by Tony Horwitz
Succotash was originally just the soup course on Forefathers’ Day, but now it was the main meal, followed by apple pie. “In the old days, people did physical work from dawn to dark, they could eat ten courses without killing themselves,” Cynthia said. “Not these guys.”
At seven P.M., she rang a cowbell, and the men, who had been drinking upstairs, clumped down the narrow stairs like hungry prep-school boys. They seated themselves around small wooden tables, diving into baskets of bread even before someone rose to say grace. “This is a godless place,” murmured the Reverend Gomes, whose table I shared. “Beyond the reach of prayer.”
Then the men passed plates of meat and forked it into the bowls of gruel Cynthia had dispensed. The result wasn’t particularly appetizing: basically chunks of well-cooked flesh floating on a pool of brown soup. But it tasted much better than it looked. The corned beef provided salt, and the beans and turnip and hominy formed a soothing sort of porridge. “In my youth, everyone in town ate this on Forefathers’ Day,” Gomes said. “It was a way to clean out the refrigerator before Christmas.”
The Rock was another fixture of his childhood in Plymouth, and one he regarded as instructive. “Growing up here, we were given a useful distinction between symbol and reality,” he said. “The Rock, like many icons, is important not because it’s big and impressive, but because of what it represents.”
As Gomes paused to add more meat to his bowl, I asked him the question I’d put to others in Plymouth. Setting aside local pride, why elevate the Pilgrims to iconic status and ignore all the others who came to America before them?
Gomes responded by telling me about his appearance, some years ago, in a television debate with the owner of Berkeley Plantation in Virginia. Not only had Jamestown preceded Plymouth, the Virginian observed; documents showed that in 1619, colonists landing at nearby Berkeley had designated their arrival date a day of annual thanksgiving.
“This man was energetically anti-Yankee,” Gomes recalled. “So I decided magnanimity was the best response. I said, ‘Of course, the gentleman from Virginia is quite correct. But it doesn’t matter. Americans love us.’ ”
I wasn’t sure I followed his argument. “So you’re saying we should honor myth rather than fact?” I asked.
“Precisely.” The reverend smiled benignly, as I imagined he might at a bewildered parishioner. “Myth is more important than history. History is arbitrary, a collection of facts. Myth we choose, we create, we perpetuate.”
He spooned up the last of his succotash. “The story here may not be correct, but it transcends truth. It’s like religion—beyond facts. Myth trumps fact, always does, always has, always will.”
THE DESSERT COURSE arrived, and more wine. Men rose to deliver inebriated toasts or simply to shout, “We are table number one!” Tired from the long day, I left before the speeches and cards and cigars, and walked down to the harbor, digesting my dialogue with Gomes, along with the succotash. In December, the waterfront was empty and dark, except for floodlights illuminating the Rock and the coins scattered in the sand around it.
Gomes had articulated a thesis I’d been groping toward during the course of my travels, but had kept resisting. Now, shivering beside Plymouth Rock, it seemed inescapable. I could chase after facts across early America, uncover hidden or forgotten “truths,” explode fantasies about the country’s founding. But in the end it made little difference. Myth remained intact, as stubbornly embedded as the lump of granite in the pit before me.
Maybe I’d gone about my research all wrong. Instead of combing history’s fine print, like an investigative journalist, I should have studied the Greek classics, or anthropology, or elementary psychology. Myth didn’t grip only modern Americans; it had possessed the long-ago Europeans I’d been traipsing after.
A shortcut to Cathay, cities of gold, Norumbega, Columbus’s terrestrial paradise—these were visions I’d dismissed as medieval superstition. But they’d driven Europeans all over the Americas, with unintended and shattering consequences. Even Bartholomew Gosnold, searching for a tree that would cure syphilis, helped set in train the events that led to Squanto’s kidnapping, his assistance to the Pilgrims, and their successful settlement of the shore I was standing on almost four centuries later. Myths didn’t just trump fact; they helped create it.
