What? Are we to believe they also didn't play football?Ī more interesting myth Horwitz tackles is that of Virginia Dare. Nor did they celebrate Thanksgiving or mention turkey. The Pilgrims never even wrote about the Rock, Horwitz learns. As a Plymouth resident quips, there's another meaning for Plymouth Rock's initials: "We had good public relations people on the Mayflower," he says. Plymouth, which dubs itself America's Home Town (ahead of Jamestown), is no exception. In his many stops, Horwitz discovers that history has been routinely rewritten to serve people's purposes. Or, more precisely, where it didn't begin.
Finally, he comes full circle, returning to Plymouth, where America's story began. His trek starts in Canada, then continues in the sweltering Caribbean, the deserts of Mexico and the Southwest, and the swamps of the South. Thus emboldened with a quest for knowledge, Horwitz packs his bags. The impetus for the author's journey begins when a random visit to Plymouth Rock makes him realize that he's alarmingly ignorant about Europeans' early exploration of North America: "This wasn't a gap in my education it was a chasm."
His voyage may be long, but Horwitz is a sympathetic narrator and makes it a smooth ride for the reader: He's as companionable a traveler as anyone would want on a road trip. Tony Horwitz revives this little-known history in his wonderful new book, "A Voyage Long and Strange." As he did in "Confederates in the Attic" and "Blue Latitudes" - which explored the legacies of the Civil War and the explorer James Cook, respectively - Horwitz travels to remote, often forbidding places to see how the past lives on, or more often doesn't, in the present.Ī former journalist who will engage anyone in conversation - the word colorful cannot do justice to some of the characters he meets - Horwitz has written another travelogue that's consistently eye-opening and entertaining. In his journeys across the Atlantic Ocean, Columbus was convinced that he was traversing this curvaceous globe toward its nipple - whose tip was home to the Garden of Eden.įew of us may be aware of this marvelous historical nugget, but there's plenty more about the so-called discovery of the New World that will come as a surprise. What children do not learn: The explorer believed the planet was shaped like a breast. Christopher Columbus, as any schoolkid will tell you, did not think the Earth was flat.
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