A Voyage Long and Strange

by Tony Horwitz

  CHAPTER 2

  The best collection of primary sources relating to Columbus is Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, translated and edited by Samuel Eliot Morison. Another excellent source is New Iberian World: A Documentary History of the Discovery and Settlement of Latin America to the Early 17th Century. For a short edition, with background on navigation and geography, see The Log of Christopher Columbus, translated by Robert Fuson.

  Morison’s Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus is the standard modern biography of the navigator, and is particularly useful for its nautical insights (Morison retraced Columbus’s voyages in a yacht). But the book was published in 1942, a half century before the wave of new and more critical scholarship that attended the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s sail. One of the best of these recent works is The Mysterious History of Columbus by the New York Times science writer John Noble Wilford, who writes with rare balance and clarity about the navigator and his legacy. Also noteworthy is the historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s biography Columbus, an elegant, erudite, and concise portrait of the explorer and his beliefs.

  Other works relating to Columbus that I found useful were Stephen Greenblatt’s Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, Tzvetlan Todorov’s The Conquest of America, and Ilan Stavans’s Imagining Columbus: The Literary Voyage, a scholarly survey of writing about the navigator. For scathing critiques of Columbus and his impact, see Kirkpatrick Sale’s The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy and David Stannard’s American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World.

  A fascinating subgenre of Columbus literature is scholarly debate over the intellectual impact of his voyages on the Old World. Did his discoveries transform Europe’s image of itself and the universe, or were Columbus’s voyages filtered through a medieval and classical worldview so entrenched that his exploration served mostly to buttress preexisting beliefs? Anthony Grafton surveys this and other aspects of the European cosmos in New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery. Balanced, accessible, and beautifully illustrated, this is one of the most illuminating books I read in the course of my research.

  The quote that is the basis for the title of my book, about Columbus thanking God for the end to “a voyage so long and strange,” comes from “To the Indies,” an essay in The Aztec Treasure House, by Evan Connell.

  CHAPTER 3 and 4

  In addition to the sources cited above, I relied on The Dominican Republic: A National History, by Frank Moya Pons; Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola, by Michele Wucker; and Colonial Santo Domingo, a guide published in the Dominican Republic. Also helpful to my understanding of the modern D.R. were my conversations with Hamlet Hermann, a writer, political analyst, and former government minister in Santo Domingo.

  For the native history of Hispaniola, see The Tainos: Rise and Fall of the People Who Greeted Columbus, by Irving Rouse, and Columbus’s Outpost Among the Tainos: Spain and America at La Isabela, 1493–1498, by Kathleen Deagan and José Maria Cruxent.

  My principal source on Vespucci was Letters from a New World: Amerigo Vespucci’s Discovery of America, edited by Luciano Formisano. For an outrageous and incisive commentary on Vespucci, listen to Jack Hitt’s radio essay, which aired on PBS’s This American Life on July 12, 2002. Hitt likens Vespucci’s letters to those published in Penthouse Forum, and regards the Italian as the first great salesman in American history. “The naming of America wasn’t a mistake,” Hitt concludes. “It was prophecy.” A link for the program, “Give the People What They Want,” is at www.thislife.org.

  The little-known work of Father Ramón Pane can be found in “Columbus, Ramón Pane and the Beginnings of American Anthropology,” by Edward Gaylor Bourne, in Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 1906. Pane’s writing is also tucked within The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by His Son Ferdinand, translated by Benjamin Keen.

  For Bartolomé de Las Casas, I turned to the Penguin Classic edition of A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, translated by Nigel Griffin, with an excellent introduction by Anthony Pagden.

  CHAPTER 5

  The books I found most useful for a general understanding of Spain and Spanish conquest are J. H. Elliott’s Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 and Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830, Henry Kamen’s Imperial Spain, 1469–1716, and Hugh Thomas’s Rivers of Gold: The Rise of the Spanish Empire. A provocative, revisionist study is Matthew Restall’s Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. My understanding of the Spanish has also been informed by Professor Douglas Cope, whose lectures on colonial Latin America I attended at Brown University in the fall of 2007.

