The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram

October 31, 2022
In this scholarly study, ethnohistorian Snow (1777: Tipping Point at Saratoga) revisits the story of David Ingram, a 16th-century British sailor who claimed to have trekked 3,600 miles across North America. A member of an ill-fated slaving expedition, Ingram was marooned near Tampico, Mexico, in 1568 and spent 11 months following Indigenous trail systems all the way to Nova Scotia, where he and his two companions were picked up by a French ship. In 1582, Ingram, the surviving member of the trio, was interrogated by royal officials planning for English colonies in North America. According to Snow, errors in the interrogators’ records jumbled Ingram’s testimony, mixing up his observations of Africa and the Caribbean—the expedition’s first stops—with those from North America. A badly edited version of the testimony appeared in Richard Hakluyt’s The Principall Navigations (1589), but was dropped from later editions of the book, contributing to Ingram’s reputation as a fraud. Drawing from long-neglected primary sources from the interrogation, Snow persuasively argues that Ingram was actually “a sympathetic ethnographic, botanic, and zoologic observer” whose descriptions of Indigenous settlements and customs and “wild beasts whose skins are most delicate” were confirmed by later explorers. Cogent and well-documented, this is a valuable correction to the historical record. Illus.