A Voyage Long and Strange by Tony Horwitz

and no, that is not a misspelling of his name) at what is now L' Anse aux Meadows which is nothing more than a moribund fishing village at the ass-end of Canada. Unromantically, it turned out to be nothing more than a farm settlement (founded by Leif Eiriksson. get it?) the author visits the site of the first European settlement in North America. In what is now Newfoundland (New Found Land. And it also quickly becomes clear reading this book that this concept applies to historical events as well. One of the underlying themes in this tome is the truth many of us come to realize as we travel through this life that our mental image of a place and the reality of it are two quite different things. The others usually get all the credit because they wrote the histories most of us Moderns digest be it reading or watching television. The first stop in this journey of discovery is the location of First Contact which would not be achieved by Western Europeans (French or English) or Southern Europeans (Portuguese or Spanish) but by Northern Europeans (Norsemen) half a millennium before the others. Or perhaps Horwitz visited Plymouth, MA, while suffering from 'writer's block' and upon visiting the place realized a clever new concept for a book. This, claims Horwitz, inspired him to undertake a 'pilgrimage' to various significant sites related to early European contact in the Americas and retrace some of the more relevant paths that various explorers blazed. There he finds all kinds of fascinating tales, themes, interconnections, ironies, horrors, mundanities. This leads him to bone up on American and New World history starting at the various points of First Contact between Europe and the Americas both North and South. He quickly becomes disillusioned by the disconnect with American prehistory (and early history) that he sees not only in the tourists there but also within himself.

Horwitz starts in the prologue at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts. Horwitz then proceeds to visit all the significant historical locations where Old World first visited New World.

The basic premise is that Horwitz comes to realize he knows little about the real history of the land that would later become the United States of America and by extension its surrounding zone of influence, to wit, Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean. The non-fiction sub-genre of history travel adventure in the wrong hands can be cliched and hackneyed but not so in this case. Yesterday I finished reading author Tony Horwitz' wonderful history-adventure yarn ' A Voyage Long And Strange: Rediscovering The New World'.

A Voyage Long and Strange by Tony Horwitz