Note Note 8, page 15 — BOOK I. RISE OF THE FIRST ENGLISH COLONY.

Fact and fable about America. The unfaltering faith in the existence of abundant gold on the eastern coast of North America could not have subsisted on thin air so long if it had not been stimulated by the almost fabulous wealth drawn from South America by Spain. It had received encouragement also from the tales told by adventurers returned from America, who seem to have thought it necessary to bring back stories that would match in some degree the prevalent beliefs about the New World. The earliest but one of all the documents relating to America preserved among the British state papers is the statement of one David or Davy Ingram. With a hundred other luckless seamen he was put ashore in Mexico by Sir John Hawkins, because the ship lacked provisions. Ingram, traveling from tribe to tribe, achieved the notable feat of crossing the continent in a year. In 1569 he embarked on a French ship that he found near the mouth of the St. John River in what is now the province of New Brunswick. It was eleven years later that Davy Ingram, at home in England, made his statement, and the sailor's story had by that time gained much, perhaps, by frequent telling to wonder-loving listeners. Ingram's story. Sometimes he relates facts with sobriety, speaking the truth by relapse, it may be; again, he seems to be repeating tales told him by the savages, who were habitual marvel-mongers, or weaving into the account of what he had seen legends common in the folklore about America that had grown up in Europe; or perchance he only falls into an old forecastle habit of incontinent lying without provocation. The American women are described as "wearing great plates of gold covering their whole bodies like armor.... In every cottage pearls are to be found, and in some houses a peck"—an assertion that had a grain of truth in it, since the sailor no doubt mistook wampum beads for pearls. Fireflies, in this old tar's exalted memory, are "fire dragons, which make the air very red as they fly," while the buffalo appears as an animal "as big as two of our oxen." The streets in one "city" are broader than London streets, which we may readily believe. The banqueting houses are built of crystal, "with pillars of massie silver, some of gold." This is a fine example of the manner of a mind afflicted with the vice of exaggeration; crystal becomes silver in the next breath, and silver is as instantly transmuted to gold. All that optimistic projectors sought in America—gold, silver, pearls by the peck, and great abundance of silkworms—are obligingly supplied in Ingram's narrative. Such tales impressed the imagination in a romantic and uncritical age. Note 8.