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\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Author Tony Horwitz got the idea to write about the history of the New World when he visited Plymouth, Massachusetts in the early \u201800s.\u00a0 He ended up in Plymouth more by chance than by any deliberate plan.\u00a0 He was taking a road trip and decided to pull off at that particular exit when the Red Sox game he was listening to on the radio ended.\u00a0 In the land known best as the spot\u00a0 where the <\/span>Mayflower<\/span><\/i> Pilgrims first set foot on these shores, Horwitz decided he may as well visit Plymouth Rock, the fabled location where they first came ashore.\u00a0 Although the Rock is housed in a columned pavilion, he missed the site on his first pass and had to flag down a speed walker for directions.\u00a0 His initial reaction was a vague sense of disappointment:\u00a0 \u201cStepping inside, I came to a rail overlooking a shallow pit.\u00a0 At the bottom sat a lump of granite, the wet sand around it strewn with cigarette butts and ticket stubs from the nearby wax museum.\u00a0 The boulder, about five feet square, had a badly mended cleft in the middle.\u00a0 It looked like a fossilized potato.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0As he pondered this icon of American history, other tourists began to gather.\u00a0 Horwitz listened to their comments and gathered they had similar feelings of being underwhelmed:\u00a0 \u201cThat\u2019s it?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s like nothing – we have bigger rocks than that in our yard.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cThat\u2019s going to be one heckuva home movie.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cYeah, my visit to Plymouth Pebble.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cThe Pilgrims must have had small feet.\u201d\u00a0 He stopped to talk to the park ranger who was dutifully recording the number of visitors with a hand clicker and asked about people dissing the \u2018sacred stone\u2019.\u00a0 She replied, \u201cA lot of people come here expecting the Rock of Gibraltar.\u00a0 Maybe that\u2019s where they went on their last vacation.\u201d\u00a0 Given all the press the Pilgrims get in school history books, I assume most people who go there are expecting something more \u2018Disneyland\u2019 and less \u2018fossilized potato\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0As Tony discussed the matter with the park ranger, she mentioned some of the odd questions tourists ask about Plymouth Rock:\u00a0 \u201cWas it true the <\/span>Mayflower<\/span><\/i> crashed into it?\u00a0 Did the Pilgrims serve Thanksgiving on top of it?\u00a0 Is the ten-foot tall bronze Indian statue on the hill overlooking the rock life-sized?\u00a0 Why does the date etched into the stone say 1620 and not 1492?\u00a0 Is this where the three ships landed (meaning the fleet of the<\/span> Nina, Pinta, <\/span><\/i>and the <\/span>Santa Maria –<\/span><\/i> the ships from the first voyage of Columbus in 1492)?\u00a0 Did Columbus drop off the Pilgrims and then sail home?\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Upon returning to his room at the William Bradford Motor Inn, Horwitz tabulated his own list of questions.\u00a0 At the top, he wrote, \u201cHow come I know so little about what happened between the Pilgrims and Columbus?\u201d\u00a0 Tony pondered how little he actually remembered about the history of America between the two dates everyone had burned into their brains in elementary school:\u00a0 1492 for the arrival of Columbus – 1620 for the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock.\u00a0 What about the 128 years in between these dates?\u00a0 He noted, \u201cI was expensively educated at a private school and university – a history major, no less! – I\u2019d matriculated to middle age with a third grader\u2019s grasp of early America.\u201d\u00a0 Returning home to Virginia, he vowed to visit his public library and do some remedial research about what other things took place in this time period.\u00a0 The end result was his book <\/span>A Voyage Long and Strange – Rediscovering The New World <\/span><\/i>(Henry Holt Co. –\u00a0 2008).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I ordered copy in the spring of 2022 from one of those discount book seller\u2019s catalogs and when it arrived, I recognized the cover.\u00a0 It was a book I had found at our public library and read when it first came out.\u00a0 It was reasonable to assume most of the information had already left my memory banks from my previous read (considering I had already forgotten the title).\u00a0 This is one of the reasons I decided to keep a log of the books I have read since my retirement in the summer of 2018!\u00a0 It didn\u2019t matter because once I started the book (again), I found it hard to put down.