Is everything we know about American history wrong?

Readers of Tony Horwitz's previous volumes, including "Blue Latitudes" and "Confederates in the Attic," know he likes to use history as a pretext for travel, the better to yoke past and present. The same pattern holds in "A Voyage Long and Strange," and it must be said that some of the author's excursions are more germane than others. There's fun to be had, yes, in watching him nearly combust in a Micmac sweat lodge, but it tells us next to nothing about Norse colonizers or the natives they encountered. It's even more fun to watch Horwitz go to the Dominican Republic and negotiate Santo Domingo, the New World's first city (where today the prevailing motto is "Estamos jodidos": "We're fucked"), but his experiences only reinforce what we already know about today's developing world.

Horwitz is on more fecund ground when he tries to duplicate the actual experience of the first colonizers -- clambering, for instance, into the 50 pounds of armor that one of De Soto's men would have had to drag through the Florida swamps or experiencing firsthand the wonders of the halberd: a combination hook, ax and bayonet that finished whatever business the Spanish musket and crossbow had begun.

Against his own better judgment, it seems, Horwitz keeps returning to those brutish Spaniards, ignoring the more pacific passages of La Salle, Champlain, Marquette and Joliet that were every bit as crucial to North America's future. From an entertainment standpoint, it's hard to blame him. The conquistadors may have been insane, but they were also insanely brave, "marching miles and miles," says one admirer, "with no idea who or what they'd meet." In pursuit of seven cities of gold, Coronado led his men across the Sonoran desert and mesa, then traveled 77 days across the Plains before returning to Mexico City. The journey of De Soto's army across the American Southeast, says one historian, was "a thousands-mile trek, right up there with the epic marches of military history ... Navy SEALs would be dropping with exhaustion after what these guys went through."

Of course, one of the things "these guys" carried out along the way was genocide. Their mission, as sublimated by Horwitz, was "gold and God, conquest and conversion." When Indian slaves petered out, they simply imported new ones. (The first African slaves arrived in Hispaniola in 1518.) Moral introspection was not the Spaniards' strength; neither was empiricism. Columbus was certain that Asia lay only 3,000 miles west of Spain -- about 8,000 miles short of the real distance -- and nothing he experienced could sway him. During his third voyage, he concluded he was "sailing up the breast of the world" to the nipple-extremity of the Garden of Eden. (In fact, it was Venezuela.) To his dying day, he believed he'd reached Asia. He changed the world, writes Horwitz, "not because he was right, but because he was so stubbornly wrong. Convinced the globe was small, he began the process of making it so, by bringing a new world into orbit of the old."

What distinguishes Horwitz's work from the usual anti-colonial tract is his reluctance to exchange one myth for another. Europeans may have trailed disease, violence and slavery in their wake, but the Indians they encountered were not the happy, dancing savages of New Age imaginings. The empire of the famous Powhatan (known to his people as Wahunsenacawh) extended from North Carolina to Maryland, and he ruled it with as tight a fist as George III's, exacting tribute from 15,000 subjects. Indian tribes were at constant war; fathers were even known to feed their baby daughters to dogs to keep them from being captured. It was "an impoverished and Hobbesian world," says Horwitz, "where all struggled against all for survival." A Spanish traveler found one tribe reduced to eating spiders, worms and deer dung.

America was an even crueler hostess to her European settlers. Half the Mayflower passengers perished within six months of landing. Of the 20,000-plus English who journeyed to Virginia during the colony's first decades, some three-quarters died, a mortality rate comparable to the Black Death at its height. Jamestown's most harrowing trial came in the long 1609 winter known as "the Starving Time": "When rations ran out, colonists ate horses, dogs, cats, rats, and mice. They ate shoes, cooked starch from their collars into 'a gluey porridge,' and devoured excrement. When nothing else remained, they ate one another ... Others disinterred corpses. The nadir was reached when a man killed his pregnant wife, 'chopped the Mother in pieces and salted her for his food.'"

The wonder, really, is that anybody survived at all. What separated England from its European counterparts, argues Horwitz, was not luck or planning but simply persistence. England, secure in its newly attained superpower status, could afford to send over wave after wave of colonists, giving its settlements the influx of human resources they needed to stave off extinction.

So what are we to do with the Anglophiliac bedtime stories we've been spoon-fed since childhood? "When the legend becomes fact," says the editor in John Ford's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," "print the legend." Horwitz's suggestion is more radical: Let the legend and fact intertwine in a never-resolving dance.

The example of Amerigo Vespucci is instructive. A Sevillian pickle-dealer, he accompanied Spanish and Portuguese fleets to the Indies between 1499 and 1502 and embroidered his modest travels into flagrantly fictional accounts of places he'd never been. His stories feature big-bosomed native giantesses who use insect venom to make their husbands' penises swell and who freely offer sexual favors to every passing Christian. Vespucci was punished for his effrontery in this fashion: Two continents were named after him. Better than Columbus, Vespucci understood that the New World was not just a plot of earth but a state of mind.

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