Customer Reviews

A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and Other Adventurers in Early America

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Some people get turned off by Horwitz's light, popular style; he mixes his history with his own travelogues as he follows its trail, which means that parts of his books are about crappy hotel rooms and weirdos. All that fluff conceals a careful, sober researcher, though; when you're done breezing through one of his books, you'll realize that you learned quite a bit after all.

"A Voyage Long and Strange" covers the murky epoch between the original "discovery" of America and the 1620 Plymouth settlement, when men like Hernando de Soto and Cabeza de Vaca were wandering lost and starving through America, looking for gold and shooting everything else. Fascinating stuff.

There are around 40 counties, towns and cities in the United States that are named after Christopher Columbus, an explorer who never set foot in what is today the U.S.

Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Horwitz uses that fact to launch an exploration into the early adventurers on that vast landscape - including conquistadors, missionaries, pirates and brigands - through impeccable scholarship, humor and unique storytelling bolstered by his walking many of the areas that contain these faded footsteps in the dusty afterthought of history.

The first European who should be feted for the feat "awarded" to Columbus is Ponce de Leon, who landed in Florida in 1513. And it was French Huguenots who were the first Protestants to escape religious persecution in Europe by landing near what is now Jacksonville, Florida, and building a fort.

It certainly was a long and strange trip and one that has the twists and turns of incredible richness and drama. Horwitz brings those times back to life with vivid colors on a rich canvas that sheds light on the true facts and incredible fiction that continues to shape the debate on early America.

First off, I enjoy historical writings written by journalists because they tend to add a more personal touch to the prose, something often missing in the pedantic-academic style of many professors. And, same as Horwitz, I have found myself relearning much of what was `taught' and forgotten. Pulling out my old college text that covers American history from Columbus to 1877 - I see about 19 pages in the front chapter covering 1492 to 1640. I now remember not remembering, because in all practicality, most of the history I was "taught' was my own myth; it never happened. This book is fun because it's like a road trip the rest of us would love to take, but can't, so we follow Horwitz around America and enjoy his discovery of how "American's don't so much study history as shop for it". Our ancestors chased all sorts of myths, discovering and creating truth and fact, that over time either got forgotten or recreated into new myths by more people following them. Columbus chased the "India" myth, the Spanish chased the gold myth, and each myth became melded to the next. The gory awful historical truths laid out next to the endearing myths, makes all our `relearning' more balanced and ultimately something we can enjoy to replace the blank or inaccurate sound bites remembered from our grammar school and college days. Thank you Mr. Horwitz.

Most people have no notion of what occurred during the century between Columbus' discovery of America in 1492 and the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620, or the events in America before Columbus. Tony Horwitz tells the interesting tales of the many dirty and disease infected Europeans who came to America before the Pilgrims in 1620 searching for gold for wealth, grapes for wine, Indian converts to save for Christ, a cure for syphilis, and slaves.

At first glance this history may seem ponderous, but this misconception disappears even after reading part of the first page. The book is written well, with wit and humor and with a scope of interesting details. Horwitz visited the sites that he discuses and describes what and whom he sees in a way that helps the reader understand the history that he is narrating.

The Pilgrims who came to America from England were not the first to settle in this country. Many Europeans preceded them. The Europeans reached half of the forty-eight continental United States. They introduced horses that the Indians had never seen, despite cowboy movies, pigs and diseases.

The first European city in America was not Plymouth, but St. Augustine, founded by the Spanish who celebrated a thanksgiving meal with the Indians fifty-six years before the Pilgrims allegedly did so at Plymouth. There is no proof that the pilgrims had such a ceremony. Anti-European bias probably caused the true history to be forgotten. Moreover, people are wrong who think that the first English colony in America was at Plymouth.

Jamestown preceded Plymouth by thirteen years and was the first permanent English colony in America. In fact, when the Pilgrims disembarked from the Mayflower and came ashore, an Indian who spoke English that he learnt at Jamestown greeted them. These late arrivals were able to find large areas of free land because the diseases brought by the Europeans had killed so many Indians in the area.

