David Ingram (explorer)

David Ingram (dates uncertain) was a 16th century English sailor and explorer who claimed to have walked across the interior of the North American continent from Mexico to Nova Scotia in 1568. Ingram signed on with English privateer John Hawkins in 1567 to raid and trade off the coasts of Portuguese Africa and Spanish Mexico. In November of 1567, he was marooned with some 100 of his shipmates near Tampico on the coast of Mexico, about 200 miles south of the present Texas/Mexico border. Ingram and two dozen of his party struck out northward into the interior to avoid capture by the Spanish, and disappeared off the map. 11 months later, in October of 1568, Ingram and two others of his original party were picked up from the coast of Nova Scotia by a French fishing vessel. How they got there is attested only by Ingram's own account, written down 13 years later in 1582 by Sir Francis Walsingham (Ingram himself was illiterate) and published in 1589 in Richard Hakluyt's "The Principall Navigations Voiges and Discoveries of the English Nation of 1589." Ingram returned to the new world in 1583 with Sir Humphrey Gilbert in his unsuccessful attempt to establish an English settlement in Newfoundland.

Ingram's account is potentially of considerable historical interest, since he was ostensibly the first European to traverse the North American interior. He reported a populous and prosperous land dotted with large settlements, divided into a multitude of what he calls kingdoms, mostly friendly and eager to help him along his journey. At the same time, much of his description of the country and its inhabitants seems fanciful, at least partly cobbled together from things he had seen or heard in his travels up and down the coasts of Africa and South America (he reported encountering elephants). Nevertheless, it is peppered with intriguing tidbits, including what may be the first recorded description of an American bison. Some scholars have questioned the entire story, on the grounds that it would have been physically impossible to walk over 3,000 miles through the wilderness in only 11 months, but in 1999 British writer Richard Nathan retraced Ingram's journey in reverse, walking from Nova Scotia to Tampico in just 9 months.

References

• Charlton Ogburn "The Longest Walk: David Ingram's Amazing Journey" American Heritage Magazine Vol 30 #3 (1979)
• Ingram's Improbable Walk Across 16th-Century America
• [1] "On August 18, 1999, Richard Nathan set out walking from Guysborough in Nova Scotia. On May 14, 2000, nine months and 4,000 miles later, he arrived in Barra del Tordo, a tiny fishing village in Tamaulipas, on the Gulf of Mexico." He recreated the alleged trek by David Ingram.

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Name	Ingram, David
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