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.

Q: What drove these early explorers to persist in these harsh circumstances?

A: God and gold explain a lot of it. In simplistic terms, the Spanish were the jihadists of this era. They were infused with this belief that with the sword and the cross they would bring about worldwide conversion to Christianity. Also, the vast riches that Cortez and Pizarro had found in Mexico and Peru convinced them that North America would offer the next great strike. Mythic places -- the Seven Cities of Gold, the Isle of the Amazons, El Dorado -- weren't wild fantasies to the Spanish, they were realities just waiting to be found.

Q: These pie-eyed dreamers were also brutal killers, weren't they?

A: The body count was very high -- massacres, beheadings and torture. They killed and enslaved thousands of Indians. De Soto created the first chain gang in the South. Disease was even more damaging because the natives didn't have immunity to many the Europeans brought over. ... Later arrivals described America as a virgin wilderness but that wasn't exactly accurate. It had partly become a wilderness because of depopulation due to earlier European contact.

Q: The Spanish created the first permanent European settlement at St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565. But it wasn't until Jamestown in 1607 and Plymouth Colony in 1620 that firm roots were planted. What happened?

A: These English settlers were latecomers who benefited from the fact that others had charted much of the coast, had written accounts. Also earlier Europeans had cleared the way. The Pilgrims settled in a ghost Indian village vacated by disease -- as a result they have fresh water, good place to settle, no one to oppose them. John Smith was also crucial. At Jamestown, he was the first to recognize that the true bounty of America was not gold or silver but the land itself. Soon after he left, the tide really turned when they started growing tobacco. This led to the introduction of slaves in 1619. Really it was tobacco and slavery that ensured survival.

Q: What have you learned about history -- and our memory of history -- through your work?

A: Americans are not famed for their historical memory. We are a forward-looking country. In some ways this is healthy but it also makes us ignore the way that history still haunts -- like the critical role of tobacco and slavery. What was also striking to me was how recognizably American the earliest explorers were. They came here for a better life, to get rich quick, to flee destitution and persecution. And they were infused with something akin to manifest destiny -- the idea that this land was waiting for them to conquer and civilize it. That's as much our story as the Pilgrims.

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