Long, Strange Trip
Finding the new world
It’s not true that Christopher Columbus defied the conventional wisdom of his time in thinking that the world was round. All the wise people of his time already knew that; Columbus, in fact, thought the world had the shape of a pear, complete with a stalk “like a woman’s nipple,” which was the site of the Garden of Eden.
notion came to the famed “Admiral of the
Historical nuggets such as that are salted throughout A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World (Holt), Tony Horwitz’s latest delightful foray into sensible-shoes adventuring. A Pulitzer-winning journalist and author of Confederates in the Attic (about Confederate re-enactors) and Blue Latitudes (retracing Captain Cook’s journeys), Horwitz tracks down everything he—and most of the rest of us—didn’t know or had gotten wrong about North American history.
on a visit to Plymouth Rock, Horwitz began musing about American history and
realized, “I’d mislaid an entire century, the one separating
is a half-ton of them and they encompass a lot of firsts, starting with the
Norse exploration around 1000 A.D. of what they called Vinland and that is now
first European encounter with American Indians was by Leif Eriksson’s siblings
The book’s chief attraction, even more than its historical revelations, lies in armchair traveling with a personable, entertaining companion. What catches and holds our interest is the same as in John Steinbeck’s Travels WithCharley and William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways and other books of that ilk: the author’s encounters with people on his route.
are long, the author discovers. American Indians in the South and Southwest
still simmer over the brutal Spanish conquistadors. On the other hand, there is
a surprising number of conquistador sympathizers, like the die-hard defenders
of the Confederacy or Hitler apologists who complain that no one remembers the good things they did. Throughout the
Spanish-dominated region there is much resentment of the national lack of
importance placed on Southwest history as compared with that
sojourn in the
Horwitz focuses on 10 or so historical episodes, including, of course,
historical figure herein comes off looking notably good. Hernando