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The plan Horwitz hatched while doing his research was to simply hit the road and visit some of the historical sites that had been skipped over in his education.\u00a0 The diversity of stories he discovered during his research led him to a conclusion supported by the old axiom, \u201cThe winners write the history.\u201d\u00a0 In that most of North America ended up being controlled by light-skinned Europeans, it made sense to Horwitz – the history they wrote down and peddled was about them.\u00a0 The \u2018losers\u2019 (aka the other explorers who failed to gain a permanent foothold here and the Indigenous peoples who were displaced) became little more than footnotes in this Euro-heavy narrative.\u00a0 Before the Pilgrims settled in Plymouth, there had already been short lived settlements up and down the east coast of North America.\u00a0 These proto-settlements lasted long enough to inflict new diseases on the locals who had no immunity to fight them off.\u00a0 Indeed, William Bradford described the area around Plymouth as, \u201cFit for situation\u201d with land already cleared and ready to plant.\u00a0 The reason this land was available?\u00a0 Bradford said it was because \u201can extraordinary plague\u201d had wiped out the coastal natives.\u00a0 It was a sad tale repeated at other pre-Pilgrim settlements – later Americans, according to Horwitz, \u201cDidn\u2019t pioneer a virgin wilderness.\u00a0 They occupied a land long since transformed by European contact.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0With Columbus and those who followed him as an anchor point, Horwitz decided to go back even further to find the true story of who discovered America.\u00a0 In the Norse sagas (\u2018saga\u2019 comes from a Norse word for \u2018say\u2019), the original stories were oral histories passed from generation to generation around the campfires.\u00a0 They weren\u2019t actually written down until much later so, as with any story passed down over many tellings, parts were mixed up and sometimes embellished.\u00a0 Regardless of how much truth these tales may or may not contain, Horwitz started with the saga of Eirik the Red.\u00a0 It seems Eirik\u2019s bad temper and habit of killing those he had disagreements with pushed him from Norway to Iceland and eventually to Greenland.\u00a0 Settling there in 986 A.D., he picked the lush sounding name, \u201cas he said people would be attracted to go there if it had a favorable name.\u201d\u00a0 Having arrived during a relatively mild period, he and his followers were able to raise stock and enough crops to survive on the green fringes of the largely ice-covered land mass.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It was Eirik\u2019s son, Leif, who would go on to explore the lands to the west of Greenland.\u00a0 A Norse seaman named Bjarni Heerjolfsson had become disoriented at sea (an event common enough the Norse even had a word for it – <\/span>hafvalla<\/span><\/i>) and stumbled upon a previously unknown land.\u00a0 Lacking curiosity, he sailed along it for five days before returning to Greenland.\u00a0 Leif (the more curious of the two) bought Bjarni\u2019s boat and set off with thirty five men to explore this new land.\u00a0 As they explored the coast, they came upon a headland with mild enough temperatures to produce good grazing land year round and rivers full of salmon.\u00a0 They built \u2018large houses\u2019 and settled in.\u00a0 While making exploration sorties in the area, a man named Tykir discovered grape vines which he recognized from his European homeland.\u00a0 The Norwegians, who knew of wine (but nothing of grapes), were fine with naming the new land Vinland, or Land of Wine.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Horwitz discounts most other \u2018discoveries\u2019 of Viking relics in North America (perhaps another story for another day), but he fully embraced the discoveries made in the area of what Leif named Vinland.\u00a0 In 1961, a Norwegian lawyer turned explorer named Helge Ingstad did his own research of the Norse Sagas and followed the trail to the northern tip of Newfoundland.\u00a0 There at a fishing village called L\u2019Anse aux Meadows, he was shown a field the locals called an \u2018Indian camp\u2019.\u00a0 To Ingstad, the layout reminded him of Norse farms he had seen in Greenland.\u00a0 He and his wife spent the next eight years uncovering dwellings and artifacts that were dated back to 1000 A.D.\u00a0 Horwitz had found his starting point for his New World history tour – the Vikings did indeed discover, and then became the first non-native settlers of this continent.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Horwitz devoted 67 pages to Columbus and his exploits in the New World.