The Lost City of Norumbega
Have you ever read the wonderful tales
of the Baron Munchausen? If you have, you may be interested to
know that Maine history has a Baron Munchausen of its own, one
who could make up quite as remarkable stories of his adventures
as could the renowned German storyteller. This man was David
Ingram. His stories have not entertained the young people for
generations nor held a place in the public libraries, but they
have served a more practical purpose. They sent adventurers to
the coast of Maine in search of the wonderful city of Arembec,
and so began the exploration and colonization of our State which
might have been delayed a number of years had not this man of
wild imagination and lively tongue landed, by accident, in the
country called Norumbega.
The historians are agreed that David
Ingram was the first Englishman to bring back to his country any
detailed report, true or otherwise, regarding the ancient
Norumbega, and so it is not strange that his story attracted
wide attention. Being of an adventurous nature, young Ingram had
no notion of spending his life in the dull little hamlet of
Barking, Essex, and, like other English boys who wanted to see
the world, he went to sea.
Now Ingram lived in the days when
slave-traders and pirates were common places of life on the
seas, and so it is not strange that he should have found
himself, in 1568, on a ship commanded by Capt. John Hawkins, a
slave-trader, bound for the newly discovered shores washed by
the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. Hawkins was
not above piracy, and his coat-of-arms was crested with the
figure of a Negro child bound with cords.
All went well until they put into the
harbor of John d'Uloa, where the villainous Capt. Hawkins was
attacked by equally villainous Spaniards, who destroyed four
ships of his fleet. He managed to escape by the skin of his
teeth, and, with his two remaining vessels, he made port in the
mouth of the Tampico River on the Mexican Gulf coast.
All the sailors who had escaped with their lives (and there were
over a hundred) were crowded into these two little vessels and,
when the captain took account of stock, he found that the
greater part of his food supply was at the bottom of the sea and
that what remained would not last his crew a quarter of the way
across. He decided that, in order to get back to England at all,
he must dispose of the superfluous crew and this he promptly did
by putting them ashore to look out for themselves, choosing, of
course, those that he could best spare.
To show that Capt. Hawkins wasn't
entirely heartless, one survivor has written that he "set on
shore of our company fourscore and sixteen; and gave to everyone
of us five yards, of Roan cloth, and monie to those who did
demand it. Then he lovingly embraced us, greatly lamenting our
distressed state, and having persuaded ns to serve God and love
one another, he bade ns all farewell." Then he sailed away.
Just what Capt. Hawkins thought they
could do with the ''Roan cloth" and with the "monie" in a land
where there was nothing to buy and nobody with whom to trade, we
cannot imagine. He left no weapons by which they might protect
themselves, probably fearing attack on himself before he could
get away.
That night the marooned sailors slept on
the sands beside the Pamlico and the next morning they started
on their almost hopeless journey through the semi-tropical
wilderness, following the coast. They had not gone far before a
band of Indians swooped down upon them and soon relieved them of
their "Roan cloth," their shirts and other garments. Those who
resisted were killed by the arrows of the Indians; the rest,
scantily attired, were allowed to go their way. The savages
pointed out to them the direction of Pamlico, the Spanish
settlement.
The company then divided. Half went
west-ward, in the direction the Indians pointed out, led by
Anthony Goddard, who, records say, lived to return to Plymouth,
his home in England. Ingram, with his companions, Twid and
Brown, travelled north ward, for Ingram knew that the waters of
Northern America teemed with fish and were visited by his own
countrymen. They pushed on for miles through the forests,
occasionally resting with a band of friendly Indians they
encountered. They lived on food supplied them by these same
Indians, and, when that gave out, on the berries and green
vegetables they found along the way. At last, after suffering
such hardships as you can scarcely believe, Ingram, more dead
than alive, crossed what is now Massachusetts into Norumbega,
the land of the Bashaba. What became of his companions, the
records do not tell us.
David Ingram actually made the journey
on foot, thru the miles of wilderness between the Gulf of Mexico
and the St. John's River and there is little doubt that he
tarried awhile at Norumbega and met the Bashaba at his capital,
Arembec, the fabled lost city of Norumbega. Just what he found
there, we can only guess, for his own account reads like a fairy
tale. Just to lie on the rich furs, which the natives used
lavishly for mats and beds, and to feast on the abundance of
fish and game, must have seemed princely luxury to the famished
and footsore Ingram and no doubt the brilliancy of the savage
ornaments dazzled his eyes and their value became magnified many
times.
