The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram by Dean Snow

Author:Dean Snow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Verrazzano’s rebuff caused his cartographer brother, Gerolamo, to refer to that portion of the continent as the Land of Bad People (Terra Onde di Maila Gente). Perhaps the fact that these were successful hunter-gatherers living beyond the limits of productive agriculture had something to do with their hostility. Like the nomadic people of northern Mexico, they might simply have been less accustomed to encounters with traveling strangers.10 However, Verrazano’s description of his own behavior is probably sufficient explanation. Whatever had been the case in Verrazzano’s time, there is no evidence that Ingram and his companions encountered any unfriendliness almost a half century later.

At Mescombe, modern Camden, Ingram finally saw Penobscot Bay, a broad body of water that might be the one Ingram described as “so large that they could scarce cross the same in 24 hours.” Ingram and his partners probably took the advice of locals and did not try to cross it. Instead, they most likely would have been advised to follow the trail along the west side of the bay four days northward to the village of Norumbega on the site of modern Bangor, a distance of 56 miles (90 km). Forty years later, Norumbega would be called Upsegon by Tisquantum, who claimed it had 60 houses and as many as 1,000 people living there at least part of the year. Ingram remarked that they hiked along the first half of that leg for two days.11

Had they made their long walk four decades later, the three sailors would have encountered Bashabes at Norumbega/Upsegon. By that time, this would be the man to whom all other chief men of the Eastern Abenaki people deferred, as Smith noted. After he kidnapped the group of people that included Tisquantum, George Waymouth also noted that they all regarded Bashabes as the most influential man in the region.12

It was an easy one-day walk 12 miles (19 km) upstream to the end of the trail, the Penobscot settlement on Indian Island, a place Ingram called Saganas. Decades later, Tisquantum and others of Purchas’s informants said it was called “Caiocama.”

Here Ingram and his companions had to decide what their next move would be. It was the end of the long walk because the overland trail route ended abruptly at Saganas/Caiocama. But they were still 450 air miles (725 km) from their goal at Cape Breton (Figure 8.1). The English sailors knew that English ships from Bristol frequented the waters off Cape Breton, but they might not have known that by then French and Basque fishing vessels occasionally stopped on the Maine coast as well. Fishermen sometimes came ashore there to dry fish and to trade with local people. In exchange for iron tools, beads, mirrors, and other portable goods, the locals provided food, furs, and other products of the sea and forest. Beaver pelts brought particularly good prices back in Europe, meeting the growing popularity of beaver felt hats, and this eventually grew into the lucrative beaver fur trade of the following century.13 Keeping Cape Breton as their intended destination had to hold out the strongest possibility of rescue.

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