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On a chance visit to Plymouth Rock, Tony Horwitz makes an
unsettling discovery. A history buff since childhood, expensively
educated at university -- a history major, no less! -- he's reached
middle age with a third-grader's grasp of early America. In fact, he's
mislaid more than a century of American history, the perioud separating
Columbus's landing in 1492 from the arrival of English colonists at Jamestown in 160-something. Did nothing happen in between?
Horwitz decides to find out, and in A Voyage Long and Strange
he uncovers the neglected story of America's founding by Europeans. He
begins a thousand years ago, with the Vikings, and then tells the
dramatic tale of conquistadors, castaways, French voyageurs, Moorish
slaves, and many others who roamed and rampaged across half the states of the present-day U.S. continent, long before the Mayflower
landed. These forgotten firstcomers sought grapes, gold, converts, even
a cure for syphilis, and brought creatures, weapons, and germs unknown
to natives of the New World. Though almost all failed, they wrote
vividly of what they saw -- Zuni pueblos and buffalo plains, the Great
Smokies and Grand Canyon, Atlantic dunes and Pacific fogs -- and left
an enduring mark on the land and people encountered by late-arriving
English settlers.
To explore this history and its legacy in the present, Horwitz embarks
on an epic quest of his own -- trekking in search of grape-rich
Vinland, Ponce de León's Fountain of Youth, Coronado's Cities of
Gold, Walter Raleigh's Lost Colonists, and other mysteries of ear1y
America. He joins Micmac Indians in a sub-Arctic sweat lodge and
modern-day conquistadors who don helmets and armor in subtropical heat.
He paddles the Mississippi and scales ancient mound cities. And
everywhere he goes, Horwitz probes the revealing gap between fact and
legend, between what we enshrine and what we forgot.
An irresistible blend of history, myth,
and misadventure, A Voyage Long and Strange allows us to rediscover the New World for ourselves.
pub date: 2008-04-29 | hardcover | 9780805076035 |