The mortality rate at Jamestown was 80 percent and in Plymouth, half the Mayflower passengers died within six months of landing.

Plymouth was not alone in being incorrectly credited. The Norseman Leif Eiriksson discovered the eastern part of the continent long before the time of Columbus. The newly found land was called Newfoundland. However, the general area that the Norsemen settled - which some historians claim reached into northeastern United States was called Vineland because the Norsemen found good grapes and fertile soil in the land that they could use to make wine. Scientists found remains and confirmed that there was a Norse settlement in Newfoundland around the year 1000.

Columbus did not arrive until half a millennium later. While many Americans think that he discovered the United States, the truth is that we do not know exactly where he landed, but it was probably in the Bahamas, four hundred miles southeast of Florida, and he never set foot on United States soil. Columbus was generally wrong: he thought he traveled to India and he thought the world was shaped like a pear.

It was the Spaniard Ponce de Leon who was the first European to enter what later became the United States. He came to Florida in 1513, a century before the English arrived. He named the area Florida because of the many flowers that he saw. He was insulted in the press and a disparaging legend grew up that he traveled throughout Florida looking for a cure for impotence, a story that was latter changed to a search for a fountain of youth.

Horwitz tells how the Spanish explored and settle in America long before the English set foot on American soil, how they butchered and mistreated Indians, and how, among other atrocities, the first recorded sex between a European and an American, an Indian, was rape.

Horwitz also relates the history of the French settlement in Florida in 1564, generations before Jamestown and Plymouth. The French began their settlement with peaceful relations with the Indians, but it did not take long before they also began to kill them.

The English came to North Carolina in 1584, also long before the famed settlements, not to seek a safe place to worship or settle, but a land to plunder.

People will surely end reading this history being struck, and perhaps even bothered, by all the facts that were never mentioned in their high school classes and maybe even somewhat angered over the misinformation they were taught. Horwitz's book is an enjoyable way to set this matter straight.

Tony Horwitz does a brilliant job of sifting through the voluminous material available on the exploration and settling of America from the time of Columbus' first voyage to the West Indies in 1492 up through the Pilgrims landing in Plymouth in the early 1600s. He debunks many myths and fascinates us with information that should really be taught to any student in the U.S. before they graduate from High School. We learn that St. Augustine, Florida is really the earliest permanent settlement in the continental United States. It was Abraham Lincoln who proclaimed the last Thursday of November 1863 as Thanksgiving to acknowledge the sacrifices made for the Union -- not as a tribute to the Pilgrims. Horwitz acknowledges that he focused on ten historical episodes rather than attempting a comprehensive survey and it leaves us wanting to find out more. We don't hear about Samuel de Champlain or Henry Hudson, for instance. However, the work is accessible and engrossing and we come away with the knowledge that what is now known as the United States was abuzz with activity, both from indigenous peoples and European Explorers, long before the Mayflower sailed.

Any long-time Tony Horwitz reader will love A Voyage Long and Strange. Part travelogue, part history, this book puts you in the places today that were so important to the vistors from long ago. The ending is cathartic and satisfying. Highly recommended!

I bought this book for my Kindle but it appears it is no longer available for that platform. In fact I can't view the maps and etchings on my laptop - which really stinks. The printed edition is likely the best way to read this as the Kindle's graphics are very lacking.

Tony Horwitz tells us he was distressed to find that he, a history major, knew almost nothing about the century following Columbus. The author set out to visit sites relevant to this period, but only after he had hit the books. His technique is to switch the narrative, back and forth, between his present-day adventures on location and the associated history itself. He writes with a nice touch of humor, both in telling of the places and the characters he meets and in relating stories from the past. As for style, I'm always suspicious of those with revisionist tendancies, and I see Horwitz in this camp. Perhaps our preconceptions need revision, but I've never cared for the enthusiasm usually involved. Horwitz does prick many bubbles along the way, and in this regard, his writing, for me, felt a bit cynical. Despite this misgiving, Horwitz clearly did his homework, and he helped me understand this surprisingly vague chunk of our past. I learned a lot.

