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    Subtitled "Rediscovering the New World"
    From: Peter Fogg
    Date: 2008 Aug 23, 04:59 +1000
    "A Voyage Long and Strange focuses on the neglected period in early" [North] "American history between Columbus' voyage of 1492 and the Pilgrims' arrival in 1620" says the blurb on the back.

    This book by Tony Horwitz begins with an event earlier than those; a more detailed account of the Viking seafaring that led to the settlement at l'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, and its later abandonment, than I have come across before, although sadly it entirely neglects the Brendon story (see The Brendon Voyage by Tim Severin).

    A constant theme is how little of their own early European history are modern North Americans aware of, including the author.  Certainly many of these expeditions deserve to be better known, such as the wanderings of Cabeza de Vaca and his men between 1528 and 1536: "a cross-country trek that made Lewis and Clark's expedition, three centuries later, look like a Cub Scout outing by comparison".

    "I wandered lost and naked through many and very strange lands" de Vaca wrote in his chronicle, adding about his story: "this is the only thing that a man who returned naked could bring back".  These "many and very strange lands" included a virtual crossing of the continent, from a landfall at Tampa Bay in Florida and subsequent following of the Gulf of Mexico overland and by sea, in improvised rafts, before that came to an end at the "Isle of Doom" (now Galverston Island, Texas). From there they continued overland to the west, before following the eastern side of the Gulf of California south into New Spain.

    Or the lust for gold and rich cities to plunder that drove Coronado in 1540: "the only European army ever to invade the U.S. continent by land".  That trek led them to central Kansas.  Like de Vaca he returned empty handed, with fewer than a hundred men left from the 2000-odd "and approximately as many animals" that had "trod north across the arid frontier".

    Another chapter is entitled:  "De Soto Does Dixie".  Although his route is disputed by historians, it seems he pushed well into the west of present Arkansas.  Luis de Moscoso, at much the same period (1540s) apparently reached a similar northerly point before travelling down the Mississippi to the coast.

    At the moment I'm reading about the early history of St Augustine, the second European settlement in the United States, around 1564 - after the Spanish founders massacred their French rivals at nearby Fort Caroline, on the grounds of religious difference; the French being Protestants:  "I had to make war with fire and blood against all those who came to sow this hateful doctrine" said Pedro Menéndez who "founded a string of fortified settlements along the Altlantic and Gulf coasts, and supported the establishment of missions as far north as the Chesapeake Bay". 
     
    Horwitz travels to these places of significance himself, in search of whatever physical remnants or local historical awareness of these early events may now exist.  Both are typically meagre in the extreme, when not obviously contrived and false, he finds.  So the book is also a kind of road-trip through modern-day North America and its culture.  This isn't meant as a criticism, but I was struck by how driven by facts and statistics seemed the two recent postings of NavListers' extensive journeys by car around the United States, although I enjoyed the exceptions to  this; including the anecdote about the cafeteria patron and his head problem.
     
    Perhaps the best thing I can say about A Voyage Long and Strange is that it encourages further research to flesh out what are often fairly sparse accounts (remember that major expeditions or colonies only get a chapter apiece, and only about the first half of the book has been read so far - we first meet the English in the next chapter: "In 1558, when Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne, the notion that England was to rule North America would have seemed as far-fetched as present-day New Zealand colonizing Mars").

    An example, gleaned from sources other than Horwitz: After the massacre at Fort Caroline, Menéndez hung the bodies thus slaughtered from trees, leaving an inscription: "Not as Frenchmen but as Lutherans".  Despite this appeasing note, news of the bloody extermination of the colony caused widespread consternation in France, extending well beyond the Protestant minority.  When the crew of a French boat captained by Dominique de Gourgues attacked Fort San Mateo (as the Spanish had renamed Fort Caroline) in 1568 and hung the members of the garrison, another inscription was left: "Not as Spaniards but as murderers."  So it seems, and not just from this example, that European contact with this New World was marked by extreme violence from the beginning, from beyond what is even (widely) remembered these days.

    The only other book by Horwitz I'm familiar with is: Baghdad Without A Map, oftimes a funny account of his time as a journalist of marginal success covering stories in, and discovering for himself, the Arabic world in the early 1990s -during the first (American) Gulf War.
     



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