\u00a0 He reminds us that in spite of how many geographical references we can find in North America (like Columbus, Ohio and Washington, District of Columbia), he never set foot on the continent proper.\u00a0 For the sake of brevity, I am going to only say the voyages of Columbus transformed the islands he touched but not necessarily in a positive way.\u00a0 The endless search for gold and the subjugation of the native populations are placed squarely on Christobal\u2019s shoulders, but they pale when compared to those who followed him.\u00a0 For example, when Hernan Cortez conquered the Aztec empire (with a population of some ten million people, 100,000 of which lived in one city, the future location of Mexico City), the history books seemed fixated on the feat because Cortez\u2019s command only contained some 400 men.\u00a0 Truth be told, his greatest skill as a military leader was rounding up the people who had been conquered by Moctezuma, the Aztec leader.\u00a0 The dual edge sword of newly inflated numbers (with his new found allies who hated the Aztecs) and the smallpox epidemic that swept the country brought down the empire, not just \u2018Cortez and his 400 Spaniards\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The Spanish crown needed gold to fund their military campaigns in Europe.\u00a0 Their secondary goal was to spread their version of Christianity.\u00a0 As Cortez told his soldiers, \u201cWe were obligated to make war against enemies of our faith.\u201d\u00a0 The pattern would be repeated in North and South America with Spain eventually controlling a larger domain than the entire Roman Empire.\u00a0 Cortez and the Conquistadors were Johnny-come-latelies, however, as the first Spaniards to set foot on the North American continent were led by Ponce de Leon.\u00a0 That de Leon would be wounded and die in Florida, the state he named for its beautiful flora, is remembered less than his reported search for a \u2018fountain of youth\u2019.\u00a0 The whole \u2018fountain of youth\u2019 schtick being a creative retelling of his adventures by a historical writer who needed to jazz up the story.\u00a0 We hear about the conquests and pillaging, but we will leave the stories of Cortez, Pizarro, DeSoto, Coronado, and the other conquistadors for another time.\u00a0 The story Horwitz had never heard was perhaps the greatest of all the Spanish adventures in North America.\u00a0 It took place almost a hundred years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth.\u00a0 The Conquistadors listed above left a trail of brutality and exploitation in their wake but the story Horwitz uncovered ended with the explorers being transformed, not the Natives they encountered.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Between 1528 and 1536, a former member on one of de Leon\u2019s explorations in La Florida, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, took what Horwitz called, \u201cA cross-country trek that made Lewis and Clark\u2019s expedition, three centuries later, look like a Cub Scout outing by comparison.\u00a0 This desperate crossing, which transformed him from armed invader to native healer, also demolished my [Horwotiz\u2019s] image of Spanish conquest as a relentless steamrolling of America and its people.\u201d\u00a0 In his own remembrances, a chronicle Cabeze de Vaca called <\/span>Account<\/span><\/i>, he stated, \u201cI wandered lost and naked through many and very strange lands.\u00a0 [This story] is the only thing that a man who returned naked could bring back.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Cabeza de Vaca\u2019s tale begins when an exploratory expedition under the command of Panfilo de Narvaez landed near present day Tampa in 1528.\u00a0 Hoping to find a Tierra Nueva (the New Land) version of an Aztec empire to loot, Narvaez made the classic mistake of dividing his party:\u00a0 Five ships and a quarter of his men were sent west along the coast to have a look-see.\u00a0 The rest moved in land.\u00a0 Ill-provisioned for the hostile climate and under attack by Native archers, they fled back to the coast hoping to be rescued. Their hopes were dashed when they found the ships were long gone, never to return.\u00a0 The 242 survivors fashioned crude rafts and, \u201cWithout having anyone with us who knew the art of navigation,\u201d they followed the Gulf shore west until they ran out of fresh water.\u00a0 When they encountered the mighty Mississippi River, this makeshift flotilla began to drift apart in the strong currents.\u00a0 As they came to shore, de Vaca called out to his commander on another raft who answered, \u201cIt was no longer time for one man to rule another.\u00a0 Each one should do whatever seemed best to him in order to save his own life.\u201d\u00a0 Narvaez and his raft turned from the shore, never to be seen again.