I didn’t dislike Tony Horwitz’ rambling book, A Voyage Long and Strange. He’s a likeable writer. One assumes his political preferences are liberal, but he works very hard to give everybody a fair hearing, not just the contemporaries he meets on his journeys across America, but the historical figures whose footsteps he attempts to follow.

The germ of the book was conceived when he made an accidental stopover in Plymouth, Massachusetts, was unimpressed with the sight of Plymouth Rock, and began to wonder why, out of all the pre-colonial and colonial American settlements, we’ve chosen Plymouth Plantation as the birthplace of the American idea. He decided to follow the trail of the chief European explorers and settlers who predated Plymouth, to try to evaluate their relative contributions.

In this goal, I believe, he fails utterly. Still, the story is amusing and informative. Horwitz is good company, and has a charmingly self-deprecating voice.

He starts out in the obvious place, L’Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland, the site of the Leif Eriksson archaeological site. His account of the place and the Norse American story is pretty good. He makes a couple of the kind of errors one expects from a non-specialist, but as a whole it’s adequate.

Then he moves on to the (often conjectural) landing sites of Columbus in the Caribbean, and spends a major portion of the story following the paths of various conquistadors over the landscape of the Caribbean, and the American southeast, southwest, and midwest. This was an eye-opener to me; I was particularly impressed by the obsessive, man-killing treks of De Soto across a huge portion of our continent. De Soto would make a great epic hero, if he hadn’t been such a bloody monster.

Then there’s the story of Jamestown, and finally Plymouth. As a response to his initial question of “Why designate Plymouth as the birthplace of America?” he comes to the following—in my view extremely dubious—conclusion, voiced by a pastor (obviously a very liberal one) he meets in Plymouth:

“Myth is more important than history. History is arbitrary, a collection of facts. Myth we choose, we create, we perpetuate.”

He spooned up the last of his succotash. “The story here may not be correct, but it transcends truth. It’s like religion—beyond facts. Myth trumps fact, always does, always has, always will.”

No, I say. There’s a very good reason why we call Plymouth Colony the cradle of America.

America was an English idea. It grew out of English common law, and English traditions of individual rights.

Therefore, a Spanish conception of America is a non-starter as an theory. The founding fathers who made the revolution and wrote the Constitution made no appeal to Spanish tradition. It doesn’t matter how early the Spanish (or the Vikings, for that matter) were here. The founders did not look to them for their model.

The seed of America has to be found in one of the two first “permanent” English colonies, either Jamestown or Plymouth. You could probably construct an argument for Jamestown, but Jamestown was a general clusterberry as an enterprise. Plymouth, though no major success either, did better, and also made the important contribution of the Mayflower Compact (a document Horwitz barely mentions, which strikes me as rather disingenuous).

So my conclusion about A Voyage Long and Strange is that it’s an entertaining, educational book with much to teach almost any reader who’s not a professional historian. But its conclusions are bunk.