  For the history of Spanish exploration and settlement of what is today the United States, the outstanding work is David J. Weber’s The Spanish Frontier in North America, which touches on everything from the sixteenth-century origins of the black legend to Spanish revival architecture in the twentieth. Weber is exceptionally balanced, avoiding the romanticizing or reviling of the Spanish that characterizes so much writing on this subject. For one-stop shopping on the Spanish in North America, there is no better book than this.

  In a very different vein, Carlos Fuentes’s The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World is a freewheeling, literary meditation by one of Latin America’s leading novelists. “The Hispanic world did not come to the United States,” Fuentes observes. “The United States came to the Hispanic world. It is perhaps an act of poetic justice that now the Hispanic world should return.”

  Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative of his journey across America was published in several editions, under different titles. Among the many translations, one of the most recent and fluid is by Martin A. Favata and José B. Fernández, The Account: Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Relacion. Cyclone Covey’s earlier translation, Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America, is useful for its introduction, annotations, and thoughtful epilogue by William Pilkington.

  For devoted students of Cabeza de Vaca, the indispensable work is Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez, translated and edited by Rolena Adorno and Patrick Pautz. This three-volume study presents The Account in Spanish and English and includes an examination of everything to do with Cabeza de Vaca and the Narváez expedition.

  A new and less academic work is Paul Schneider’s Brutal Journey: The Epic Story of the First Crossing of North America. Well-paced and thoroughly researched, Brutal Journey is also notable for its nuanced treatment of Narváez, who tends to come off as a cartoon conquistador in many works about Cabeza de Vaca.

  CHAPTERS 6 and 7

  As I mention in the text, the New Mexico scholars Richard Flint and Shirley Cushing Flint are unparalleled in their knowledge of Coronado and his expedition. I have drawn heavily on their work, in particular Documents of the Coronado Expedition, 1539–1542, a meticulous and exhaustively annotated translation of letters, accounts, muster rolls, and other papers relating not only to Coronado’s travels but also to those of Fray Marcos, Estevanico, and Hernando de Alarcón. The Documents includes the original Spanish, maps, a glossary, and biographical and geographic data on the people and places named in the documents. This is the bible of Coronado studies.

  Richard Flint is also the author of Great Cruelties Have Been Reported: The 1544 Investigation of the Coronado Expedition, and he and Shirley have edited two collections of essays, The Coronado Expedition to Tierra Nueva: The 1540–1542 Route Across the Southwest and The Coronado Expedition from the Distance of 460 Years. For a less detailed treatment of the expedition, see The Journey of Coronado, translated and edited by George Parker Winship. It has a concise historical introduction and fluid, lightly annotated translations of the conquistador’s letters and accounts by his men.

  The Flints and their fellow members of the Center for Desert Archaeo
logy are also at the forefront of the search for sites along Coronado’s trail. During my own trek, I attended lectures on this quest by John Madsen, Gayle Hartmann, and William Hartmann, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona. “Coronado’s journey was the Apollo expedition of his day,” he says, “and Mexico City was a sixteenth-century mission control, shipping out men to explore the unknown.” Hartmann has written a novel about the Spanish in the Southwest, Cities of Gold, and designed an excellent Web site about Coronado, http://www.psi.edu/coronado/coronado.html.

  For a different approach, see To the Inland Empire: Coronado and our Spanish Legacy, by Stewart Udall, a former secretary of the interior and renowned environmentalist. Udall makes a passionate case for recognition of the early Spanish and calls 1542—when Coronado, De Soto, and other Spaniards were roaming across America and the Pacific—“a Himalayan moment” in geographical discovery. “Never again would any country have a year—or even a century!—when its explorers would range so far or add so much to the store of knowledge about earth’s unknown places.”

  Another distinctive take on Coronado is Douglas Preston’s Cities of Gold: A Journey Across the American Southwest. This book combines history and travel adventure, rather like my own, except that Preston is much more intrepid: he retraces Coronado’s route through Arizona and New Mexico on horseback. By turns comic and poignant, Cities of Gold is particularly strong in its evocation of the Southwest’s pioneer and ranching cultures.

