A Voyage Long and Strange

March 10, 2008
Signature

Reviewed by
Robert Sullivan
As opposed to the Pilgrims, Tony Horwitz begins his journey at Plymouth Rock.
Plymouth Rock is a myth. The Pilgrims—who, Horwitz notes, were on a mission that was based less on freedom and the schoolbook history ideas the president of the United States typically mentions when he pardons a turkey at the White House and more on finding a cure for syphilis—may or may not have noticed it. In about 1741, a church elder in Plymouth, winging it, pointed out a boulder that is now more like a not-at-all-precious stone. Three hundred years later, people push and shove to see it in summer tourist season, wearing T-shirts that say, “America’s Hometown.” Which eventually leads an overstimulated (historically speaking) Horwitz to come close to starting a fight in a Plymouth bar. “Not to Virginians it isn’t,” he writes. “Or Hispanics or Indians.”
“Forget all the others,” his bar mate says loudly. “This
is the friggin’ beginning of America!”
A Voyage Long and Strange
is a history-fueled, self-imposed mission of rediscovery, a travelogue that sets out to explore the surprisingly long list of explorers who discovered America, and what discovered
means anyway, starting with the Vikings in A.D. 1000, and ending up on the Mayflower
. Horwitz (Blue Latitudes
; Confederates in the Attic
) even dons conquistador gear, making the narrative surprisingly fun and funny, even as he spends a lot of time describing just how badly Columbus and subsequently the Spanish treated people. (Highpoint: a trip to a Columbus battle site in the Dominican Republic, when Horwitz gets stuck with a nearly inoperable rental car in a Sargasso Sea of traffic.) In the course of tracing the routes of de Soto in, for instance, Tennessee, and the amazing Cabeza de Vaca (Daniel Day Lewis’s next role?) in Tucson, Ariz., Horwitz drives off any given road to meet the back-to-the-land husband-and-wife team researching Coronado’s expeditions through Mexico; or the Fed Ex guy who may be a link to the lost colonists of the Elizabethan Roanoke expedition.
Horwitz can occasionally be smug about what constitutes custom—who’s to say that a Canadian tribe’s regular karaoke night isn’t a community-building exercise as valid as the communal sweat that nearly kills Horwitz early on in his thousands of miles of adventures? But as a character himself, he is friendly and always working hard to listen and bear witness. “I hate the whole Thanksgiving story,” says a newspaper editor of Spanish descent, a man he meets along the trail of Coronado. “We should be eating chili, not turkey. But no one wants to recognize the Spanish because it would mean admitting that they got here decades before the English.”
Robert Sullivan is the author of
Cross Country, How Not to Get Rich and
Rats (Bloomsbury).

Starred review from April 1, 2008
Realizing that his knowledge of American history between Columbus's discovery and Plymouth Rock over 100 years later was sketchy at best, Pulitzer Prizewinning former journalist Horwitz ("Confederates in the Attic") sets out to educate himself with his own explorations. He intertwines his experiences retracing the early conquistadors, adventurers, and entrepreneurs through such regions as Newfoundland, the Dominican Republic, and the American South, Southwest, and New England with thoroughly researched accounts of the territories themselves, the natives who were historically affected, and the motives of the explorers. Along the way, Horwitz meets many interesting people who have studied and/or appropriated the early discoverers for their own purposes: a conquistador reenactor who likens De Soto to a drug lord, the Zuni tribe of New Mexico, an expert on 16th-century combat, the fraternal Improved Order of the Red Men, and the Dominican belief in a Columbus jinx. At the end of his journey, Horwitz recognizes that all the truths he uncovered will never quash the myths of American history, especially the Pilgrim mystique. This readable and vastly entertaining history travelog is highly recommended for public libraries.Margaret Atwater-Singer, Univ. of Evansville Libs., IN

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 15, 2008
Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist Horwitz has presented what could be described as a guide for those who are historically ignorant of the lost century between the first voyage of Columbus and the establishment of Jamestown in 1607. Despite his undergraduate degree in history, Horwitz includes himself in that group. In this informative, whimsical, and thoroughly enjoyable account, Horwitz describes the exploits of various explorers and conquistadores and enriches the stories with his own experiences when visiting some of the lands they discovered. He recounts the Viking settlement of Vinland and then visits Newfoundland. He offers a balanced view of Columbus personality and accomplishments, placing him within the context of an epoch of great maritime innovation. He follows in the footsteps of Cabeza de Vaca, whose amazing wanderings across the southwest began when he was shipwrecked off the Gulf Coast of Texas. Coronados trek in search of the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola is viewed as combining elements of farce and tragedy. As always, Horwitz writes in a breezy, engaging style, so this combination of popular history and travelogue will be ideal for general readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)