No wonder he found it hard to tear
himself away from this land of plenty and continue his weary
march to the St. John's, even when informed by the Indians that
a ship of the white man was in its waters offering him a
possibility of soon returning home. He found the ship to be the
Gagarine and her master, Capt. Champagne, gladly offered him
passage to France, from which he easily worked his way across
the Channel and home.
But perhaps you want to know where
Norumbega, which also appears in various manuscripts as
Norumbegue and Norombega, is located. The ancient historians and
geographers differed widely in their ideas of the extent of
Norumbega. It certainly embraced the country drained by the
Penobscot, then known as the river of Norumbega and called by
the Indians the great river of the Panawanskek. The lost city of
Norumbega is commonly believed to have been near the present
site of Bangor, though some historians have located it
else-where.
The ancient French fishermen, who
visited the waters long before the coming of Ingram, called the
Gulf of Maine, with its 230 or more miles from Cape Sable to
Cape Cod, the sea of Norumbega. Some of the early map-makers
made it extend down as far as what is now New Jersey and some as
far as Virginia, while others reckoned it a part of Canada.
Look, on his map in 1582, made Norumbega an island with the
Penobscot as its southern boundary. A later traveler described
its form as "very much like the figure of a colossal turnip,
with a broad head, a small body and two thin roots."
Had an English student of the 16th
century attempted to draw a map according to his knowledge of
this part of the country, it would have been a curious looking
paper. What limits he would have set on Norumbega, north and
south, we cannot guess, but he surely would have made it a thin
strip of land, with a body of water, probably no more than a
strait, separating it from Asia; for all voyagers then believed
that the northern part of America was no more than a small
obstruction between the Atlantic Ocean and Asia, and they always
were looking for a passage that would take them, by a short cut,
to that rich continent. All below Norumbega he would have marked
"Florida.'' And then, according to the fashion of the map-makers
of those days, he would have liberally sprinkled the "Sea of
Norumbega" and adjacent waters with sea-monsters.
Several French voyagers visited
Norumbega before Ingram. In 1556, Andre Thevet, a Catholic
priest, sailed in a French ship along the entire coast. He
entered Penobscot, where he spent five days and had several
conferences with the Indians. He found a little fort settlement,
which might have been used by French fishermen as headquarters
during the fishing season.
He says in the records, which still
exist: "Having left La Florida on the left hand, with all its
islands, gulfs and capes, a river presents itself, which is one
of the finest rivers in the whole world, which we call "Norumbegue,'
and the aborigines, 'Agoncy.' Several other beautiful rivers
enter into it; and upon its banks the French formerly erected a
little fort about ten or twelve leagues from its mouth. Before
you enter said river, appears an island, surrounded by eight
very small islets, which are near the country of the green
mountains and to the Cape of the islets. From there you sail
along into the mouth of the river, which is dangerous from the
great number of thick and high rocks; and its entrance is
wonderfully large.
"About three leagues into the river, an
island presents itself to you, that may have four leagues in
circumference, inhabited only by some fishermen and birds of
different sorts, which island they call "Alayascon,' because it
has the form of a man's arm, which they call so.
"Having landed and put our feet on the
adjacent country, we perceived a great mass of people coming
down upon us from all sides in such numbers that you might have
supposed them to have been a flight of starlings. And all this
people was clothed in skins of wild animals, which they call "Rabatatz."
If you have ever taken the sail up the
Penobscot, from Camden to Bangor, you will recognize this for as
clear a description as anyone could give, not knowing the names
of the places he was passing. The island "before you enter the
river'' was Fox Island; the "Green Mountains" the Camden hills,
and the island like a man's arm, Islesboro.
But it remained for David Ingram to
discover or invent the magnificent city of Arembec. His stories
gained such fame that he was ordered by the English government
to describe the countries through which he had passed in his
travels and the manuscript is still to be seen in the English
State Paper Office. This is a small part of his sworn statement:
"The Kings in those Countries are clothed with painted or
Colored garments and thereby you may know them, and they wear
great precious stones which commonly are rubies, being 4 inches
long and 2 inches broad, and if the same be taken from them
either by force or fight, they are presently deprived of their
Kingdoms.
"All the people generally wear bracelets
as big as a man's finger upon each of their arms, and the like
on each of their ankles, whereof one commonly is gold and two
silver and many of the women also do wear great plates of gold
covering their bodies and many bracelets and chains of great
pearls."