The modern map of America ratified ancient mirages. Land-bound Rhode Island got its name from a geographic mixup with Block Island, which Giovanni da Verrazzano thought resembled the Greek isle of Rhodes. “California” is believed to derive from Calafia, queen of the tall, black Amazons whom sixteenth-century Spaniards conjured as occupants of today’s Golden State. And two continents bore the name of Amerigo Vespucci, who penned fantasies about lands he never saw. All these names were now fixed, and likely to remain so.
As a fact-bound journalist, I’d dutifully recorded the legends littering my path across America. But I’d failed to appreciate why these myths persisted. People needed them. In St. Augustine, I’d doubted that many of my fellow visitors to the “Fountain of Youth” really believed Ponce de León found an elixir, or that the sulphur water they quaffed from plastic cups would roll back the years. But it was harmless fiction, so why spoil the fun with facts?
Like everyone else, I’d tossed the water down with a smile, even with the faint hope that the foul-tasting minerals might do some good, like cod liver oil or vitamin C. Anyway, the fountain was the rare chapter of the conquistador story that offered hope and renewal and a little comedy, rather than conquest and cruelty. Was it so surprising that visitors preferred the fountain myth to the grim reality on display nearby, of Indians exterminated by European contact?
At St. Augustine, and at the Florida history fest where tourists steered clear of my conquistador armor, I’d sensed something else. Americans didn’t so much study history as shop for it. They did this at Plymouth, too, ticking off sites like items on a grocery list: the Rock, the Mayflower, Pilgrim Hall, Plimoth Plantation.
The past was a consumable, subject to the national preference for familiar products. And history, in America, is a dish best served plain. The first course could include a dollop of Italian in 1492, but not Spanish spice or French sauce or too much Indian corn. Nothing too filling or fancy ahead of the turkey and pumpkin pie, just the way Grandma used to cook it.
I HAD MY own comfort food, which I consumed when the season allowed. After long days tracking the sixteenth century, I’d switch on a motel TV to watch baseball, or doze off over newspaper box scores. Despite steroids and other scandals, baseball was for me unchanging and unchallenging, a well of pleasant boyhood memories. A soothing lullaby, like the lines I’d learned in grade school about American history. O beautiful for pilgrim feet . . . When, in the course of human events . . . our fathers brought forth on this continent . . .
One night, while reading about baseball, I sensed a link between my nostalgia for the game and the historical quest I’d been on. In his essay “The Creation Myths of Cooperstown,” Stephen Jay Gould pondered why Abner Doubleday was celebrated for “inventing” baseball one day in 1839. Doubleday never claimed to have done so, and the man who gave him posthumous credit for creating the sport was later judged criminally insane. In any event, there was clear evidence that our “national pastime” evolved over decades, from English games with funny names like rounders and stool ball. Yet the romantic legend of young Abner, a future Civil War general, creating an entirely new and American game, in an upstate New York cow pasture, was so potent that humble Cooperstown became home to baseball’s Hall of Fame.
Gould attributed this to “the psychic need for an indigenous creation myth.” Humans, whether contemplating the genesis of their customs or of their species, yearn to locate “an explicit point of origin,” rather than accept that most beginnings are gradual and complex. “Creation myths,” he concluded, “identify heroes and sacred places, while evolutionary stories provide no palpable, particular thing as a symbol for reverence, worship, or patriotism.”<
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As with baseball, so, too, with America’s birth. The country’s European founding was slow and messy: a primordial slime of false starts and mutations that evolved, over generations, into English colonies and the United States. Once on its feet, the newborn American nation looked back in search of origins, and located its heroes and sacred places on the stony shore of Massachusetts. The Pilgrim Fathers of 1620 begat the Founding Fathers of 1776. Cooperstown had Doubleday’s cow pasture, Plymouth its hallowed Rock.
