India

The South Asian subcontinent, home to modern-day India, came to have increased significance in the minds of Europeans at virtually the same time as did lands and peoples in the Atlantic basin.

It is impossible to date the moment when knowledge of India became widespread in Europe. Certainly merchants hauling goods along the SiLK Road knew of the great cultural treasures of the region. In the first decades of the 16th century, Portuguese explorers, notably Vasco da Gama, rounded southern Africa and sailed for India. His efforts, and those of Portuguese explorers and colonizers who followed, such as Alfonso de Albuquerque and Dioco Lopes de Sequeira, expanded these Iberians’ authority in a valuable locale and also a crucial stopping point in the spice trade (see SpiCE Islands). Europeans were not the only ones attracted to the region. Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, a prince of Fergana, traveled into Hindustan and eventually founded the Mughal Empire, which lasted from 1526 to 1858. Like later Europeans, he, too, left a written account, now known as the Baburnama. Originally written in Chaghatay Turkish, a language spoken in the Turco-Mongolian world, the Baburnama had spread from one hand to another (see scribal publication) by the end of the 16th century. It remains one of the great classics of early modern literature.

Knowledge of India spread to northern Europe as well, especially after the return of Jan Huygen van Linschoten, who published his travel narrative, entitled Itinerario, voyage often schipvaert, in Amsterdam in 1596. Richard Hakluyt the Younger arranged for an English-language translation, which appeared in print (see printing press) in London in 1598. This book contained lengthy descriptions of India and its peoples and their customs, and engravings based on the text revealed a world of pagodas, suttee (the burning of Brahmin widows), and prolific flora—including poppies, coconuts, and pepper. These narratives, along with the accounts of da

Gama’s journey, created an image of India in the minds of Europeans. Eventually the desirability of South Asia would prompt the English East India Company to establish settlements there, though that development occurred well after 1600.

Further reading: Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, 3 vols. in 9 books (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965-1993); Joan-Pau Rubies, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250-1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Sanjay Subramanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco Da Gama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Ingram, David (fl. 1568-1582) sailor, writer A sailor on an English mission to North America in the late 1560s, David Ingram wrote an account of his escapades during which he claimed he walked approximately 2,000 miles from the Gulf of Mexico to Cape Breton, a story that received wide notice when Richard Hakluyt the Younger printed it in 1589.

According to his account, Ingram, from Barking in Essex, was perhaps 50 years old when he joined the English expedition led by Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Hawkins in the late 1560s. The ships under Drake and Hawkins fared poorly in a naval encounter with Spanish ships off the coast of Florida, a territory that then encompassed not only the modern-day state but also much of the northern rim of the Gulf of Mexico. After they reached the North American mainland, Drake and Hawkins gave their men a choice: Those who wished could try their luck in a return voyage to England in a small and battered fleet, and the others could fend for themselves on land. Although the return expedition did manage to reach Cornwall, most of those aboard had perished from famine or disease.

Ingram was one of 105 men who decided to stay. Those who remained found survival difficult. Ingram wrote about near-starvation conditions during which the men ate parrots, monkeys, cats, mice, rats, and dogs. For unknown reasons, the men on land broke into small groups, and Ingram left the others in the company of Richard Browne and Richard Twide. Starting their journey at what Ingram called the Rio de Minas, the men walked northward, “by land two thousand miles” in Ingram’s accounting. Along the way they traveled through a number of Indian villages, none of them well described in the surviving account. Ingram provided his readers with descriptions of the flora and fauna of the mainland, as well as tales about the Indians’ religious beliefs and their social mores, noting that some were polygamous but had strict rules against adultery. At one point he and his companions even came face-to-face with the Indians’ devil, a creature he called “Colluchio.” This beast, which appeared in the shape of a black calf or a black dog, terrified Ingram and his companions, but when they blessed themselves in “the name of the Father, and of the Sonne, and of the holy Ghost,” it “shrancke away in a stealing maner” and never bothered them again.

Historians have long suspected that Ingram made up his account, but Hakluyt, an expert on travel accounts, nonetheless included it in the 1589 edition of his Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation. However, when Hakluyt revised this work and published a far larger volume on American travels in 1600, he no longer included Ingram’s account. Although Hakluyt never stated why he dropped Ingram’s tale, his successor, Samuel Purchas, suggested that he believed that Ingram had, in fact, created the improbable story.

David Ingram, along with Browne and Twide, traveled back to England, apparently on a ship commanded by a French captain, who picked the trio up somewhere near modern-day Halifax, Nova Scotia. Upon their return the three visited Hawkins to tell him of their journey. By the time Hakluyt published Ingram’s tale in 1589, Ingram was the only one of the three still alive. Although Ingram did publish his own version of his travels in a book entitled A true discourse of the adventures & travaile, no copy of the work has survived.

Further reading: “Examination of David Ingram,” in David Beers Quinn, ed., The Voyages and Colonising Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, 2 vols., Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society, 2nd Ser., LXXXIII-LXXXIV (London: Hakluyt Society, 1940), II: 281-283; “The Relation of David Ingram of Barking, in the County of Essex,” in Richard Hakluyt, The Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (London: Hakluyt Society, Extra Series XXXI) II: 557-561; Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage, Or Relations of the World and the Religions Observed in All Ages and Places Discovered, from the Creation unto this Present, 2nd ed. (London: W. Stansby, 1613).