the exception being Balma, "a ritche cyttie a mile and a half long" where they lingered for a week.
It's often difficult to know what to make of Ingram's tale. As John Toohey notes in The Long, Forgotten Walk of David Ingram;
A constant problem with his account is that the credible and the fantastic often inhabit the same sentence. A crystal sedan chair sounds like something out of a fairytale but because copper, silver, and gold were worked in pre-Columbian America this statement needs only a slight shift in perspective to be plausible, although it isn’t clear what he meant by rubies, especially of that size. More important is his constant reference to cities, a term that in the sixteenth century equated with civilization and advanced technologies.And that's before Ingram mentions seeing an animal that sounds very much like an elephant!
The account frequently reads as though Ingram is answering questions rather than telling the story in his own term. There is no chronological narrative, rather descriptions of the people, the flora and fauna are set out in discrete sections. It is impossible in parts to tell whether he is talking about the south soon after they land, the mid-Atlantic, or the northern regions. When he says that, “there is a clowde somtyme of the yeare sene in the ayer (which) comonlye turnethe to great tempests”, he is talking about tornadoes, which he was more likely to have seen in what is present day Kentucky than Florida or Maine, though tornadoes can strike across the US and in any month.
So what can we say about this remarkable journey? Did it happen?
Ingram certainly existed, though Twyde and Brown appear only in his account and we have no other way to verify their existence. Some accounts of Ingram's journey have Hawkins putting the men ashore north of Vera Cruz but south of the Rio Grande while others speculate it was the Escambia River near Pensacola. I believe the latter more plausible. First, the 1582 account includes Ingram's estimate that their journey covered 2,000 miles and Google Maps gives 2,056 miles as the distance from Pensacola to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Second, a journey starting south of the Rio Grande along the Gulf of Mexico would have added 1,000 miles to the walk making it even more implausible for eleven months. Third, Ingram's description of the lands he passes through is much more consistent with the Atlantic coastal plain than the more open and arid lands of Mexico and Texas.
As to the ending point, we have evidence that the Gargayne was a French vessel that sailed to the Americas.
As to his description of the Indians, the flora and the fauna is it plausible? Parts, like the elephant, are clearly not. But the fairly populated coastal area he describes is consistent with what we know now. Coastal North America was to be transformed over the next half-century as increasing contact with European fishermen and traders introduced diseases to which Indians had little immunity and epidemics decimated the population (and it's possible Ingram and his companions could have been carriers of disease). In 1620 the Pilgrims landed at a deserted village in Plymouth in an area where an estimated 90% of the Indian population had perished during the prior two decades.
But in the 1560s the area was still heavily populated and though cities on the European model did not exist, large sprawling settlements, particularly in the Southeast, are known to have been present.
Even with that, the ability of three Europeans to survive and travel 2,000 miles in eleven months without encountering any hostile Indians or, on the other hand, being overly delayed by hospitality is surprising.
Reading Ingram's account many questions occurred to me that I wished Peckham and Walsingham had asked or, if they had the information, had included it in order to further verify its truth. For now, I rate it a whopping good story and likely true in its essence.
David Ingram disappears from the historical record after his interview in 1582.
As for Hawkins and Drake, the latter famously circumnavigated the globe between 1577 and 1580, they both lead the English Navy in defeating the Spanish Armada in 1588 and then unsuccessfully tried to counterattack Spain. In 1595 they embarked on anther piratical attack on the Spanish Caribbean, but after failing to capture San Juan, Puerto Rico, Hawkins and Drake died of disease, the former in November 1595, the latter in January 1596.
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