Of gold and God, conquest and conversion
A VOYAGE LONG AND STRANGE:
Rediscovering the New World
By Tony Horwitz
398 pp. Henry Holt $27.50
Reviewed by Ruth Douillette
When it comes to history, most of us learned desiccated chips of information from texts as dry as cornflakes. We never realized that real blood once coursed through the veins of the men, and the occasional women, in those books who were granted a paragraph and maybe a color-coded arrow on a map.
Tony Horwitz pours the cornflakes into a bowl, adds cream and sugar, and even tosses in some strawberries. If students were fed such tasty fare as A Voyage Long and Strange, perhaps the olden days would cease to seem so . . . well, old, let alone lifeless and dry.
Surveys claim American students lack important historical information. Horwitz admits gaps in his own knowledge spurred his “journey long and strange.” Writing about his memory of America’s founding he says:
. . . the sum of what I dredged up [was] scraps from elementary school and the Thanksgiving table. As for dates, I’d mislaid an entire century, the one between Columbus’s sail in 1492 and Jamestown’s founding in 16-0 something. Expensively educated at a private school and university—a history major, no less!—I’d matriculated to middle age with a third grader’s grasp of early America.
Thus his mission: “to explore this New World, not only in books, but on the ground.” Horowitz visited the arrows on the map.
Beginning at Vinland, site of European “first contact” in North America, he travels chronologically from Columbus’s “discovery” to the Spanish expeditions through the southwest, up through the plains, southeast to St Augustine, Florida, the earliest existing European settlement in America. Then northward to the English colonies of Roanoke and Jamestown, and finally up the Atlantic coastline to Plymouth, Massachusetts, the place some still argue, it all began—“all” meaning America. These folks need to read Voyage.
Horwitz effectively toggles back and forth between past and present, combining historical facts gleaned from primary resources with present day commentary, his own and that of the many locals he encounters on his travels.
His ear for the perfect quote and gift for wry observations provides an altogether delightful combination. Add to the mix his ability to “puncture stereotypes” and expose human frailties with subtle humor, and you have a unique voice for a book about conquest and its attendant violence and bloodshed—man’s inhumanity to man. The first recorded sex in the New World was a rape, carefully documented by the rapist, who complained about scratches the woman inflicted.
Horwitz exposes long-held idealism about these men who led explorations. He reveals their feet of clay, while managing to show a positive side as well.
The heroes of fifth grade reports—Coronado, Drake, De Soto, Columbus, Ponce de Leon, and others—had some outright weird quirks and downright nasty personalities. Our teachers never told us; they fed us cornflakes.
If Columbus had never existed, says Horwitz , someone else would have filled the Spanish lust for “gold and God, conquest and conversion.” Columbus was “able to put his idiosyncratic vision into practice because he arrived at a propitious moment in western history.”
The “truth” of historical records varies, he explains, depending upon the point of view of those who lived it—some of those documents were written in the moment, and some tweaked after the fact to suit the sensibilities of the day.
Take Pocahontas. That she saved John Smith from being killed at the hands of her powerful father may be true. Or maybe, as some evidence suggests, she was enacting a ceremonial ritual when she pulled John Smith’s head off the chopping block. She was young and naked, a sign, Horwitz says, that she was just a child, not the lusty, busty, Indian maiden in a skimpy loincloth immortalized in bronze. Disney’s Pocahontas/Smith love affair is a romantic fantasy.
John Rolfe, an English widower, married Pocahontas when she was twenty and moved to England. “Union with heathen natives was a grievous sin.” Centuries later, when the United States banned marriage between Indians and whites, Rolfe was “airbrushed from American memory,” Horwitz says.
Then there are the monuments and museums. They draw tourists —money—to small towns that otherwise would be overlooked. Towns vie to be the “first site” of anything historical, which often leaves several towns claiming the title. Contention between ethnic groups spurs rival monuments frozen in a perpetual stare-down. Horwitz’s commentary brings a smile and a shake of the head. We are a funny nation, we Americans.
Living a stone’s throw from Plymouth, Massachusetts, I was impressed by the accurate description of the tourist town. He eavesdrops, sharing comments of visitors to Plymouth Rock (“Looks more like Plymouth pebble”), banter of the locals. (“Everett’s so old he came on the Mayflower”), and tourist guides who patiently repeat that the Pilgrims did not arrive on The Nina, The Pinta, and The Santa Maria.
“Now arriving at the end of a long journey forward in time,” Hurwitz writes, “I saw Plymouth through jaundiced eyes, not as the cornerstone of early America, but as its capstone, piled on a cairn erected by all those who came before.”
Seeing the motto: “America’s Home Town,” Horwitz thinks, Not to Virginians it isn’t. Or to Hispanics, or Indians. Then in a Plymouth pub, admittedly grumpy, he “needled the man on the next stool, a local tour-bus driver wearing a red, white and blue jacket. What about Jamestown? I asked or St Augustine?”
“Forget all the others!” [the man] finally shouted, slapping his hand on the bar. “This is the friggin’ beginning of America.”
“That generations come and go—tribes, cultures, whole civilizations—and leave barely a trace is humbling. Each recorded moment in time contributed to a collective memory. That it is a fanciful, nobler one, is understandable. People like to keep skeletons in the closet.” But Horwitz lets the skeletons out to rattle our complacency, then, acknowledging the brighter side, he says:
But what happened in America wasn’t foreordained.... Nor did all newcomers, or all natives, behave the same. Those Europeans who reached across the canyon of language an d culture, as curious fellow humans rather than as combatants, almost always discovered Indians willing to respond in kind.
A Voyage Long and Strange challenges what we believe about ourselves, our nation, and how we became the society we are today. The added cream, sugar, and strawberries give a unique flavor to a period of time we thought we knew.
Ruth Douillette is an associate editor of The Internet Review of Books.
See her blog at Upstream and Down~.
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