ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the important role occupied by Indigenous polities in the writings describing the American exploits of David Ingram and George Peckham. It also explores the nature of the empire that Dee, Frobisher, Davis, Peckham, and Ingram brought into being through their collective invasive, ideological, and literary actions. Ingram's insistence that his knowledge was derived from observations gathered while he walked the length of America represents an attempt to lay claim to those lands that had passed under his feet through several webs of appropriation. In addition to articulating the vision of a British Empire avant la lettre, John Dee carried out acts of figurative erasure as a reader and annotator that were quite similar to David Ingram's ambulatory cartography. Similar to Ingram's stratagems of genre appropriation and geographical erasure, Peckham articulated an explanatory scheme through which Spaniards could be taken entirely out of the equation.
