We can say that because several people independently stated they met him and they had no reason to make that up, but we know nothing else about the man save he was born in Barking, Essex.

If you have doubts, it becomes the beginning of another that is even stranger in the ways it invokes the visions of empire in Elizabethan England and how they played out in North America. If you believe the account that Sir George Peckham recorded years later then it marks the end of a strange and little known story in North American history. There are two ways to approach the story of Ingram and his shipmates’ journey. After some died and others returned south, the three remaining sailors, after more than a year wandering up the eastern coast of North America, reached the fishing village at Cape Breton, Canada, unintentionally becoming, if the story is to be believed, the first Europeans to cross North America.ĭepiction of the 1568 battle of San Juan de Ulúa from A Larger History of the United States of America, to the Close of President Jackson’s Administration (1886) by Thomas Wentworth Higginson / European settlements along the Atlantic coast were sparse and some of the men decided to walk back to San Juan while others including Ingram, Brown, and Twyde intended to follow the coast north in search of English communities. After Hawkins’ ship, the Minion, was damaged, he sailed across the Gulf of Mexico where he put the crew on shore. In September 1568, they’d been involved in the battle of San Juan de Ulúa (present day Veracruz, Mexico), between a fleet of English privateers, led by John Hawkins and Francis Drake, and Spanish forces under Francisco Luján. Their names were David Ingram, Richard Brown, and Richard Twyde, and they told him a story that began in Mexico the year before. Three English men sitting in a native canoe were asking to be let on board. Champaign was alerted to a commotion outside. In the autumn of 1569 the Gargaryne, a French trader, was moored off Cape Breton in present day Nova Scotia when its captain M. Although the account’s more fantastical elements, such as the sighting of elephants, have spurred many to consign it to the fiction department, John Toohey argues for a second look. If three shipwrecked English sailors really did travel by foot from Florida to Nova Scotia in 1569 then it would certainly count as one of the most remarkable walks undertaken in recorded history.

Detail from Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues’ 1591 map of Florida, where David Ingram supposedly began his journey up the Eastern seaboard / Library of Congress

Second Time Around by Gay Ingram