wave of Maine explorers thus arrived with radically different dreams and objectives. For the English, the new phase of exploration and colonial endeavor began when Sir Humphrey Gilbert sent Simon Ferdinando and John Walker to the Maine coast in 1579 and 1580 respectively. In search of a likely place to locate a New World colony, the explorers were drawn to the Penobscot region, for it was there they hoped to find Norumbega, a region and a city of fabled productivity, wealth, and splendor.
The myth of Norumbega blossomed during the mid-sixteenth century. The term first appeared as "Oranbega" on Girolamo da Verrazano's 1529 map of his brother's 1524 voyage. Three decades later, the region had acquired a reputation as a northern land of milk and honey, owing in large part to European publicists who obtained sketchy, second-hand information about the region and imaginatively embellished it. One of them, Pierre Crignon, stated that "the land overflows with every kind of fruit, there grow the wholesome orange and the almond, and many sorts of sweet-smelling trees." André Thevet, who had spoken with Jacques Cartier about his experiences in the St. Lawrence region, was slightly more accurate, but he too provided a glowing portrayal of Norumbega.
In the late 1550s, an English sailor named David Ingram grasped the opportunity to improve a good story. Ingram and two companions had been set ashore on the Gulf coast of Florida in October 1557. According to Ingram, they proceeded overland on Indian trails all the way to Maine. After a couple of years of wandering, Ingram turned up at the mouth of the St. John River and caught a French ship back to England. There he began recounting his adventures in the New World. Norumbega, he insisted, was the Cibola of the north. In "a town half a mile long" with "many streets far broader than any street in London," the men wore "hoopes" of gold and silver on their arms and legs. Their ornaments were "garnished with pearls, divers of them as big as one's thumb." Women were adorned in gold plates, and the houses were supported by pillars of gold, silver, and crystal. Ingram's adventures included finding gold nuggets as large as his fist in springs and brooks and being chased by creatures as big as a horse with tusks. Seldom had a single traveler done more to misinform one continent about the makeup of another.
If Ingram had done little to further truth about the New World, at least he sparked new interest. John Walker, who apparently landed near present day Camden on his 1580 voyage, climbed a nearby hill and described the surrounding land as "most excellent for soil, diversity of sweet wood and other trees." Walker visited an Indian lodge and stole some of four hundred hides that were stored there. Only once did he let his imagination get the better of him. Spying some mica sparkling in the rocks, he promptly decided he had located a silver deposit.
Humphrey Gilbert was sufficiently impressed by the accounts of Ferdinando and Walker to attempt a colony in the region in 1583. After sailing to Newfoundland, which he officially claimed for the Queen, he continued west, only to meet with disaster. The supply ship, the Delight, went aground off Nova Scotia and was beat to pieces, with the loss of all provisions for the projected colony and most of the crew. Gilbert was forced to turn back but never reached England; the Squirrel, a small pinnace in which he was sailing, foundered in heavy seas. Gilbert's half-brother, Sir Walter Raleigh, carried on the effort by commissioning yet another exploration, but reports from the voyage convinced him to shift his efforts farther south; soon thereafter he established the unsuccessful settlements at Roanoke, Virginia. This, along with the great war with Spain, once again shifted the focus of exploration and colonization away from Maine.
It was not until 1602 that English explorers returned to the North. That year Bartholomew Gosnold and Bartholomew Gilbert (the son of Sir Humphrey Gilbert) launched an expedition sponsored by the Earl of Southampton to establish a s