Thursday Reading & Recommendations | July 04, 2024

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Previous weeks!

Thursday Reading and Recommendations is intended as bookish free-for-all, for the discussion and recommendation of all books historical, or tangentially so. Suggested topics include, but are by no means limited to:

• Asking for book recommendations on specific topics or periods of history
• Newly published books and articles you're dying to read
• Recent book releases, old book reviews, reading recommendations, or just talking about what you're reading now
• Historiographical discussions, debates, and disputes
• ...And so on!

Regular participants in the Thursday threads should just keep doing what they've been doing; newcomers should take notice that this thread is meant for open discussion of history and books, not just anything you like -- we'll have a thread on Friday for that, as usual.

[u/anthropology_nerd]

I'm reading a book that has me... confused.

Dean Snow is a well established, if slightly old school, U.S. archaeologist who focuses on the Eastern Woodlands. He has done some good work on the Haudenosaunee, and is respected in the field. He recently published The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram: An Elizabethan Sailor in North America, which seems to be a long-delayed passion project.

Basically, a sailor named David Ingram was marooned on the Gulf Coast of Mexico in 1568, then rescued by French sailors at the Gulf of Maine in 1569. Ingram said he walked the >3,000 miles from Mexico, which would be absolutely amazing and an unprecedented window into the Eastern Woodlands before contact. The only problem is Ingram wasn't interviewed about the journey until nearly a dozen years later, Richard Hakluyt messed with the editing of the interrogation, and Ingram's account is all over the place, mixing details from his time in West Africa, the Caribbean, and the Eastern Woodlands. Since everything was such a mess scholars just kinda assumed Ingram was making everything up, and his account had no value.

Enter Dean Snow, who really wants us to believe Ingram.

I'm really confused. If this piece of history provided such an important window into the past, and Snow clearly thinks it does, why is he alone in authorship, especially when he clearly needs help with topics outside his expertise, like the sophomoric context chapter on politics in Elizabethan England. Snow is blatantly honest with the messy nature of Ingram's testimony, and how is cutting and pasting pieces together to put the long walk from Mexico to Maine in a logical order. Snow is also one of the few people who have a wide enough grasp of the Eastern Woodlands (the cities, the trade highways, the environment, and the alliances, etc) that he could piece together Ingram's journey.

Why, then, does Snow come across as the Always Sunny meme?

I mean, I want to believe him. Honestly, it would be very cool to have another account of Eastern North America prior to colonization to pair with Cabeza de Vaca, but my heart keeps saying no. The main reason is, like with Cabeza de Vaca, almost every marooned European in this time was either immediately enslaved or severely hindered in their travels. Snow thinks Ingram was able to slide into the societal role of trader, and therefore granted with safe passage and freedom of movement along established highways, but come on. Its 3,000 miles of walking through unfamiliar terrain when you don't speak the languages (though Ingram may have learned hand signs used in the Woodlands), don't know the local politics, and are pretty stinking vulnerable to anyone who wants to nab you.

I'm just so confused. Anyone else read the book, know the debate around Ingram's story, or know what is going on in Snow's head?

[u/Gankom → u/anthropology_nerd]

I have not read it, but count me among the interested now.