The First Frontier

by Scott Weidensaul

  We know that many of the coastal tribes created huge, stable, oceangoing dugout canoes for fishing and whaling. Why did none of them cross the Atlantic?

  Perhaps some did. “In the year 1153,” according to the sixteenth-century Portuguese historian Antonio Galvano, “it is written, there came to Lubeck, a city of Germany, a vessel bringing certain Indians in a canoe, which is a vessel propelled by oars . . . but this canoe must have come from Florida, the country of cod fish, which lies about the same latitude as Germany.”

  Galvano may have based his comment on the work of Otto of Freising, who wrote in the twelfth century about the arrival of “Indians” in Lübeck during the reign of Otto’s nephew, Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa. But Otto may have been borrowing, too. Stories about Indian merchants washing up in northern Germany bump through the historical record all the way back to a.d. 43, when the Roman geographer Pomponius Mela used the tale as evidence that the Indian Ocean and Baltic Sea were connected.

  Galvano didn’t cite a source for his claim. When he unearthed this tidbit four hundred years after the fact, he casually made the astonishing assertion that Indians paddled to coastal Germany. To the Portuguese of Galvano’s day, “Florida” was a nebulous concept, a name applied to almost any point in the New World. But to an Iberian such as Galvano, who every Friday ate bacalao (salt cod), “the country of cod fish” very specifically meant Newfoundland and its surrounding fishing banks.

  “The Germans greatly wondered to see such a barge, and such people, not knowing from whence they came, nor understanding their speech, especially because there was then no knowledge of that country,” Galvano wrote. He admitted that it may seem incredible that such a small boat could cross such immense seas; “nevertheless it is quite possible that the winds and currents might bring them there.”

  And that’s it—nothing more. On its face, it certainly does seem incredible, not only because of the distances and dangers that had to be overcome, but also because in order to make landfall in Lübeck, such mariners would have had to bypass Iceland, Scotland, the Faeroe Islands, and Norway (if coming from the north) or thread the English Channel without bothering to stop in England or France (if coming more directly from the west). And regardless of the route, they would then have to circumnavigate Danish Jutland, poking like a thumb into the North Sea, and avoid the four hundred islands surrounding it before deciding to finally land at Lübeck.

  It’s preposterous, surely. But what if, by some infinitesimally small chance, Otto and Galvano were right? What if the descendants of the skrælings who battled the Norse in Vinland wondered about the land from which those violent intruders had come and decided to seek it out for themselves, stocking a great sea canoe with bladders of water, dried meat, and sealing harpoons? What if men who, like their counterparts in Europe, looked at the horizon and wondered, then decided to stop wondering and take action?

  Despite the historical odds, despite common sense, it’s thrilling to imagine a big dugout rolling with the swells, wending its way through the flat Danish islands and into the Baltic waters under an overcast sky. With final, tired strokes, the paddlers drive the boat onto the muddy shore and step out—men in leather and furs, their arms and faces tattooed, otter-skin quivers on their backs, their feet clad in sealskin boots, bone and copper in their long black hair.

  They can see fields, where strangely clad men and women stop what they are doing and point—oddly pale humans, bleached as though they’d been trapped underground, many of them weirdly and unnaturally hairy.

  The two groups face each other, shifting uneasily. Then one of the Indians slowly raises a hand in the universal sign of peace.

  The day Americans discovered Europe.

  Chapter 3

  Stumbling onto a Frontier

  In the late summer of 1582, three powerful Englishmen, united by an interest in the new lands of America, gathered to question a man who, it appeared, had managed one of the greatest treks of that or any other age: a wilderness journey across nearly three thousand miles of unknown land, affording him an unprecedented familiarity with the New World, its inhabitants, and its riches.

  The man’s name was David Ingram, and he was either one of the greatest accidental explorers of history or a liar of epic proportions. Or very likely both.

