Plymouth, to me, is the end of the beginning, not the beginning; it's the toddlerhood of America, when things could have gone in any direction," Tony Horwitz was saying recently on Martha's Vineyard, where he lives with his wife, the novelist Geraldine Brooks, and their son in an old house that was once a bed-and-breakfast. "As early as 1513, when Juan Ponce de León shows up near Daytona Beach," the 49-year-old author and Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter went on, "you have Spanish roaming over roughly half this continent — generations before the English settlers get here." Indeed, as Horwitz points out, by the logic of naming countries after their European discoverers, the future American nation should have been called the United States of Juan.
In Confederates in the Attic, his best-selling 1998 adventure through the lingering aftershocks of the Civil War, Horwitz considered whether his obsession with the 1860s wasn't a sort of ritualized way of being American, a route back to a central question that has stretched through our history: How will such a fractured populace come together to form a unified nation? In his new book, A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World (Henry Holt), Horwitz travels through some of the forgotten colonial history that has been cast aside in formulating an answer to that question.
Visiting Plymouth Rock in 2003, Horwitz realized that what he knew about America before the Mayflower arrived in Plymouth in 1620 could be dispensed with in a few sentences. Over the next three years, he assigned himself the task of discovering that history. And so Horwitz, who is the type of guy who will talk to as many strangers as will talk to him, set about traveling the routes of North America's first pioneers, up and down and all over the continent — from Newfoundland, where seafaring Norsemen landed a thousand years ago, to the Dominican Republic, where Columbus planted a second European outpost almost 500 years later, to Roanoke, where the English misplaced their first group of colonists, and to the many places in-between.
By and large, what Horwitz found surprised him. Take our myth of 1492. First of all, the continent had been known to European adventurers ever since a Norseman named Bjarni Herjolfsson, sailing for Greenland around the year 986, stumbled upon Canada. (He judged it worthless.) Later, after explorer Leif Eriksson arrived, the Norse would produce the first European child born in the Americas, one Snorri, son of Thorfinn and Gudrid. Or take the bravery of Columbus's rejection of flat-earth theory: In fact, European scholars had agreed that the planet was round for centuries. Columbus, who thought the Earth was shaped like a breast (with a nipple at the top), died in Spain in 1506 still thinking he'd reached a set of islands off the Asian mainland.
The next century in America, Horwitz writes, was largely an age of Spanish exploration, during which settlers traveled not only in Florida and California and the Southwest but also through the Appalachians, to the Mississippi, over the Great Plains, up to Maine, and out to Oregon. "This was a Spanish territory before it was an English one," Horwitz said. "And it's a misconception that they were just in a few spots. They were in Kansas! They ranged all over. So I find it ludicrous to argue that this is somehow an Anglo nation in its bones."
