A Voyage Long and Strange

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tony Horwitz stumbles onto his own ignorance during a chance visit to Plymouth Rock. A park ranger tells him that tourists routinely believe Christopher Columbus dropped off the Pilgrims and sailed home, conflating events separated by 128 years. Horwitz realizes he is little better: Between Columbus's 1492 voyage and the Pilgrims' 1620 arrival, his knowledge is blank. He resolves to fill the gap by retracing the routes of the forgotten explorers, conquistadors, and colonists who preceded the English to America.

His journey begins with the Norse. The Icelandic sagas recount how Eirik the Red, a fugitive killer, pioneered Greenland around A.D. 985, and how his son Leif Eiriksson sailed west to a shore he named Vinland. Subsequent expeditions clashed with natives the sagas call Skraelings, and the outnumbered Norse abandoned the continent. Horwitz travels to L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, where in 1961 Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad discovered the only confirmed Norse site in America: faint depressions and artifacts such as a rusted nail and a spindle whorl. He drives south to Conne River, a reserve of the Micmac, an Indigenous people of Newfoundland, to find descendants of the Skraelings. He meets Chief Missel Joe, who campaigned to remove the derogatory term "Skraeling" from Parks Canada signage. The Norse failure, Horwitz reflects, illustrates a broader principle: Small incoming populations rarely take root, and England's later success depended on waves of settlers restocking colonies with devastating mortality rates.

Horwitz immerses himself in the Columbus literature and finds the historical navigator radically different from the storybook icon. Born to a Genoese wool-weaving family, Columbus spent years peddling his vision of a westward route to Asia; his estimate of the ocean's width was the most wrongheaded of his era, yet his stubborn error propelled him across the Atlantic. Horwitz follows the 1492 voyage through Columbus's journal: the crew's growing panic, the secret manipulation of distance logs, and the October 12 landfall at San Salvador. Within hours of meeting the islanders he called Indios, Columbus noted their potential as servants and seized captives. He made four voyages but never set foot on what became U.S. soil, dying in 1506 still convinced he had reached Asia.

In Santo Domingo, the first permanent European city in the Americas, Horwitz confronts the Spanish colonial legacy. The Zona Colonial's sixteenth-century churches contrast with the modern city's poverty. Horwitz explores the interior with Caonabo, a local artist named for a chief of the Taino, the Indigenous people of Hispaniola. They visit Santo Cerro, site of a 1495 battle where guns, horses, and attack dogs routed thousands of Taino, and the ruins of Concepción de la Vega, where a monastery's open graves display Spanish and Taino skeletons in contrasting burial postures. He traces the catastrophic decline of the Taino from an estimated 500,000 in 1492 to fewer than 23,000 by 1514, destroyed by war, disease, forced labor, and mass suicide.

Horwitz turns to the Spanish exploration of North America. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca survived a disastrous 1528 expedition to Florida and spent eight years walking across the continent, transforming from armed invader to revered healer. His companion Estevanico, an enslaved African from Morocco, later led a reconnaissance toward the rumored Seven Cities of Cibola and was killed, but his discovery set in motion the conquest of the Southwest. Horwitz retraces the path of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, who in 1540 led roughly 2,000 people, mostly Indian allies, north from Mexico. At Zuni, New Mexico, the fabled Cibola turned out to be modest stone pueblos; the Zuni still occupy the same land and maintain their own language and governance. Coronado pushed onto the Great Plains, producing the first European descriptions of bison. An Indian guide called El Turco lured him to central Kansas with promises of gold in Quivira, but the expedition found only thatch huts and strangled El Turco after he confessed to lying.

Horwitz follows Hernando de Soto, who in 1539 landed in Florida with 600 men and spent four years marching through the Southeast, seizing chiefs as hostages and chaining Indians as porters. In Alabama, the battle of Mavila killed an estimated 2,500 to 3,000 Indians in a single day. De Soto reached the Mississippi in May 1541, which his men described not as a glorious discovery but as an obstacle patrolled by armadas of war canoes. After crossing into Arkansas, De Soto died of fever; his men placed his body in a hollowed oak and sank it in the river. Half the expedition died, and the survivors left behind devastated Indian societies, creating a shatter zone that later Europeans entered as if it were virgin wilderness.

Horwitz turns to France's attempt to plant a colony of Huguenots, or French Protestants, in Florida. In 1564, René de Laudonnière founded Fort Caroline near present-day Jacksonville, the first attempt at a Protestant refuge on U.S. soil. In 1565, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés arrived with a Spanish fleet, established St. Augustine, and marched overland to surprise the fort, slaughtering 142 Huguenots; at the Matanzas River, he executed over 200 more French castaways who refused to renounce their faith.

Horwitz investigates the lost colony of Roanoke, where in 1587 colonial governor John White left 115 colonists, including his newborn granddaughter Virginia Dare, the first English child born in America. Delayed three years by the Spanish Armada, White returned to find only the word "CROATOAN" carved on a post, a reference to the nearby island later known as Hatteras. Horwitz concludes that the colonists were not so much lost as abandoned by their sponsor Walter Raleigh, by pirate-captains, and by an English nation that gave low priority to their rescue.

At Jamestown, founded in 1607, Horwitz follows John Smith from arrest for mutiny to leadership of the colony. Smith's aggressive trading kept the settlement alive. His famous encounter with Powhatan, the paramount chief of the region's Indian confederacy, in which Powhatan's daughter Pocahontas allegedly saved Smith from execution, was not published until 17 years later. After Smith sailed home in 1609, the colony collapsed into the Starving Time: Of 500 settlers, only 60 survived. Horwitz traces Pocahontas's kidnapping by the English, her conversion to Christianity, her marriage to tobacco pioneer John Rolfe, and her death in England in 1617 at about age 20. He visits the Pamunkey Indian reservation, a remnant of Powhatan's domain, and uncovers the story of Walter Plecker, Virginia's registrar of vital statistics, who from 1912 to 1946 waged a eugenics campaign to reclassify Virginia's Indigenous people as "Negro," driving a racial wedge that persists.

Horwitz returns to Plymouth, where he traces the kidnapping of Tisquantum (Squanto), who spent five years in Europe before finding his village of Patuxet wiped out by plague. The Pilgrims arrived in December 1620 and settled on the extinct village's site, saved by Squanto, who taught them to plant corn. Plymouth Rock itself rests on the testimony of a 95-year-old man in 1741, three generations removed from the landing. The Reverend Peter Gomes, a Harvard clergyman of African-American and Cape Verdean descent, tells Horwitz that Plymouth's power lies in myth, because people choose myths whereas history is merely a collection of facts. Horwitz reflects that the founding of America was slow and messy, but the nation looked back and located its heroes and sacred places on the stony shore of Massachusetts.