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Q&A with Tony Horwitz

Q. What first prompted you to embark on your “reeducation campaign” to learn about early European exploration and the settlement of North America?

A. I went to visit Plymouth Rock and realized how ignorant I was of the period before the Pilgrims’ arrival in 1620. Apart from Columbus in 1492 and a few other scraps from elementary school, I couldn’t retrieve anything. For someone who considers himself a history nerd, this struck me as a gaping hole in my knowledge. So I decided to fill it.

Q. So who were the very first Europeans to explore and settle North America?

A. Vikings, who stumbled on America in about ad 1000 and briefly occupied the northern tip of Newfoundland. I began my research by visiting the remains of their settlement and can see why they left: icebergs, black flies, biting wind—and that was in summer. Actually, though, it was the natives who drove the Norse off. We think of Vikings as fearsome warriors, but they were no match for native archers in canoes.

Q. Then came Columbus, who sailed the ocean blue in 1492.

A. Yes, though his “discovery” was different from what many Americans imagine. On Columbus Day in 1492, he landed in the Bahamas and then sailed around the Caribbean. In fact, in the course of four long voyages to America, he never once set foot on what is today the U.S. continent. It’s a little peculiar that our nation’s capital and countless other cities are named for a man who never came here. But nonetheless Columbus is crucial to our history, because his voyages unleashed a wave of Spanish conquest that eventually spilled onto our shores.

Q. What part of the Americas did Columbus have the greatest impact on during his lifetime?

A. The island of Hispaniola, which is now divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. I went to the D.R. as part of my research and Columbus’s legacy is still vivid there. The island’s native people, the Taino, were enslaved by Columbus and then driven into extinction from disease and overwork. To replace their labor, the Spanish quickly began importing African slaves. The Spanish also exported tobacco from the Caribbean. Slavery and tobacco would later prove critical to the success of English colonists in Virginia. So it’s impossible to fully understand our history without going beyond textbook timelines and present-day borders.

Q. You tell us that in the whole scheme of our country’s history, the English came to the party pretty late. Who was the first European to set foot on what is today U.S. soil?

A. The first confirmed landing was by a Spaniard, Juan Ponce de León, in 1513, near present-day Daytona Beach. He gave us the name Florida. But there’s no substance to the legend that he was seeking a “Fountain of Youth.” Ponce de León was only thirty-nine at the time and appears to have come in search of gold and slaves.

Q. But the Spanish explorers didn’t make it much father than the Gulf Coast and Florida, right?

A. Wrong! In the 1500s, the Spanish reached half of what is today the Lower 48, from Oregon to Maine, from Arizona to Virginia. Spanish expeditions scaled the Appalachians, rafted on the Mississippi, and descended the Grand Canyon. Conquistadors even rode deep into Kansas, coming close to the exact geographic center of North America. And they left vivid records of their exploration. This history is largely forgotten, but it’s hiding in plain sight.

Q. The Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto spent most of his time in the Southeast, but his legacy there is mostly overshadowed by the more recent cataclysm of the Civil War. What was de Soto’s lasting impact on the South?

A. De Soto cut a deadlier swath across the South than Katrina and Sherman’s March combined. Brutal, even by conquistador standards, he enslaved, tortured, set dogs on, and often simply massacred Indians from Florida to Texas. In a single day of battle at an Indian settlement called Mavila, in what is today Alabama, de Soto’s army slew and burned alive an estimated 3,000 natives. But the greatest damage was inflicted by the introduction of European diseases to which Indians had no immunity. De Soto’s men described dozens of large city-states inhabited by thousands of people. Spaniards who visited the same territory, just two decades after de Soto’s march, found almost no trace remaining of these once-populous societies. De Soto also brought the first pigs to North America, as a reserve food supply, and they seeded the vast swine population of the South.

Q. When the English finally got to our shores, some arrived before Jamestown. Who were they and what happened to them?

A. The first we know of were castaways, and a few of them straggled from the Gulf Coast to the Atlantic. But the first settlers were at Roanoke Island in North Carolina, where Walter Raleigh founded a colony in the 1580s. More than a hundred men, women, and children were dropped off there in 1587 and never seen or heard from again. In the book, I try to unlock the mystery of the “lost colony” of Roanoke.

Q. What’s the reality behind the many myths about Jamestown?

A. The most enduring myth is that John Smith and Pocahontas were lovers. In fact, she was only about ten when they met, he left Jamestown a year later, and she went on to marry a different John—colonist John Rolfe—after being kidnapped by the English. She died a few years later during a visit to England, at the age of about twenty. So while Pocahontas was an extraordinary young woman, her story is tragic rather than romantic.

Q. At the end of A VOYAGE LONG AND STRANGE, you return to Plymouth, Massachusetts, and explore the many myths and misconceptions about everything from Plymouth Rock to Thanksgiving. What does this say about why some aspects of history endure and others get buried?

A. All memory is selective, for societies as for individuals. The full story of our country’s founding by Europeans is messy and complicated and often unpleasant—the body count is really high. So we tend to remember and celebrate events and places and characters that provide an uplifting story line, and forget the bits that don’t fit. Plymouth Rock, which the Pilgrims probably never set foot on, and Thanksgiving, which they barely mentioned in their writings, are just two examples of how we rewrite history long after the fact to suit our own needs. And once those legends get embedded, they’re almost impossible to dislodge. But I hope I’ve given a few of them a good shove in this book.