  Ingram, who was about fifty that summer, was a presumably illiterate sailor from the Thames port of Barking, just east of London. Fifteen years earlier, he’d had the bad luck to sign on with a legendarily ill-starred voyage, one that ended with a ferocious sea battle and his being abandoned on a foreign shore with more than a hundred other starving men. For years, Ingram had been plying tavern audiences with his stories of crossing America on foot, before a miraculous rescue restored him to England. These tales, percolating up through the strata of Elizabethan society, had eventually reached the curious ears of influential men for whom the New World was an abiding passion. At their command, Ingram was plucked from the alehouses he frequented and brought before them.

  Francis Walsingham was principal secretary to Queen Elizabeth I, a member of her Privy Council, and her spymaster. He was also fascinated by the prospects of the fabled Northwest Passage to the Orient. Sir George Peckham saw the New World as a refuge for Catholics, persecuted in Elizabeth’s Protestant England, a concept that fit neatly within the colonization schemes of the third gentleman, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who held a royal patent permitting him to colonize “remote heathen and barbarous landes.” Gilbert was a frightening prospect as an overlord. As military governor in Ireland, he had wreaked such terror and devastation putting down a 1569 rebellion that his half brother Sir Walter Raleigh said he “never heard nor read of any man more feared . . . amonge the Irish nation.” To Raleigh’s mind, that was a compliment. (Later, in 1583, Gilbert would claim Newfoundland for England, despite the presence of a fleet of foreign fishing ships, then vanish with his frigate during a storm.)

  There are a great many unknowns cluttering David Ingram’s story, so it is best to start with what is indisputable. In 1567, when he was about thirty-five years old, Ingram hired on as a seaman with Sir John Hawkins, who was outfitting a fleet of four ships he owned with his brother. To these ships were added two aging hulks belonging to the queen, Minion and Jesus of Lübeck, the latter an especially decrepit vessel bought secondhand by Henry VIII. One of Hawkins’s smaller ships, Judith, was commanded by a young firebrand relative of his named Francis Drake.

  The stated purpose of the expedition was to seek a supposed gold mine in Africa, but anyone who knew John Hawkins could guess its real goal. Three years earlier, Queen Elizabeth had granted him a coat of arms, whose heraldic devices included “a demi-Moor proper bound in a cord”—that is, an African slave tied up for sale. Hawkins had made two previous slaving voyages to Africa, selling the captives in the Caribbean (if the Spanish planters declined to buy, he’d shell and burn their plantations until they relented), buying cod in Newfoundland for resale back home, and making a tidy profit in the process. Along the way, Hawkins also introduced the sweet potato and tobacco to England.

  This time, things did not go so well. Hawkins’s fleet (bolstered by several additional ships he acquired along the way) captured five hundred Africans, but only after a bloody fight in which Hawkins was nearly killed by a poison arrow. By the time they crossed the Atlantic, hammered by a hurricane, the Jesus was so decayed that fish were said to swim freely into and out of the hull, and only constant pumping kept the ship afloat.

  Hoping to make repairs, the fleet put in near the newly established Spanish fort of San Juan de Ulúa at Veracruz, on the Gulf coast of Mexico, in September 1568. Hawkins’s bad luck continued. The following day, the Spanish treasure fleet arrived with the new viceroy, and a few days later the Spaniards, fuming at the English intrusion, attacked. The English sailors managed to sink three Spanish ships, but they lost all but two of their own in the melee. Hawkins’s Minion was crammed with two hundred of the surviving sailors, while Drake’s Judith held almo
st all their supplies. When Hawkins signaled his cousin to come and take some of the men, Drake ignored the command and sailed under cover of darkness for England, taking almost all their food. “The Judith . . . forsooke us in our great myserie,” Hawkins bitterly recalled.

  For two weeks after the battle, the Minion wallowed in the Gulf of Mexico, trapped by headwinds. Although she was loaded down with riches from the sale of the slaves, the starving men onboard were reduced to eating anything they could find, including their pets. “Hides were thought very good meate,” Hawkins recalled, “rattes, cattes, mise and dogges none escaped that might bee gotten, parrats and monkayes that were had in great prize.”