And that’s where I’d ended up. While walking off my Forefathers’ Day dinner, I found myself drawn by the lights inside the Greek Outhouse. On a late December night, bathed by the icy tide in seaweed and styrofoam, the Rock looked even more pitiful than it had on my earlier visits. But for the first time I regarded the battered stone with grudging respect. You could yank at it with thirty yoke of oxen, crack it, chip pieces from it, or bury it in sand, as Indian protestors had done. But you couldn’t dislodge it from American memory.
I reached into my pocket for a penny. Fingers chilled, I fumbled the toss, watching the coin skid off the Rock and into the rimy surf. I stood for a moment, thinking of luck, and Pilgrim feet, and my own feet, numb with cold, then turned and set them on the way toward home.
NOTE ON SOURCES
When navigating the source material on early America, it’s easy to feel as the Vikings often did in the North Atlantic: hafvalla, lost at sea. The literature on Europe’s discovery of America spans ten centuries, twenty-odd countries, and roughly as many genres, from saga to science fiction. No two translations or editions of explorers’ writings read alike. There are also countless charts, runes, graves, and other remains to decipher. It helps to have a working knowledge of Icelandic, Algonquian, and radio-carbon dating.
Possessing none of these skills, I’ve been unusually reliant on the spadework of historians and the generosity of archaeologists, archivists, linguists, and other specialists I consulted in the course of my research. This book also reflects my training as a journalist. “When in doubt,” a hard-nosed city editor once advised me, “leave it out.” I’ve tried to bring that same caution and skepticism to a historical subject that is riddled with controversies, fantasies, and outright forgeries. For this reason, I’ve given little or no space to the so-called Vinland Map, the Chinese discovery of America, Columbus’s crypto-Judaism, and other popular but poorly sourced notions about the hemisphere and its early explorers.
A reporter’s love of paper trails has also influenced my selection of which among scores of expeditions to retrace. The journeys of Coronado, De Soto, John Smith, and others in this book generated hundreds of documents that survive to this day. Unfortunately, the voyages of men such as Henry Hudson and the Portuguese Corte-Reales did not.
That being said, my decision to focus on ten or so historical episodes, rather than to attempt a comprehensive survey, has inevitably resulted in a number of significant figures being left out—most notably, Samuel de Champlain, the Frenchman who explored the coast and rivers of New England and wrote vividly about his adventures (including the founding of the Order of Good Cheer, the first gastronomic society in North America). For readers interested in Champlain’s voyages, and other topics that merit much more attention than I’ve given them, I’ve offered some suggestions below.
Finally, before I dive into specific sources, a word on proper nouns. The names of explorers, and of the people and places they encountered, vary tremendously depending on language, translation, idiosyncratic spelling, and alphabet (or the lack of it). Hernando De Soto, on second reference, should properly be Soto, not De Soto. The ruler called Powhatan by the English was known to his own people as Wahunsenacawh. However, for the sake of clarity, I’ve almost always hewed to common usage. Also, when not specifying tribal names, I’ve frequently used the term “Indians,” as Native Americans generally do themselves.
The chapter notes below are intended as a highlights reel of my research. Full citations for the books mentioned, and for other works I consulted, are in the bibliography that follows.
PROLOGUE
The story of America’s discovery and settlement by Europeans stretches across such a vastness of time and territory that most scholars have probed pieces of it rather than the whole, rather like the explorers themselves. A notable exception is Samuel Eliot Morison, the great Harvard historian, mariner, and misogynist (he refused to teach Radcliffe women). Morison is to America’s early exploration what Shelby Foote is to the Civil War: an old-fashioned storyteller who writes with exceptional verve, sweep, and wit. Morison’s writing, like Foote’s, can feel dated, particularly in its dismissive treatment of natives. But for an overview of New World exploration, there’s no better place to start than with Morison’s magisterial The European Discovery of America, a two-volume work divided into northern and southern voyages.
Other general works I found particularly useful during the initial, omnivorous phase of my research were Alan Taylor’s American Colonies: The Settling of North America, John Bakeless’s The Eyes of Discoverery, and The Discovery of North America, edited by W. P. Cumming, R. A. Skelton, and D. B. Quinn. One of the best compilations of writings by and about explorers is online: American Journeys, a digital library sponsored by the Wisconsin Historical Society. This user-friendly site includes maps and historical background to each selection. Go to http://www.americanjourneys.org.
