TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Hernando Today

New Book Explores History Of 'The New World'

ADVERTISEMENT

By JOHN HERBERT

From Where I Sit

Published: July 10, 2008

Elementary school Gospel: Columbus discovered America back in 1492. Categorically wrong, according to a new book, "A Voyage Long and Strange," which was on my summer reading list. Columbus never set foot in North America, argues the author, Tony Horwitz.
But Columbus did put Florida on the map of the New World, sort of. Hundreds of Spanish explorers, aka conquistadors, followed in the self-appointed "Admiral of the Ocean Sea's" wake to both North and South America.
Preaching that the world was round, the 15th-century visionary sailed off into the sunset to prove it. Although he didn't leave much of a confirming paper trail, Columbus probably made landfall at what's now the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic or somewhere else in the Caribbean.
That uncertainty is underscored by two different claims that Columbus's skull is interred in the Dominican Republic, plus another assertion that his body lies in a grave back in Spain.
Ponce de Leon, who has a street named for him in Brooksville and most other Florida cities worth their fresh water supplies, was actually the first European to disembark in the U.S. His 1513 landing site is believed to be near Daytona Beach, where he searched in vain for the mythical "Fountain of Youth," supposedly to cure the diminutive (4'11") Spanish conquistador's impotence.
Horwitz fills in many of the blanks between Columbus and the Pilgrims, retracing what's thought to have been the early explorers' paths through the southern half of what was eventually to become the Continental U.S. They were searching for still more veins of gold and silver, the author reports.
Native American Indians, whom the Spanish conquistadors took hostage as guides and interpreters, would be burned at the stake or tossed to hungry attack dogs if they led their captors astray.
The conquistadors' standard operating procedure, in fact, was first to sign a peace treaty and exchange goodwill baubles with the Indians, then take them hostage, and, finally, torture and slaughter the braves and rape their women.
Strong on color, Horwitz notes that Florida's dense clouds of mosquitoes (long before the age of the love bug) "left everyone looking like lepers."
Horwitz does half-heartedly credit the Vikings with beating Columbus to American soil by 500 years, although they lacked the PR machinery to make any noise about the feat. He ends with the Pilgrims wading ashore at Plymouth in 1620, since the inner harbor was too shallow for a questionable Mayflower landing.
All that Plymouth Rock stuff, and accompanying ballyhoo about the first permanent European settlement in the Americas, belongs to mythology, Horwitz argues. The Spanish had already been running the University of Lima, Peru, 70 years before 1620 and Plymouth Rock.
Conquistadors used Cuba as a base of operations for their years of bloodthirsty wandering throughout the U.S. As far as they knew, the Spaniards never left Florida, which stretched (in their early minds) from the Atlantic to the Rockies.
Hernando (our Hernando!) De Soto and his butchering mob of armored conquistadors came ashore in Tampa Bay, most likely near Bradenton, in 1539. It took him six years to ford the wide Mississippi and reach Texas.
One highlight of Horwitz's Florida reporting expedition is a tiny De Soto museum in nearby Inverness. At a Stars and Bars-decorated fish camp next door, a sign over the bar warns "Unattended children and dogs will be used for gator bait." The spirit of the merciless conquistadors lives on in Citrus County.
Horwitz pours cynical observations over St. Augustine, probably the very first permanent European settlement in North America. "St. Tourist Trap," he calls the town, which dates from 1565. The surrounding region, he reports, "is Dixie's version of Newark."
Although St. Augustine claims numerous North American firsts, including our "oldest" house, "oldest" school and "oldest" drugstore, none of the buildings predate 1700, writes Horwitz.
He sums up on a positive note (for Spaniards, anyway), pointing out that "by the time the Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth, St. Augustine was up for urban renewal."

A regular columnist for Hernando Today, John Herbert lives in Spring Hill.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT