A Voyage Long and Strange

"On a chance visit to Plymouth Rock, Tony Horwitz makes an unsettling discovery. A history buff since early childhood, expensively educated at university - a history major no less! - he's reached middle age with a third-grader's grasp of early America. In fact, he's mislaid more than a century of American history, from the period separating Columbus's landing in 1492 from the arrival of the English colonists at Jamestown in 160-something. Did nothing happen in between?" "Horwitz decides to find out, and in A Voyage Long and Strange he uncovers the neglected story of America's founding by Europeans. He begins a thousand years ago, with the Vikings,and then tells the dramatic tale of the conquistadors, castaways, French voyageurs, Moorish slaves, and many others who roamed and rampaged across half the states of the present-day U.S. continent, long before the Mayflower landed. These forgotten firstcomers sought grapes, gold, converts, even a cure for syphilis and brought creatures, weapons, and germs unknown to natives of the New World. Though most all failed, they wrote vividly of what they saw - Zini pueblos and buffalo plains, the Great Smokies and the Grand Canyon, Atlantic dunes and Pacific fogs - and left an enduring mark on the land and people encountered by late-arriving English settlers." "To explore this history and its legacy in the present, Horwitz embarks on an epic quest of his own - trekking in search of grape-rich Vinland, Ponce de Leon's Foundation of Youth, Coronado's Cities of Gold, Walter Raleigh's Lost Colonists and other mysteries of early America."--BOOK JACKET.Horwitz, Tony is the author of 'A Voyage Long and Strange' with ISBN 9780805076035 and ISBN 0805076034.