MADreads

A new look at a new-founde land

September 4th, 2008 Katie H.

Ask most Americans about what transpired between Columbus’ sighting of the New World and the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving, and you’re likely to get a blank look in response.  At least, that was the experience of Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Tony Horwitz, who was appalled to discover that in spite of a college degree and a career of fact-finding, he had no inkling of what transpired in that 130 year void, his own sort of historical terra incognita.   

Ever the intrepid reporter, Horwitz sets out to fill in the missing gaps with his own trip, recounting his misadventures in A Voyage Long and Strange:  Rediscovering the New World.  It’s an apt title, as it refers equally well to the wanderings of hapless Europeans spectacularly out of their depth, or Horwitz’s own state of mind as he encounters modern day Americans still grappling with the effects of the American conquest.  Starting out where the Vikings first made landfall hundreds of years before Columbus, Horwitz considers the felicity of Nordic naming practices that gave the barren Newfoundland coast the moniker Vinland before barely surviving a harrowing night in a sweat lodge.  Moving on to the Dominican Republic, Horwitz comes close to seeing what could be Columbus’s bones–only to discover the real meaning of the Columbus curse.  Finally, he wanders much of the southern United States, following the brutal wake of conquistadors De Coronado and De Soto in their fruitless searches for cities of gold among the wilds of modern-day New Mexico and Florida. 

Horwitz’s humorous approach to travel writing reminds me a lot of Bill Bryson’s many misadventures.  But Horwitz’s journalistic use of interviews and research is as much interested in determining the relevance of such long ago events as it is in debunking historical myths.  For instance, the story of Pocahontas and John Smith has been romanticized into a glossy, Disneyfied love story.  But as Horwitz reports, Pocahontas’ legacy has been used to justify racist efforts to deny Native Americans their identity and drive a wedge between them and African Americans–wounds that still linger in Virginia today. 

Like his earlier work Confederates in the Attic, A Voyage Long and Strange asks why myths about history persist and what that says about American identity.  Under the fun travelogue and various mishaps, the history lesson isn’t quite the same one taught in elementary school, but one that will linger considerably longer.

Entry Filed under: Nonfiction, Travel