  An excellent overview of native societies encountered by the early Spanish is Edward H. Spicer’s Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest. For a provocative look at the Spanish impact on the Pueblo peoples, see Ramón A. Gutiérrez’s When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away. On the Zuni, I often consulted A Zuni Atlas, by T. J. Ferguson and E. Richard Hart. For the story of the controversial Smithsonian anthropologist I refer to in the text, see Zuni: Selected Writings of Frank Hamilton Cushing, edited by Jesse Green.

  CHAPTER 8 and 9

  The principal sources for De Soto’s expedition are the writings of three men who accompanied the conquistador: Luis Hernández de Biedma (a royal factor), Rodrigo Rangel (De Soto’s secretary), and a Portuguese known only as a “gentleman of Elvas.” There has been a great deal of scholarly debate about the accuracy of these accounts, and how much they borrow from one another. But taken together they provide a rich and plausible narrative of the expedition.

  The same can’t be said of a fourth, widely used source, which is too often lumped together with the others. Long after De Soto died, the half-Spanish, half-Incan historian Garcilaso de la Vega drew on memories of survivors to write a book-length narrative of the expedition. He also drew on his own very literary imagination, stretching scenes that merit only a few lines in the others’ accounts into entire chapters that read like chivalric romances. I’ve used Garcilaso very sparingly, in a few instances where he’s directly citing the information of others or is writing about events corroborated in the three principal accounts.

  Translations of Biedma, Rangel, Elvas, and Garcilaso, as well as other documents relating to De Soto’s life and expedition, are collected in The De Soto Chronicles: The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539–1543. This indispensable two-volume work includes essays by many of the leading experts on De Soto and Spanish conquest. For a cautionary deconstruction of the sources on De Soto, see The Hernando de Soto Expedition: History, Historiography, and “Discovery” in the Southeast, edited by Patricia Galloway.

  The best biography of the conquistador is David Ewing Duncan’s Hernando De Soto: A Savage Quest in the Americas. Duncan bridges popular and academic history, writing a biography that is carefully researched, balanced, and also a lively and accessible read. Almost half of the book deals with De Soto’s life before his arrival in La Florida. Charles Hudson’s Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando de Soto and the South’s Ancient Kingdoms focuses almost exclusively on the La Florida expedition, and is particularly strong on the native societies De Soto encountered. Hudson’s earlier research on this subject can be found in The Southeastern Indians.

  As I’ve noted in the text, Hudson has also devoted more study than anyone else to reconstructing De Soto’s route. While the Hudson Route remains contentious, it’s the current best fit of the documentary and geographical evidence. The story of Hudson’s quest is told by his wife, Joyce Rockwood Hudson, in her engaging travelogue, Looking for De Soto: A Search Through the South for the Spaniard’s Trail.

  While tracking De Soto, more than at any other point in my book, I had to leave out a wealth of material gathered from historians, archaeologists, and park officials along the conquistador’s route; if I hadn’t, telling the story of the expedition would have consumed two volumes rather than two chapters. However, my discussion of De Soto and his impact on the South has been informed by many of these sources, in particular Charles Fenwick, former superintendent of the De Soto National Memorial in Bradenton; Bonnie McEwan, director of Mission San Luis in Tallahassee; Jeff Mitchem, station archaeologist at the Parkin Archaeological State Park in Arkansas; Dave Moore, archaeologist at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina; and John Connaway, survey archaeologist with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, in Clarksdale. I’m also indebted to two professors I consulted at the University of Mississippi, Jay Johnson and Robbie Ethridge (whose “shatter zone” thesis I refer to in the text), as well as Vernon Knight at the University of Alabama.

  There is no better way to grasp the sophistication and grandeur of mound culture than to visit its remains, not only at large complexes such as Moundville in Alabama and Ocmulgee in Georgia, but also at small parks like the one in Parkin, Arkansas. For more reading on mound culture, see Robert Silverberg’s The Mound Builders and Mann’s 1491, which is particularly good on Cahokia.