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Stranded and mostly naked after several attempts to relaunch their rafts, de Vaca and his men were taken in by the local Natives who gave them shelter and food.\u00a0 The 80 Spaniards who remained called this place the Isle of Doom, today known as Galveston Island, Texas.\u00a0 As Natives and Spaniards alike began to die from a mysterious stomach ailment, their hosts suspected the Spaniards were the cause.\u00a0 They demanded their visitors heal the ill.\u00a0 Cabeze wrote, \u201cWe did our healing by making the sign of the cross on the sick person, breathing on them (a Native \u2018cure\u2019 they had observed), saying the Lord\u2019s Prayer, and a Hail Mary.\u201d\u00a0 The miraculous healing earned the Spaniards more good will from the Natives who put them to work gathering berries and pulling cane from the water in the spring.\u00a0 Cabeza de Vaca, tired of being half starved and worked like a slave, fled to a new village on the mainland where he became a trader and a\u00a0 go-between of the various coastal tribes and their enemies.\u00a0 He liked the freedom of this life, but after four years, he returned to the Isle of Doom to convince a fellow Spaniard to flee to the west with him.\u00a0 After only a short while, his companion changed his mind and returned to the Isle, leaving de Vaca to carry on alone.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Cabeza de Vaca would eventually connect with the only other survivors of the original 300 man expedition:\u00a0 two Spaniards, and a \u2018black Arab\u2019 who had come ashore in La Florida many years ago.\u00a0 All four were put to work as slaves and the unrlenting cycle of hard work, tormenting mosquitos, and near starvation marked this as de Vaca\u2019s lowest point.\u00a0 He stated in <\/span>Account<\/span><\/i>, \u201cI can affirm that no other affliction suffered in the world can equal this.\u201d\u00a0 Once they resolved to escape their captivity, the band of four made their way across south Texas and eventually into northern Mexico.\u00a0 Word about this new \u2018healer\u2019 spread ahead of them and their entourage grew to several hundred tag-a-longs.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The farther they traveled and the more he \u2018healed\u2019, the more mystical his version in <\/span>Account<\/span><\/i> becomes.\u00a0 With the \u2018black Arab\u2019 Estervanico acting as the point man, de Vaca\u2019s little band took on the air of a traveling cult.\u00a0 All along his travels, de Vaca\u2019s view of the Natives began to change.\u00a0 Ne no longer viewed them as people to be conquered but to be saved.\u00a0 His followers, however, had other ideas and took every opportunity to sack whatever villages they came to on the long trek.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Upon reaching the Gulf of California, de Vaca and crew finally encountered, \u201cfour Christians on horseback.\u00a0 They looked at me for a long time, so astonished that they were not able to speak or ask me any questions.\u201d\u00a0 Eight years and several thousand miles of wandering after landing in Florida, de Vaca felt he had to protect his band of followers from the slave traders he had just met, so he sent is entourage home.\u00a0 He later learned the slavers returned and attacked the Natives de Vaca had tried to protect.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Though he would eventually die in obscurity at a time and place not recorded, de Vaca sailed home after his American ramble and wrote the Crown a letter placing him squarely in the role of\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n advocate:\u00a0 \u201cAll these people, in order to be attracted to becoming Christians and subjects of your Imperial Majesty, need to be treated well.\u00a0 This is a very sure way to accomplish this;\u00a0 indeed, there is no other way.\u201d\u00a0 Sad to say, the message fell on deaf ears and, in terms of the Native Americans who occupied these shores long before Columbus, the worst was yet to come.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0One further note on the author:\u00a0 Tony Horwitz was on the way to a book signing in Washington, D.C. on May 27, 2019 when he suffered a massive heart attack.\u00a0 He passed away at the age of 60 leaving his wife and two grown sons.t<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Top Piece Video:\u00a0 Billy Joel is my ‘go to musical history’ guy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Author Tony Horwitz got the idea to write about the history of the New World when he visited Plymouth, Massachusetts in the early \u201800s.\u00a0 He ended up in Plymouth more by chance than by any deliberate plan.\u00a0 He was taking a road trip and decided to pull off at that particular exit when the 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