A Voyage Long and Strange
Original airdate: June 6, 2008
If your wondering how Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tony Horwitz ended up writing about Columbus and Ponce de Leon… wonder no more.
Here is the official “Story Behind the Book”…
On a New England road trip a few summers ago, I visited Plymouth Rock. The boulder’s surface was only five feet square, with a badly mended cleft in the middle. It looked like a fossilized potato. A park ranger told me that tourists often heaped scorn on the sacred stone. They also asked odd questions. Was it true the Mayflower crashed into the Rock? Did the Pilgrims serve Thanksgiving on top of it?
“Or they ask, ‘Is this where the three ships landed?’†the ranger said. “They mean the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. People think Columbus dropped off the Pilgrims and sailed home.â€
She had to patiently explain that Columbus’s landing and the Pilgrims’ arrival occurred a thousand miles and 128 years apart. “Americans learn about 1492 and 1620 as kids, and that’s all they remember as adults,†she said. “The rest of the story is blank.â€
Back on the road, winding past cranberry bogs, I scanned the data stored in my own brain about America’s founding by Europeans. In fourteen hundred and ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue . . . John Smith and Jamestown . . . Pilgrims in funny hats . . . Of the Indians who greeted the newcomers, I of course knew Pocahontas, Squanto, and . . . Hiawatha?
That was the sum of what I dredged up. Scraps from elementary school and the Thanksgiving table. As for dates, I’d mislaid an entire century, the one between Columbus’s sail in 1492 and Jamestown’s founding in 16-0-something. Expensively educated at a private school and university—a history major, no less!—I’d matriculated to middle age with a third-grader’s grasp of early America.
Returning home, I undertook some remedial study. This revealed a world unknown to me, of conquistadors, castaways, and other adventurers who roamed America long before the Mayflower landed. What would it be like, I wondered, to explore this New World, not only in books but on the ground? To take a pre-Pilgrimage through early America that ended at Plymouth Rock instead of beginning there? To rediscover my native land, the U.S. continent? – from www.voyagelongandstrange.com
Thanks for tuning in.
Liz
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