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Hi Peter -

Being a navigator, you'll probably find his track of Cook around the
Pacific good reading too. HewS

On 8/22/08, Peter Fogg  wrote:
>
> "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 Men�ndez 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, Men�ndez 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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>
>  >
>

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