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History See other History Articles Title: In Love With the History Our Teachers Never Told Us CUTTYHUNK ISLAND, Mass. — Tony Horwitz’s new book, “A Voyage Long and Strange,” is about the American history most Americans never learned, including the story of the short-lived, early-17th-century colony established on this windswept island eight miles west of Martha’s Vineyard. The book starts with the Viking discovery of North America, dispels a number of myths about Columbus (a much lousier navigator than we were taught) and then traces the various Spanish and French explorations of America before turning to the English settlements at Jamestown and Plymouth. That the Pilgrims were very tardy latecomers is one of the themes of “A Voyage Long and Strange,” just published by Macmillan. Another is that much of what we think of as heroic exploration was bumbling and misguided. And a third is that large chunks of our past are preserved these days less by scholars than by passionate amateurs. Who knew, for example, that some evangelicals in Jacksonville, Fla., were keeping alive the memory of the French Huguenots who settled there and were massacred by the Spanish? Mr. Horwitz is himself a passionate amateur of sorts. For his book “Confederates in the Attic,” about Civil War re-enactors, he camped out at Antietam with a man whose specialty was making himself resemble a bloated corpse. For this book he joined some conquistador re-enactors in Bradenton, Fla., and tried on their homemade armor. The breast plate, he said, made him feel as if he were wearing a car hood on a sweltering summer day. He also baked himself — to the point of mummification, practically — in a Micmac sweat lodge in Newfoundland, and in a vain attempt to withstand the steamy climate of Santo Domingo, where Columbus may or may not be buried, he spray-painted his torso with Arrid Extra Dry and blotted himself with rolls of paper towel. To research “A Voyage Long and Strange” Mr. Horwitz trolled through libraries and also logged extensive rental-car mileage, tracing the routes of Coronado, for example, who journeyed all the way from Mexico to what is now Kansas, and of de Soto, who went from Florida to Texas. As often as not, he found that some important but neglected site was behind a Wendy’s or a Wal-Mart. Oddly, considering that he now lives on Martha’s Vineyard, one place that Mr. Horwitz writes about but did not visit is Cuttyhunk, right nearby, where the British explorer Bartholomew Gosnold established a short-lived colony in 1602. On a gray, cold and blustery day earlier this month, he rectified the omission, and afterward he wrote in an e-mail message: “I’ll never complain again about the Vineyard being bleak.” To get there he had to take two ferries: from the Vineyard to Wood’s Hole and then from New Bedford to Cuttyhunk. On the second leg, as Cuttyhunk — a gray smudge at the end of what are now known as the Elizabeth Islands — came into view, he explained that Gosnold sailed to the New England coast, or what he thought was northern Virginia, in search of sassafras, which was the 17th-century version of penicillin. It was believed — wrongly — to be a cure for syphilis and thus was extremely valuable. Gosnold had a crew of 31, including sailors — “none of the best,” according to someone onboard — an apothecary (to identify the sassafras) and 20 settlers, who were supposed to found a year-round trading post. The settlement lasted only a few weeks because those who were supposed to stay behind got cold feet. They felt they were insufficiently provisioned and were also worried about being cheated of their share of the cargo. Two men left accounts of the voyage, and so the Cuttyhunk colony, though brief, is unusually well documented, Mr. Horwitz said, and what’s most remarkable about these accounts is their description of the settlers’ encounter with American Indians. On first making landfall in southern Maine, Gosnold’s ship, the Concord, was greeted by a canoe rigged with a mast and sails, so that it was at first mistaken for a European fishing vessel. The Indians onboard “spake diverse Christian words,” one of the Englishmen wrote, “and seemed to understand much more than we.” It turned out they had been trading for years with Basque fishermen. The Indians who met them on Cuttyhunk were “exceeding courteous, gentle of disposition and well conditioned,” and made a very favorable impression, especially the women. “This is the rare story of gentle first contact between Europeans and Native Americans,” Mr. Horwitz said. “Some of the other stories are pretty bleak. But here you get these wonderful details like ‘drinking tobacco’ together and descriptions of the natives as very ‘witty.’ ” He added later: “One of the accounts talks about how they ‘much delighted in our company,’ so you get the feeling there might have been a lot of sex, though if you think about it, the Indians were probably a lot cleaner than the English. Coming off the boat, their breath and B.O. must have been just astounding.” In the summertime Cuttyhunk today has a population of about 200, but in the off season that number dwindles to 20 or 30 — fewer, Mr. Horwitz pointed out, than sailed on the Concord — and there is not a lot going on. On the day of Mr. Horwitz’s visit there was only a single pupil in the island’s one-room schoolhouse, Casey Dorian, a third grader. (Her sister, the only other pupil, was off-island for an orthodontist’s appointment.) Even though it was a mail day, one of just two a week at that time of year, the post office was empty except for Janet Burke, the postmaster. The only traffic was a golf cart piloted by Dr. Seymour DiMare, who putt-putted down to the dock to pick up Mr. Horwitz. Dr. DiMare is a retired cardiologist from Concord, Mass., and though he and his wife, Paula, still have a house there, they spend most of their time on the island. Dr. DiMare is a determined Cuttyhunk booster. He says it’s his island, and not Bermuda, that was the inspiration for “The Tempest,” and he likes to argue that Gosnold was really America’s first entrepreneur. Joined by his wife, Dr. DiMare opened the island’s tiny historical museum for Mr. Horwitz and guided him around, pointing out a life-size model of Gosnold, clad in doublet and bloomerlike breeches, and a replica of one of the Concord’s tiny, coffin-shaped bunks. He also showed him a copy of an engraving that indicated that Gosnold had introduced the wheelbarrow to the New World. What most caught Mr. Horwitz’s eye, however, was a 13-inch stone phallus that a Cuttyhunk resident found on the beach after Hurricane Carol in 1954. “Fertility symbol,” a label said. Then Dr. DiMare drove Mr. Horwitz to the island’s highest point, so he could look west at a stone tower that was erected in Gosnold’s memory in 1903, supposedly, but not necessarily, on the site of the original settlement. The wind whipped in from the northeast. Whitecaps broke against the beach. Mr. Horwitz, who is slender and scholarly-looking, with wire-rimmed glasses, was dressed more for museumgoing than exploration. He made a half-hearted attempt to look for sassafras, and then gratefully accepted a ride back to the dock. “I’m not sure I’d know sassafras if I saw it,” he said. “It’s so interesting to me,” he said later over a cup of chowder while warming up and waiting for the ferry to depart. “There are all these odd little corners in America where bits of history are still honored. But we’re also pretty bad with our historical landscape. A lot has been paved over.” He added: “In our version of America, we don’t go back nearly far enough. It’s the winners who make history, and that’s why we start with the Pilgrims: with the Anglo-American and New England version of the story. Culturally, we need to expand the story to include the Spanish in particular, but also the French and the Portuguese. Not only are we not an Anglo nation now, but we never really were. Early America, if you think about it, was a lot like America today — very diverse — and even the parts of the story we think we know, we don’t know at all.”
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