  Hawkins knew he could never get so many men back to England, so he announced that half of them would be set ashore to fend for themselves until he could send a rescue vessel. To hear Hawkins tell it, he was acceding to their wishes: “Our people being forced with hunger desired to be set a land, whereunto I concluded.” But Miles Phillips—one of the 114 men rowed through great, storm-fueled waves, beaten over the side of the boat a mile from shore, and left to sink or swim—saw it very differently: “It would have caused any stony heart to have relented to hearr the pitifull mone that many did make, and how loth they were to depart.” Two men drowned, and the rest found themselves marooned with no rations and only one useless matchlock musket and two rusty swords among them.%6

  The castaways were, by their own reckoning and Hawkins’s, near the northwestern rim of the Gulf of Mexico, about two hundred miles south of the Rio Grande. The Englishmen divided into two groups. About twenty-five of them, including Phillips, set out to the west, looking for the Spanish, while fifty-two men, including David Ingram, decided to go north. After an Indian attack that killed their leader and two others, half of those men doubled back to rejoin Phillips and the others.

  After almost two weeks of wandering with little food or water, picked off by the arrows of hidden Indians, Phillips and his fellow survivors found the Spanish settlement of Tampico. They also found themselves entrapped in the Mexican Inquisition—questioned, tried, and in a few cases burned at the stake for the heresy of Protestantism.

  Meanwhile, Ingram’s small group simply vanished. Here’s where the certainties about his story evaporate, beyond this one final fact: David Ingram, forsaken on the wild shores of the Gulf of Mexico, somehow reappeared in England.

  Thirteen years later, under the pointed questions of Walsingham, Peckham, and Gilbert (and carefully recorded by an anonymous scribe), Ingram recounted a tale he’d told many times before. Right off the bat, it differs from what’s known about the Hawkins disaster. Instead of being marooned on the Mexican coast, Ingram said that he and the others were abandoned “about 140 leages west and by North from the Cape of Florida”—a position near Apalachicola in what is today the Florida Panhandle.

  From there, Ingram said, they walked—in less than eleven months, helped along the way by each Indian village they encountered—almost three thousand miles to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. There he and two remaining companions were rescued by a French ship named Gargarine, repaying their passage with the gift of one of the “great pearles” they’d picked up along the way and by helping the French trade with the locals. In their final weeks, they encountered “the maine sea upon the Northside of America,” and the Natives drew for them pictures of ships and flags, “which thing especially proveth the passage of the Northwest.” At this point, one can almost hear Walsingham and the rest sigh with satisfaction: here was the Northwest Passage to the Orient at last.

  Ingram’s account, as condensed and transcribed by the nameless clerk (who refers to “this Ingram” or “the examinate”), runs to only a few thousand words, none of it in the first person. The original, published in 1583, is lost, and the versions that survive differ on some details. Even where they agree, they offer an infuriating mix of enticingly plausible details and transparent whoppers, and they leave unsaid far more than they explain.

  Ingram claimed that his group moved almost without pause from the territory of one Indian “king” to the next, the kingdoms spaced about 120 miles apart and each chief willing to help these strangers—at whose “whitenes of their skins” the Natives marveled—along on their journey. He said barely a word about hardships, dangers, attacks, and privations, and he was—most fundamentally and inexplicably—completely silent on the fate of the other men he was with. We know the group was twenty-six strong when they left the Gulf, but by the time they hailed the French ship, there were only three left—Ingram and two men named Richard Browne and Richard Twide. On the fate of the others, Ingram’s narrative is mute. (Miles Phillips, one of the Minion survivors who endured the Mexican Inquisition, speculated years later that the other men were “yet alive, and marryed in the sayd countrey.”)

  Doubtless in response to the noblemen’s questions, Ingram recounted the animals and plants he saw—shaggy black “buffes” with crooked horns; “a bird called a Flamingo, whose feathers are verie red”; bears, foxes, wolves, and rabbits. He talked about the climate, fierce thunderstorms, and whirlwinds that could have been tornadoes. He discussed the land (“most excellent, fertile and pleasant”) and the curious customs of the Indians, whom he described as especially pliant and docile—“how easily they may be governed when they be once conquered.”

  But most of all, he had a great deal to say, all of it pure hooey, about treasure-laden cities—kings seated on bejeweled thrones, women wearing golden plates around their necks, feasting halls with “pillers of massie silver and chrystall,” and nuggets of gold as big as a man’s fist simply lying in the streams for the taking. Here is where Ingram’s account veers into obvious fantasy, and one reason historians have for so long dismissed it—along with his claims of having seen elephants, odd red sheep, domestic cattle, an immense horselike beast with footlong tusks growing from its nostrils, and a crested bird as big as an eagle (“verie beautifull to beholde, his feathers are more orient [lustrous] than a peacockes”).

  “The Relation of David Ingram of Barking, in the Countie of Essex” was published in 1589 by Richard Hakluyt in the first edition of his Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation, the great compilation of early exploration accounts. There is no record of Hawkins ever challenging Ingram’s claims, and (perhaps conveniently) his two companions, Browne and Twide, were by then both dead. But as more and more Europeans actually visited the eastern seaboard of America—and found no golden cities or crystal palaces, no elephants or red sheep, no fist-size nuggets lying about in every stream—Ingram’s reputation took a beating. Hakluyt dropped Ingram’s “Relation” from subsequent editions, and the old sailor has been considered more or less a fraud ever since.

  Yet there must be a kernel of truth buried beneath all the hogwash. Samuel Purchas, who posthumously published some of Hakluyt’s manuscripts, used Ingram as a cautionary tale, noting “the reward for lying being, not to be believed in truths.” As Purchas realized, Ingram somehow got from the wild coast of Mexico to the halls of London; he couldn’t have made up everything. Hidden amid all the lies is a remarkable story of survival.

  One possibility, proposed by history writer Charlton Ogburn and others, is that Ingram followed the Gulf coast and crossed what is now the southeastern United States before being picked up by a French ship on the Atlantic coast. This is made even more plausible by the largely tropical or subtropical flavor of the plants, Indian customs, and landscapes Ingram described, although the general lack of French shipping in those waters at that time is a problem. If not the epic, three-thousand-mile march of legend, it would still be an impressive trek of almost fifteen hundred miles.

  Ingram may then have observed the eastern shore of the continent from the deck of a northbound ship, since he described a few things that are manifestly boreal in nature, such as his spot-on description of flightless great auks, which were not found south of Maine. He called them “penguins”—the first use of that word—and said the black-and-
white birds were “the shape and bigness of a Goose but . . . cannot flie.”

  As for the rest—the elephants and sheep and gold-bedecked halls—this was Ingram’s one chance at glory, spinning his tale to three of the most powerful men in the realm, whom he must have known were intensely interested in the commercial prospects of the New World. One suspects he wasn’t going to let the opportunity slip away; thus we have submissive, courteous Natives whose sunlit lands drip with riches.

  Besides, as historian David B. Quinn has noted, his story was “the end product of a long run of tavern tales where the original story [was] eventually overlaid by the ‘truth’ of fiction.” In the storyteller’s mind, memory and fantasy can fuse. After all those years, Ingram probably believed most of it himself.

  Whether Ingram profited from his story is unknown. It seems that at least he was offered a place in Gilbert’s expedition to Newfoundland the following year, 1583, but his fate is unrecorded. Gilbert disappeared in more theatrical style, going down with his frigate Squirrel, lost in a tempest on the way home. The last his companions saw of him, he was reading calmly on the deck surrounded by monstrous seas, shouting across to their ship, “Wee are as neere to heaven by Sea, as by lande.”

  By this time, the European race for North America was already nearly a century old. What the Basques, Bretons, and Bristolmen tried to keep secret for so long—the presence of cod-rich waters and islands to the west—had become public knowledge. In 1497, the Venetian sailor Giovanni Caboto, known by his Anglicized name, John Cabot, tried to find a northern shortcut to Asia but was stymied.