  CHAPTER 10

  The most accessible sources for the writings of René de Laudonnière and other Frenchmen in sixteenth-century Florida are two books by Charles Bennett, Laudonnière and Fort Caroline: History and Documents and Three Voyages. The former includes a history of the French colony and documents relating to its founding and destruction, including Spanish accounts.

  On the artwork of the French painter in Florida Jacques le Moyne de Morgues, see Discovering the New World, edited by Michael Alexander, and The New World: The First Pictures of America, edited by Stefan Lorant. The watercolor I refer to, of Laudonnière and a Timucuan chief, is held by the New York Public Library. Some scholars believe this is not Le Moyne’s original work, but a copy made from a tinted engraving of his drawing, which was printed by Theodore de Bry in 1591. The best book on the natives the French and others encountered in northeast Florida is The Timucua, by Jerald Milanich.

  For the Spanish in Florida, the best modern treatment is Eugene Lyon’s The Enterprise of Florida: Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and Spanish Conquest of 1565–1568. Lyon takes a revisionist tack, emphasizing the commercial aspects of Menéndez’s mission. Also useful to me were Paul E. Hoffman’s A New Andalucia and a Way to the Orient: The American Southeast During the Sixteenth Century and Woodbury Lowery’s The Spanish Settlements within the Present Limits of the United States.

  Very little is known about Juan Ponce de León and no eyewitness accounts of his voyages survive. An early Spanish history of Ponce de León’s exploration is available on the American Journeys Web site. Also see Morison, Southern Voyages, and Leonard Olschiki, “Ponce de León’s Fountain of Youth: History of a Geographical Myth,” published in The Hispanic Historical Review in 1941.

  On St. Augustine, I turned to The Oldest City: St. Augustine, Saga of Survival, a collection of scholarly essays edited by Jean Parker Waterbury. I also found a wealth of information at the St. Augustine Historical Society, one of the best archives I visited in the course of my travels. The historical society member I cite with regard to the “flimflams” in St. Augustine is Charles Reynolds; his “Fact V
ersus Fiction for the New Historical St. Augustine” was published in 1937. A contrary view, offering evidence of the Fountain of Youth’s veracity, is “The First Landing Place of Juan Ponce de León on the North American Continent in the Year 1513,” a booklet available at the present-day Fountain of Youth park.

  CHAPTER 11

  Any study of early English voyages to the New World begins with the encyclopedic work of Richard Hakluyt, the great Elizabethan chronicler of exploration. The Principall Navigations, Voyages Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation, first published in 1589, is a multi-volume compilation of Hakluyt’s and others’ writing about every explorer and adventurer known or believed to have set off before 1600. Sprawling and eccentrically organized, it is best read in excerpts, like those reproduced on the American Journeys Web site or in collections such as The Discovery of North America.

  One of the editors of The Discovery, David Beers Quinn, is a twentieth-century Hakluyt who edited and updated his predecessor’s research and wrote roughly as many words on English exploration. Of his many books, the most useful to me included England and the Discovery of America, 1481–1620, and The Voyages and Colonising Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert.

  Quinn, who died in 2002, was also the dean of Roanoke studies, collecting primary accounts in Virginia Voyages and providing a comprehensive history in Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584–1606. Quinn’s writing can be elliptical, but the depth of his scholarship makes his work indispensable.

  More accessible to the general reader is Ivor Noël Hume’s The Virginia Adventure: Roanoke to James Town, a lucid and lively retelling of early colonization, interspersed with archaeological insights. Karen Ordahl Kupperman’s Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony is an excellent short treatment, putting Roanoke in the context of English and native society. Raleigh Trevelyan’s Sir Walter Raleigh is a recent and very fine biography of Roanoke’s sponsor.

  On memory of Roanoke, Robert Arner’s booklet, The Lost Colony in Literature, offers a wry survey of the many books, poems, and other works inspired by the colony’s disappearance. For an overview of current scholarship and archaeology related to the colony, see Searching for the Roanoke Colonies, a collection of essays edited by E. Thomson Shields and Charles R. Ewen. More on the work of Fred Willard’s Lost Colony Center for Science and Research can be found at its Web site, http://www.lost-colony.com.