Q&A with Tony Horwitz, author of A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and Other Adventurers in Early America. Published this spring by Picador (888/330-8477; www.picadorusa.com/avoyagelongandstrange), the book runs 445 pages.

Tony Horwitz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of travel books such as Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before; Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War; and Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia. In his latest work, he goes on the trail of explorers, pioneers and several unsavory characters to see what happened between Columbus’ arrival in 1492 and the docking of the Mayflower in 1620. Horwitz realized that he was almost clueless about this important period in our history and set out to fill the gaps in his education.

He recently spent some time chatting with Car & Travel.

(To win one of 10 copies of Horwitz’s book, A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and Other Adventurers in Early America, click here.)

Car & Travel—Americans know a great deal about the founding of the nation (1776 and all that) but seemingly little about the formation of the country. Why is that?
Tony Horwitz—All memory is selective, for countries as for individuals, and we like to tell clear and happy narratives about our origins. Unfortunately, the true story of this country’s founding is messy and often tragic—nothing like the tales of brave Columbus and gentle Pilgrims most of us were taught in grade school.

C&T—What surprised you the most about your research?
TH—I was most surprised to learn how much of this country was explored and settled by Europeans before the Pilgrims arrived. In 1620, when the Mayflower landed, half the states in today’s continental USA, including central Kansas, had already been reached by the Spanish, French, Portuguese, English and others. The Pilgrims were latecomers, not firstcomers.
 
C&T—In his 1997 book, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, Mark Kurlansky suggests that the Basques discovered North America. His reasoning was that they were here to fish for cod, so they had every reason to keep quiet about their chance discovery of the Great Banks, while Christopher Columbus had every reason to shout his discovery from the rooftops. Have you discovered anyone else in whose interest it was to be quiet? And what other evidence did you dig up about the Basques?
TH—Cod fishermen, not just Basque but Portuguese and English, may well have reached American shores before 1492. But because they weren’t eager to share their fishing grounds, no maps or written records of these visits survive. I think archaeological finds in the near future—for instance, of a Basque ship—may well resolve this question. However, there is already clear evidence that the Vikings settled the northern tip of Newfoundland in about 1000 A.D.—long before the Basque or others would have arrived here. So I think they should be regarded as the first Europeans known to have reached America.

C&T—Passions run high about this kind of thing. You almost got into a fistfight in Plymouth, Mass., when you suggested that perhaps Jamestown, Va., had more claim to being the birthplace of the USA. Were there any other times when you felt in danger bravely digging up our history?
TH—Not really, unless you count dressing up in medieval Spanish armor to reenact the exploits of conquistadors in Florida. Clunking around in 50-plus pounds of armor in wilting heat and humidity isn’t the healthiest or sanest thing I’ve ever done.

C&T—What was the strangest place you unearthed on your search for our origins?
TH—In the Dominican Republic, on the trail of Columbus, I visited a place called the Hoyo Santo, or “Holy Hole.” It’s the place where Columbus allegedly planted a cross in 1495 during a battle with natives. Though badly outnumbered, Columbus—aided by the cross, and by the Virgin Mary, who appeared above it—miraculously won the battle. The Hoyo Santo is a major pilgrimage site, though there’s nothing to see, just a hole in the ground.

C&T—What is the biggest myth we perpetuate in regards to all this history?
TH—The biggest myth is that America was a “virgin wilderness” before Europeans arrived, a vast expanse of woods and plains with only a scattering of nomadic tribes. In fact, this continent was heavily settled before 1492, with a native population many times larger than England’s or Spain’s. Some settlements—for instance, the great mound cities of the South and Mississippi Valley—were as large as London or Paris in the same era.

C&T—Early colonists must have stared in disbelief when they reached the Mississippi. Did you? What impressions were left with you during your travels on it?
TH—Alas, my first glimpse of the Mississippi was of a truck spewing foul black smoke, because men had gone down to the riverbank to burn copper wire. But later, I traveled on the river in a canoe and was awed by its majesty and how wild the lower Mississippi remains. Much of the river still looks the way Mark Twain described it in the mid-19th century.

C&T—Did you discover any lost settlements of colonists? If so, where?
TH—The most famous “lost” colony is the one founded by the English at Roanoke Island in the 1580s, in what’s now North Carolina. The 115 colonists, including the infant Virginia Dare, were left there in 1587 and never seen again. I went to Roanoke and met with people who are still trying to solve the mystery of the colonists’ disappearance and find traces of them. I tramped around a lot of woods and swamps with an archaeologist. Let’s just say the search continues.

C&T—Did you get the sense that you were discovering yourself as much as your country? After all, the people you chronicle in the book led to us all being here. How was this feeling best brought home to you?
TH—Whatever our individual family histories may be, we’re all here together, in America, because of what happened centuries ago, when Europeans first encountered the new world and its people. I felt this most strongly in and around Jamestown, Virginia, which was not only the first permanent English colony in today’s U.S. but also home to a great Indian nation, the Powhatan, and the place where African slaves were first sold in this country. It was also the colony that attracted the first industrial workers from Poland and Germany. In a sense, it was a microcosm of the diverse country that America became.

C&T—What was the most memorable place you ended up in during your research for this book?
TH—The most memorable place for me was the pueblo and mesa-land of New Mexico, which I visited while retracing the route of the conquistador Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, who was there in the 1540s. The arid, rugged landscape is magnificent and the history more vivid than anywhere I’ve been in America. The native peoples Coronado encountered almost five centuries ago are still there, at pueblos like Zuni and Acoma, and descendants of the early Spanish still occupy Santa Fe and northern New Mexico. Perhaps my favorite spot of all was El Morro, a remote headland where you can still see the carvings made over many centuries by passing travelers: native, Spanish, Anglo-American. It’s the Southwestern story, etched in ancient stone.

C&T—I recently was in a small fishing village in the Dominican Republic called Boca De Yuma. This was Juan Ponce de León’s port (he lived a few miles up the road in San Rafael del Yuma). He seems to be a forgotten person in the States, apart from vague notions of fountains of youth. Why is that?
TH—Juan Ponce de Leon is remembered for the wrong reason. There’s no hard evidence he was searching for a fountain of youth when he sailed north from the Caribbean in 1513. But what he did find was a lush shore he named La Florida, making him the first European known to have landed in what’s now the United States. Very little is known about this voyage, so what survives is the myth of an old man searching for eternal youth, like so many Floridians today.
 
C&T—Neither Christopher Columbus nor Amerigo Vespucci ever stepped on to any part of what became the United States. Which explorers should Americans really be celebrating and naming themselves after?
TH—By the logic of naming countries after the first Europeans to land in them, we should perhaps be the United States of Juan (see above) or Ponce de Leonia. But I think we’re well past the stage of glorifying European discoverers, who were often brutal men and “discovered” a land that had been inhabited for tens of thousands of years. I feel it’s important to remember every bit of our history, clearly and factually, rather than cling to myths. But it’s not necessary to celebrate all the figures from this era or name places for them.