Readerville: Myth and Misadventure: An Interview with Tony Horwitz

By Peter Cashwell

Tony Horwitz’s unique combination of archival research with hands-on history has made his books on the Civil War (Confederates in the Attic) and the exploration of the Pacific (Blue Latitudes) critical and commercial successes. In his newest book, A Voyage Long and Strange, Pulitzer-winner Horwitz devotes his attention to the lesser-known aspects of North America’s exploration, conquest and colonization by Europeans. Giving overdue attention to the Norse and Spanish explorers, whose adventures are typically ignored in favor of the traditional tales of the settlement of Plymouth or Jamestown, as well as to the native peoples whose civilizations were displaced or destroyed by the likes of Columbus and de Soto, the book poses profound questions about the role of history and mythology in American life.

Returning to Readerville for the first time since his discussion of Blue Latitudes, Tony Horwitz chatted with me by email about A Voyage Long and Strange.

Your accounts of your travels show you as a master of improvisation, always willing to travel or spend time with someone you’ve just met. How much advance planning do you do when you go to a place like Dominica or Roanoke Island? What decisions do you leave to chance?

I try to avoid too much advance planning. The best stories are the ones you aren’t expecting to find. I’m not a total innocent abroad, I try to be have some basic information before I set off for a destination, but don’t want to have my opinions or plans formed before I get there. Also, in the case of this book, I was following in the footsteps of explorers who generally didn’t know where they were or who they’d meet. Improvising helped get me into the spirit of their travels.

Much of the book, perhaps ironically, seems to deal with the frustrations of not finding things. How do you handle the challenges of writing about what you can’t actually know — attempts to visit sites of disputed authenticity, or see the contents of tombs whose inhabitants are unknown, or find traces of visitors whose routes are uncertain?

Uncertainty and frustration come with the territory whenever you travel. Sometimes it can make for humor, at least after the fact. With A Voyage Long and Strange, there’s a great deal we can’t know for certain about events centuries ago, and often the best I could do was make an educated guess.

Peter Gomes says to you in Plymouth, “Myth trumps fact. Always does, always has, always will.” It’s a statement that’s rather opposed to the ideals of traditional journalism, but in some ways isn’t this the book’s central message? If not, how would you qualify it?

I think Gomes is right, and his opinion accorded with at the end of my travels. But I don’t share Gomes’ apparent approval of myth’s trumping of fact. Myths have caused a lot of death and suffering, as evidenced by the bloody misadventures of the explorers I describe in this book, who chased cities of gold and other chimeras all across the Americas.

Which illusion from your school days were you saddest to lose in the course of your journey?

To tell you the truth, I feel little or no sadness about this. I’m a debunker to the core and generally delight in exploding illusions, including my own.

Which illusion from your school days were you happiest to lose?

I think I was happiest to learn that the Pilgrims weren’t even the first English to try and settle New England. Eighteen years before the Mayflower landed, a band of English came to Massachusetts seeking to get rich from sassasfras, believed in that day to be a cure for syphilis. Rather different from the storybook version, about pious Pilgrims seeking religious freedom!

What causes so many Americans to focus on the English colonists in Virginia and Massachusetts more than the French, Spanish and Norse explorers elsewhere? Language? School? Xenophobia? Regional pride? Other?

The short answer is that this is an instance where the old saw about winners writing the history is true. In colonial times, it was the English who won the contest for North America, and in the newly created U.S., it was Anglo-Americans — Protestant New Englanders in particular — who created the origin story about their own forbears founding a new land at Plymouth.

They diminished the role of Catholics, continental Europeans and even English colonists in Virginia, who had preceded the Pilgrims by thirteen years. The Civil War deepened this regional scorn for Jamestown.

In Confederates in the Attic and Blue Latitudes, you took a very participatory role in your investigations, and at times you followed suit in this book. What advantages does this style of journalism offer a writer? What disadvantages does it create?

One of the challenges of writing about history is communicating the strangeness of the past, and what it was like to be there. For me, participatory history is a way to try to inhabit the past, however vicariously. It also helps me enliven the history I’m writing about. And it’s a way to understand how Americans understand and experience history.

The disadvantage is that it’s possible to take reenacting too seriously, and be fooled into thinking you’re actually experiencing what people did in the past. Sorry, but playing Johnny Reb on weekends or a sailor on Cook’s ship isn’t the same as being one. Also, reenacting should never be a substitute for the hard work of archival research, just a complement to it.

Where on your trip did you feel the most at home? Where did you feel the most alien?

I guess I felt most at home in the South, because I’ve spent so much time there before and lived in Virginia at the time I did most of the book research. (I’ve since moved to New England, where I still feel quite foreign at times.) The place where I felt most alien, geographically rather than culturally, was northern Newfoundland, where even in summer there were icebergs and sub-arctic winds. A Viking I’m not.

If you were a biographer, which historical figure from the book would you feel most deserved a complete biography from your pen?

Many of the figures in the book would be hard to do a biography about because too little is known about them. The exceptions include John Smith, whose copious and colorful writing provides great fodder, and Hernando de Soto, whose actions rather than words are jaw-dropping. He was a Spanish Ahab, a monomaniacal conquistador on a mad quest that ultimately killed him, half his men and untold thousands of Indians.

Which tourist experience in A Voyage Long and Strange came closest to the Civil Wargasm? Which was closest to a true farb experience?

There was nothing quite like the Civil Wargasm in this book; it’s harder to recapture the costume and atmosphere of the 1500s than the 1860s and there just aren’t enough concentrated sites to do the sort of deranged tour I did with Robert Lee Hodge. My farb experience was playing a conquistador for a weekend at a history fest in Florida, a “Timeline” event at which every era was represented, so I was clunking around in armor beside Rev War Minutemen, Doughboys, WWII grunts, pioneer women and even a paleolithic man knapping flint.

Your take on the Spanish legend: Black? White? Grey? Rorschach blots?

The Black Legend has large elements of truth, the Spanish were often brutal, and, like perpetrators of later eras, kept careful records of their atrocities. But the problem with the Black Legend is that the English were just as greedy and violent, and seemed to have engaged in less soul-searching than the Spanish about the crimes they were committing.

Got a funny story from the trip that didn’t make it into the book?

One funny story I didn’t include was my visit to Mystery Hill in New Hampshire, which is known as America’s Stonehenge because it’s allegedly a Druid ruin with slabs of granite used for human sacrifice and other rites. I spent a night there with the Rhode Island Paranormal Society, whose members stumbled around the woods with all sorts of strange sensors that could pick up vibes and ghosts. The whole thing just seemed too silly and baseless to include in the book.

What’s next for you?

Not sure what’s next, except that it’s likely to be related to American history and I’d like a somewhat less ambitious project, rather than another four-year ordeal spanning ten centuries and several continents. Perhaps "A Voyage Short and Dull."

And finally, what the Readerville community always wants to know: What are you reading at the moment?

I’m on book tour at the moment, so mostly I read the USAToday outside my hotel room each morning and pass out at night to the drone of the TV. Next time I can keep my eyes open, I’m planning to read an advance copy of Blindspot, a historical novel set in Rev War-era Boston by two historians I love, Jill Lepore and Jane Kamensky. It comes out later this year.

—Peter Cashwell , a longtime Readerville contributor, is the author of The Verb ‘To Bird’ and a contributor to the Chicago Tribune, OnEarth Magazine, and the anthologies Basketball in America and Literary Cash. He lives in rural Virginia, where he is working on several new books and is currently rereading John Varley's impossibly imaginative Steel Beach.