As a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Tony Horwitz excelled at writing the first draft of history. When he began his second career writing best-selling books, he examined how history is revived and revised by each generation, through continuous collisions of past and present. In "Confederates in the Attic" (1998) he explored the world of Civil War re-enactors; in "Blue Latitudes" (2002) he boarded a replica 18th-century ship to retrace the voyages of Captain James Cook, the 18th-century explorer who "discovered" Hawaii.

His smart, breezy books braid absorbing historical narratives and Horwitz's often comic encounters with people who, like himself, are living at once in yesterday and today.

In his latest work of participatory history, "A Voyage Long and Strange" (Henry Holt, $27.50, 445 pages), Horwitz brings alive the "dark ages" of American history -- the period between 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620.

Combining a scholar's reading list with a reporter's devotion to legwork, Horwitz not only recounts the blood-soaked, quixotic quests of the first Europeans to visit America but also follows their footsteps. Wisely opting to travel by car instead of hoof, he logs thousands of miles from Newfoundland (where the Vikings landed around 1000) through the American South and Southwest where Spaniards, Portuguese, French and English adventurers sought to bring God to and extract gold from the new world. "By the time the first English settled [in 1587]," he writes, "other Europeans had already reached half of the forty-eight states."

At each stop, he interviews locals, especially Native Americans, whose lives are still shaped by this largely forgotten past.

Along the way he offers a host of fun facts -- barbecue is derived from the language of a long vanquished tribe, the Taino; Columbus thought the "six-foot longer serpent" (probably iguana) that natives served him "tastes like chicken." While debunking long cherished myths -- that U.S. history, for example, starts with the Pilgrims -- he also shows how legends and false dreams drove the discovery of America.

In a recent phone interview, we asked Horwitz about his latest "Voyage."

Q: Why and how did you choose this subject?

A: It started during a visit to Plymouth Rock. I was surprised at how physically unimpressive it was -- it looked like a fossilized potato. Even more surprising was my conversation with a ranger there who explained that many Americans are confused by the date on the rock: 1620. Why not 1492, they ask? He said many Americans think Columbus sailed here, dropped off the Pilgrims and sailed home. At first this amused me until I realized I was just as ignorant of the years between. I too had lost a huge chunk of this history.

Q: What surprised you about this forgotten history?

A: First was how much history there was. Between Columbus and the Pilgrims there were dozens of expeditions by Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italians, English and others into lands that had been settled by natives for thousands of years. The Europeans left colorful accounts of their incredible adventures that make for riveting reading because they describe an experience we can't have today: What happens when utterly alien societies encounter each other for the first time.

Q: Why do you describe Coronado, De Soto, Ponce de Leon and other 16th century conquistadors as "tough hombres"?

A: During a 30-year period beginning in 1513 when Ponce de Leon made the first recorded landing by a European in the U.S. -- Columbus never got here -- you had Spanish expeditions sweeping across the entire continent. They crossed the Appalachians, rafted the Mississippi, peered down the Grand Canyon. Both De Soto and Coronado marched and rode 3,000 miles with little food, no maps, no idea where they were going, or what they would find there. One of my favorite figures was Cabeza de Vaca, a castaway from a failed expedition. Between 1536 and 1543, he and a black slave Estevancio wandered across the continent from Florida to the Gulf of California, often naked, burnt by the sun and living on the juice of prickly pears. They survived because local tribes believed they were medicine men.

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