This and much more like it could not fail to arouse in the
government an interest to colonize in this wondrously rich
country. But the sworn statement was mild in comparison with the
tales with which Ingram beguiled the crowds at the London
taverns, when they gathered of evenings to enjoy their mugs of
ale. His stories gained in the telling and he never lacked an
audience ready to believe every word. It was easy to start him
back over the 2000-mile trail from the" Gulf of Mexico to the
Gulf of Maine, and when he reached the magic city of the Bashaba
his listeners fairly held their breath.
The country wherein lies this marvelous
city was a country of great rivers and waterfalls, so he told
them. There was gold to be picked up with the sands of the sea;
great stores of silver and copper in the rocks, to be had for
the digging; pieces of gold in the rivers as big as a man's fist
and fine pearls, which he himself had gathered but became tired
of carrying and so threw them away. He had come upon a great
crowd of people gathered by the shore to feast on the quahog, a
strange fish on which they gorged themselves for several days
together, until there was left nothing but enormous shell heaps.
Ingram may, in truth, have seen such shell heaps, for remains of
them are still to be found along our Maine coast.
These natives, he further related to his
fascinated listeners, were finely dressed in soft skins, with
ornaments of gold and with strings of pearls, in which the
rivers abounded. He had been most courteously treated by them
and their chief men, who were called Sagamos, had insisted on
his accompanying them eastward to their Bashaba. While yet far
distant, his eyes had been dazzled by the roofs and towers of
the wonder city, Arembec, which glowed like living coals above
the tree-tops, by reason of the gold that covered them.
He had made the journey to the marvelous
city by canoe and the great Bashaba, having been informed of his
approach, had sent an escort down river and, when he arrived,
had received him with all honors. I could not begin to give you
the description of the Lost City of Norumbega, as Ingram gave
it, or of the Bashaba's palace, whose roof, he informed them,
was upheld by twelve great pillars of polished silver and whose
entrance was of solid crystal inlaid with precious stones,
leading into a great hall, whose walls were lined with the
finest gold to the ceiling which was of silver. He told of the
rugs and coverings of the choicest skins and furs, which were
everywhere under foot, not only in the palace of the Bashaba,
but in the dwellings of the natives as well. There was probably
some foundation for this part of the story, for the Indians
never lacked for skins as long as animals were abundant and
easily killed by their arrows.
The houses along the main street of the
city were white and shining, with roofs, some of silver and some
of copper, with wonderful entrances of crystal, hooded with
beaten silver and with doors of burnished copper. Such a house
the Bashaba bestowed on Ingram, with a squaw to cook his food,
rich skins to replace his tattered shreds of clothing, and a
supply of bows and arrows, bidding him stay as long as lie
liked.
Being tanned by sun and wind to a copper
color, when dressed in native costume Ingram's appearance
mightily pleased the Bashaba, so he affirmed, and the ruler of
all Norumbega had insisted on his remaining and becoming one of
the tribe and even now he might have been there, had he not got
wind of the white man's ship upon the St. John's, and his
longing for a sight of home got the better of his admiration for
a country where gold was more common than lead was in England
and where, in almost every house, was a bucket of pearls.
I fear that you will not recognize any
part of your State of Maine from this description, and neither
did the adventurers who later arrived there, after many
difficulties. The city of gold and precious stones had
disappeared, without leaving a trace of its magnificence, except
in the fanciful mind of David Ingram.
There is no doubt, however, that
Ingram's stories spurred on the adventurers and navigators of
the times to investigate the land of riches and to start
colonization. They stirred Sir Humphrey Gilbert to hasten
preparations for his expedition, which turned out disastrously,
and they even reached the ears of the French. It may have been
these self-same tales which aroused Roberval, a favorite of the
French king, to persuade King Francis to make him Lord of
Norumbega, as well as Viceroy of Canada, with the right of
raising a band of volunteers to found a colony, although he
gave, as his philanthropic object, The conversion of the
Indians, men without knowledge of God or use of reason." Anyhow,
the high-sounding title was actually conferred upon him.
The most renowned of the French
explorers, who frankly made one of his objects the search for
the fabled city of Arembec, was Samuel Champlain, who, as pilot,
accompanied DeMonts on his expedition in 1604. This was
noteworthy as the first expedition to the Maine coast, with the
object of founding a permanent colony.
Emmie Bailey Whitney.
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