This story has always fascinated me, and years ago I found a rare copy of Walsingham's manuscript. In it, he interviews the English sailor David Ingram, who was abandoned by the notorious...
This story has always fascinated me, and years ago I found a rare copy of Walsingham's manuscript. In it, he interviews the English sailor David Ingram, who was abandoned by the notorious privateer and slaver Thomas Hawkins with a hundred other men on the shores of Mexico in 1568.
Over three years later, after nearly all the men had surrendered to the Spanish, only three remained. They had, in Ingram's account, walked from Veracruz, Mexico to Cape Breton, Newfoundland to find a ship that would bring them home. But as if the length of the journey itself isn't fascinating enough, what Ingram said he saw was a Native North America filled with cities. He describes a kaleidoscope of cultures and languages and traditions that have been otherwise forever lost to the historical record.
Do you believe Ingram's tale? Or do you think it's too fantastical, dreamed up in the ports of 16th century Europe to explain his three-year absence? For the record, Hawkins himself met with Ingram and his companions Richard Brown and Richard Twide, and rewarded them for surviving his abandonment.
Many in England, including Elizabeth I, were inspired by the tale and all its descriptions of wealth and plenty. It did much to motivate the English to begin their own belated colonies in North America.
This story has always fascinated me, and years ago I found a rare copy of Walsingham's manuscript. In it, he interviews the English sailor David Ingram, who was abandoned by the notorious privateer and slaver Thomas Hawkins with a hundred other men on the shores of Mexico in 1568.
Over three years later, after nearly all the men had surrendered to the Spanish, only three remained. They had, in Ingram's account, walked from Veracruz, Mexico to Cape Breton, Newfoundland to find a ship that would bring them home. But as if the length of the journey itself isn't fascinating enough, what Ingram said he saw was a Native North America filled with cities. He describes a kaleidoscope of cultures and languages and traditions that have been otherwise forever lost to the historical record.
Do you believe Ingram's tale? Or do you think it's too fantastical, dreamed up in the ports of 16th century Europe to explain his three-year absence? For the record, Hawkins himself met with Ingram and his companions Richard Brown and Richard Twide, and rewarded them for surviving his abandonment.
Many in England, including Elizabeth I, were inspired by the tale and all its descriptions of wealth and plenty. It did much to motivate the English to begin their own belated colonies in North America.