Is everything we know about American history wrong?

Forget the Pilgrims. America's roots are older and more twisted, what Tony Horwitz calls a "primordial slime of false starts and mutations."

By Louis Bayard

Read more: Books, History, American History, Native Americans, Reviews, Book reviews

May 9, 2008 | Empire building isn't for sissies.

Just ask the Spanish conquistadors of the 16th century. Before attacking Indian settlements, they were required to read a summons called the Requerimiento, which spelled out the consequences of resistance: "I assure you that, with the help of God, I will attack you mightily. I will make war against you everywhere and in every way ... I will take your wives and children, and I will make them slaves ... I will take their property. I will do all the harm and damage to you that I can ... I declare that the deaths and injuries that occur as a result of this would be your fault and not His Majesty's, nor ours."

The Indians, of course, had no idea what was being shouted at them, and for the sake of expediency, Hernando De Soto never bothered with the Requerimiento. He preferred to loot the local maize supply, then impress available natives into service as porters and guides. Any natives who tried to escape were attacked by dogs or burned at the stake. In conquering the settlement of Mavila, De Soto's army succeeded in massacring between 2,500 and 3,000 Indians -- a single-day death toll that rivals Antietam.

The Indians at least had weapons. Spanish fleet commander Pedro Menéndez, after capturing two parties of unarmed French Huguenot settlers on the Florida coast, condemned hundreds of them to immediate death by stabbing. Among the few spared: those who converted on the spot to Catholicism and a few musicians "to play for dancing." The river where French blood ran still bears the name Matanzas, Spanish for "slaughters."

No, it's not pretty, this work of making empires. Nor is it a sure thing. Of all the American settlements launched by the lethally efficient Spanish in the 16th century, only St. Augustine, Fla., survived -- and barely. As journalist Tony Horwitz writes in his fascinating chronicle, "A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World," our nation's 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."

And thus a creation myth was born. Plymouth: where pious Pilgrims, by dint of their faith and labor, made a new nation.

And yet it takes only a little effort to see that the Puritans were walking in others' footprints. The first native to greet the Mayflower was an English-speaking Indian named Samoset, who asked for a beer. (He'd been introduced to the beverage by Britishers in Maine.) Shortly after came Squanto, who had learned the settlers' language the hard way: He'd been kidnapped by an earlier English expedition and sold into slavery. As for the coastal regions that seemed so ripe for the Pilgrims' taking, they had been conveniently emptied, thanks to a plague brought over by Europeans.

By the time the British secured a toehold in New England, other European nations had already explored 24 states -- penetrating as far inland as Kansas and Tennessee -- and had settled six. The Italian Verrazzano, who would later bequeath his name to a New York City bridge, had sailed the entire Eastern seaboard a full century before the Pilgrims even arrived. (We may be grateful that his name for Maine -- Land of Bad People -- never stuck.) Spanish conquistadors had, at great peril, rafted the Mississippi River, ventured into the Grand Canyon and climbed the Appalachians.

And yet you would be hard-pressed to find a modern-day American who knows any of this. Indeed, a better title for Horwitz's book might have been "The Corrections." All that stuff you learned in grade-school American history? Wrong.

Start with this. Ponce de Léon went to Florida to find not a fountain of youth but the same things that drew every Spanish invader: gold and slaves. (He found neither.) The first Protestant refuge in North America wasn't Plymouth but La Caroline, a fort built on the Florida coast in 1564 by the above-mentioned Huguenots. A year later, their slaughterer Menéndez held what was possibly America's first Thanksgiving dinner, well attended by local Indians.

On and on it goes: a hemorrhaging of certainty. The first European child born in North America? Not Virginia Dare but, more likely, a Viking boy named Snorri, born circa 1000 A.D. in what the Norse liked to call Vinland. The true founding father of New England? Not Bradford, not Standish, but John Smith, who gave the region its name and actively promoted its colonization.

And what about those flat-earthers who thought Columbus would tumble off the world's edge? You can blame that little fiction on Washington Irving. The Greeks had long ago figured out the world was round, and for more than 700 years, even the Catholic Church had accepted it. The only thing Spaniards were still debating in 1492 was the distance to Asia. In this, as in so many other matters, Columbus was mistaken.

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