A Voyage Long and Strange by Tony Horwitz

Then I spotted a lone speed-walker racing down the sidewalk. I looked around and couldn't see anything except asphalt and a few stones small enough for skipping. Near the water stood a gray historic marker that was terse even by New England standards. Stopping for beer at Myles Standish Liquor, I was directed to the William Bradford Motor Inn, the best I could find in peak tourist season.Įarly the next morning I went for a walk along the waterfront, past a chowder house, a saltwater taffy shop, a wax museum, and a replica Mayflower moored in the bay. But a Red Sox game pulsed on the radio, so I drove until it ended at the Plymouth exit. It could have been Dedham or Braintree or some other pit stop on the highway near Boston. On a New England road trip a few summers ago, I washed up in Plymouth, too. 'At least it was the best they could find.' In December 1620, they reached Plymouth, a place 'fit for situation,' Bradford wrote. 'Full of wild beasts and wild men.' Rather than stay, a small party from the Mayflower sailed ahead, searching for a winter haven. 'A hideous and desolate wilderness,' William Bradford called it.

The Pilgrims didn't think much of Cape Cod. Once there, says Horwitz, they marveled over the flatness of the landscape and the 'sea of grass' before them. In the 1540s, Coronado and his horseman galloped all the way to central Kansas - almost the exact geographic center of the continent. In fact, Horwitz says, the early French and Spanish explorers crossed the Appalachian Mountains, rafted down the Mississippi and explored the Grand Canyon - in all, reaching about half of the states in the present-day continental U.S. 'But the conquistadors who came here didn't just go along the fringes of Florida and the Southwest.' 'I associated conquistadors with Cortez in Mexico, and Pizarro in Peru,' he says. Horowitz started tracing the steps of the French and Spanish explorers, discovering that some of the early adventurers made it much farther inland that most Americans realize. 'That's what got me thinking about what happened and what could I find out about it.' 'There was this 130-year period where I couldn't come up with anything, basically between Columbus in 1492 and the arrival of English settlers in the early 1600s,' says Horwitz. It's a time period, he admits, he knew nothing about before beginning his research: In his new book, A Voyage Long and Strange, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tony Horwitz chronicles the exploration of America that occurred before Jamestown. Tony Horwitz has also written Confederates in the Attic and Baghdad Without a Map.

A Voyage Long and Strange by Tony Horwitz