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A Walk across Texas

Perhaps the first English in Texas were David Ingram, Richard Twide, and Richard Browne, seamen who were put ashore on the Mexican coast in 1568 by Captain John Hawkins. Hawkins, in league with the future Sir Francis Drake, had lost a disastrous battle with the Spanish.

The survivors of the sunken ships, crowded onto Hawkins's surviving Minion, elected not to perish by starvation on a return to England, but to be set ashore. Walking south, they could at least find the comforts of a Spanish prison.

Once ashore, David Ingram and his companions decided to walk north. This they apparently did, turning east across Texas's coastal plain to enjoy an eventual Atlantic rescue by a French ship.

Ingram wrote a short account of the journey, which appeared in print in 1589, a generally accurate description of the Gulf coastal areas. "The Countrey is good and most delicate," Ingram says, "having great plaines, as large & as fayre in many places as may be seene, being as plaine as a board: And then great & huge woods of sundry kind of trees . . . plants & busshes, bark that biteth like Pepper . . . with the fruitfull Palme tree & a great plentie of other swete trees to this Ingram unknowen.

"And after that plaines againe, and in other places great closes of pasture, environed with most delicate trees, instead of hedges: they being as it were set by the hands of men . . . and great Rivers, by reason that the lowe grounds there be so rancke, that the grasse groweth faster then it can be eaten. . . ."

The account seems to accurately reflect many things Ingram could have seen—natives, buffalo, birds and animals, palm wine and grapes, tornados and local religions, musical instruments and weapons of war...But his account—after an initial printing in Hakluyt's The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English nation, made by Sea or ouer Land to the most remote and farthest distant Quarters of the earth at any time within the compasse of these 1500 yeeres—was discredited.

Among Ingram's sightings were also elephants, what appear to be javelinas "twice as big as an Horse," gold nuggets "some as big as a mans fist," and rubies "4 inches long and two inches broad." During his visit Ingram also claimed to have exorcised a devil, one Colluchio, who was fond of appearing "in the likenesse of a blacke Dogge." Twenty years later and like many an explorer, he obviously allowed imagination to lace his words with even greater wonders.

But the account gave many readers a first description of the area that would be Texas.