The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram

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--