An indispensable geographical resource is The Atlas of North American Exploration, by William H. Goetzmann and Glyndwr Williams, which combines summaries of almost every exploring expedition in North American history with colorful, easy-to-read maps.
On Native American history and culture, I turned most often to the Handbook of North American Indians, a twenty-volume work published by the Smithsonian Institution. Though often dense, and occasionally dated (the first volume appeared in 1978), the Handbook examines every region, era, and tribe in North America, from every perspective: archaeological, demographic, linguistic, political, religious, musical, and so on.
There are a number of excellent books about environmental history and the interchange of plants, animals, and microorganisms known as the Columbian Exchange. Pioneering works in this field include Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 and William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. More recent is Charles Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, an excellent and balanced overview of current scholarship on the Columbian Exchange, disease, and New World demography.
My material on Verrazzano is mostly drawn from Lawrence Wroth’s The Voyages of Giovanni da Verrazzano, which includes not only the navigator’s writings but a comprehensive look at what’s known about his life and voyages, as well as the geographical thinking of his day.
CHAPTER 1
The most comprehensive translation of the Norse sagas is The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, a five-volume work published in Iceland that includes forty sagas and forty-nine related tales. The last volume ends with an invaluable reference section, including maps, a timeline of historical events relevant to the sagas, illustrations of ships and homesteads, and a glossary defining terms such as “Althing,” “berserk,” “scorn-pole,” and “sworn brotherhood.”
Most readers, however, will find more than enough in Penguin’s abridgement of the Complete Sagas, titled The Sagas of the Icelanders. This one-volume edition opens with excellent essays by novelist Jane Smiley and historian Robert Kellogg. As Smiley observes, the sagas’ blend of plainspoken prose and fantastical imaginings introduce us to “a world a thousand years separated from ours, both intensely familiar and intensely strange.” For readers interested only in the Norse discovery of America, Penguin has also published a very short edition, The Vinland Sagas, with a lively and informative introduction by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson.
For a broader understanding of the Norse and their world, I relied in particular on Vikings: The North At
lantic Saga, a wide-ranging and well-illustrated collection of essays by leading experts on the Norse, edited by William Fitzhugh and Elisabeth Ward. One of the volume’s authors, Birgitta Linderoth Wallace, was especially helpful to me, sharing her archive and wisdom about all things Norse during my visit to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Thanks also to Gísli Sigurd¯sson of the Árni Magnússon Institute in Reykjavik.
On native history and culture, I am indebted to Ruth Holmes Whitehead, who met with me in St. John’s and whose work includes Stories from the Six Worlds, The Old Man Told Us, and Elitekey: Micmac Material Culture from 1600 AD to the Present. My understanding of the archaeological record was also informed by other experts I interviewed in Newfoundland: Priscilla Renouf, Kevin McAleese, Gerald Penny, and Martha Drake.
On the Beothuk, I mainly drew on James P. Howley’s The Beothucks or Red Indians, Ingeborg Marshall’s The Beothuk, and Ralph T. Pastore’s Shanawdithit’s People: The Archaeology of the Beothuks. An excellent overview of Newfoundland history, both native and European, is Kevin Major’s As Near to Heaven by Sea: A History of Newfoundland and Labrador.
The story of Helge Ingstad’s search for and discovery of the Norse site in L’Anse aux Meadows is told in his own words, in Westward to Vinland. While Ingstad received (and claimed) most of the credit for having found the Viking site, others had speculated before that northern Newfoundland was home to the Norse, including W. A. Munn, a cod liver oil refiner in Newfoundland, and Jørgen Meldgaard, a Danish archaeologist.
The Thomas McGovern essay I cite at the end of this chapter is “The Vinland Adventure: A North Atlantic Perspective,” published in the North American Archaeologist, vol. 2 (4), 1980–81.