"A Voyage Long and Strange" by Tony Horwitz is an exciting tale of investigative reporting applied to dozens of American historical fables. Mr. Horwitz, through his work with archival research and walking the walk, reveals the lie that most legends of early European exploration have glossed over or covered up. If you've ever questioned such fairy tales as "Washington and the Cherry Tree" or Lincoln's "Long March to Return a Penny" you ain't seen nothin' till you read the whopppers woven into the fabric of American history -- a massive tapestry of untruth that is taught and tested in every school in the nation.

"A Voyage Long and Strange" is organized into sections representing the major target destinations of the explorers of the 16th through 19th centurie, i.e., Vinland, Columbus's 1492, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, The Gulf Coast (of Mexico, The South, The Plains, The Mississippi, Florida, Roanoke, Jamestown, and Plymouth). Norwitz follows up his research with information comparing the early explorers' intentions with what they actually did, and his personal travels following the explorers' routes. What we learn in these pages is that the imperial European launches to the new world might be broken down to motives for "God and Gold," to give the former and steal the latter (even in the form of Indian slavery). One cannot help but be dismayed at the level of greed of the Europeans and their sense that what is now North America was by some divine right theirs for the taking. Apparently what they left was a massive amount of dislocation and misery for indigenous peoples and an array of diseases against which native American had no immunity.

The book is written in an informal, non-pedantic style and larded with the author's outrageous sense of humor, including many bon mots ranging from chuckles to knee slappers. One good example of Norwitz's analyses is the sham that was Columbus. Simply said: a household word in the U.S., a monument in many states and cities, including many holidays in his name; Columbus never ever landed on what is now America. Despite the author's acerbic wit, "A Voyage Long and Strange" is often not a pleasant read, but I believe it an enormously important book for most of us who are uncomfortable with American self-righteous strutting on the world stage. It's one of those books that will change your mind about much of the history you thought you knew.

At first I thought the premise of this book would fall victim to its own humble motivation: to increase the average American's awareness of European attempts to settle his nation's territory before the arrival of the Mayflower. The author, a journalist whose education included a major in history, has an epiphany at Plymouth Rock that the time between the arrival of Columbus and the iconic Pilgrims is a "lost century" in the collective consciousness of his countrymen. This book is his attempt to retrace the many other settlement attempts in a combination of modern-day road trip and historical refresher course. He begins even before Columbus, with the Vikings. His trekking to Newfoundland for this initial foray made me hopeful that he would consider the considerable French efforts to colonize the continent through what is now Canada. However, Mr. Horwitz essentially omits this part of the story in favor of Spanish and English efforts. This may be a bias reflecting the undeniably greater impact of the latter groups on modern culture in the United States. But by avoiding a voyage too long and exhaustive, he certainly keeps the road trip more fun! Readers interested in the French contribution could nicely complement this book with Philip Marchand's "Ghost Empire", which follows a similar travelogue-as-history format.

I was won over by the masterful interweaving of history with modern day perspective as he retraces the routes of explorers and settlers. While he does concentrate on conquistadors marching through the South and the English colonization of the East coast, any arbitrariness in his narrative is offset by the humanity of his tone. This extends from the kindness of strangers he encounters along the way to sympathy for all sides of those whose legacy makes up modern America. The hardship of the settlers is duly noted, but no less so is the suffering of the natives who were displaced or, in some notable exceptions, endured. By the end, both Horwitz and the reader realize that the journey was not about literally retracing history after all. It was more a meditation on how America's own "creation myth" has evolved over time.

This diary of discovery deserves five stars for combining history and travelogue into one entertaining ride.

I really enjoyed this book. There's a lot of American history that our history teachers tend to gloss over and we get to go along for the ride as Horowitz hunts that history through the North American continent. And this isn't "revisionist" history -- it's history that just isn't told very much.

I read it soon after I read Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. While it's a lighter read, it was a great follow-up. Horowitz manages to weave history with hilarious anecdotes (both his and those of the early explorers that he's tracking). I really recommend this book to anyone with any interest in American history -- and that's why I've given it to several people.