"A Voyage Long and Strange" by Tony Horwitz; Henry Holt, 464 pages

Pity author Tony Horwitz. In search of the story, he braves sad and distant tourist sites, cheap motels, bad meals, reenactors, evangelicals, zealots and bores. He is baked, broiled, steamed, fried and frozen.

In his new book, "A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World," he sets out to discover pre-Mayflower America, a place visited and explored by Vikings, conquistadors and of course Columbus, well before the Pilgrims ever set foot in New England. (The "voyage long and strange" of the title was Columbus's term to describe his first trip to America).

"I'd mislaid an entire century, the one separating Columbus' sail in 1492 from Jamestown's founding in 16-0- something," writes Horwitz. "Maybe nothing happened in the period between."

Fat chance. And so Horwitz undertakes a program of remedial study to fill not a gap but "a chasm" in his education, as he calls it, traveling thousands of miles and experiencing the usual outrage, indignity and, occasionally, joy.

I say "the usual" because this is familiar ground for Horwitz, who has written books on the voyages of Captain Cook, rambles throughout Australia and the Middle East and the once and apparently enduring Confederate States of America. He knows that the best travel writing details misadventures and outright disasters, often set in forsaken holes.

Horwitz is a very funny writer, especially of long set pieces, and there is no shortage of material on the forgotten margins of the New World, where it all began.

A SENSE OF WONDER

In Newfoundland, he fears spontaneous combustion in an Indian sweat-lodge, one of several chapters with laugh-out-loud moments. And I doubt that the Dominican Republic will use his narrative of a drive around the island with a local shopkeeper in any of its promotional matter.

Horwitz has an eye for inconsistencies and anomalies as he recounts the often blood-soaked history of the continent. He also has a sense of wonder. What happened to the riders Francisco Vasquez de Coronado sent out into the "sea of grass" on the Great Plains in the summer of 1541, who never returned?

Did travelers five centuries ago take stunning natural vistas for granted? Did Virginia Dare and the other Roanoke colonists left behind off the coast of North Carolina in 1587 lose hope of their English kinsmen ever returning for them and go native? The history of America is often the history of people being abandoned, Horwitz writes.

MYTH TRUMPS FACT

Toward the end of "A Voyage Long and Strange," Horwitz says that being "a mere third-generation American" has given him "the freedom to rummage through other people's attics without prejudice." He also says he "liked exploding American icons and myths," such as the Mayflower landing marking the beginning of America.

And yet he comes to agree with the wise man at a Plymouth, Massachusetts, "Forefathers' Day" succotash dinner who suggests that there is nothing wrong with honoring myth over fact, and that myth is more important than history, so don't sweat it.

There are some things that will not be dislodged from American memory, and the Pilgrims' story is one of them. Yes, there were all these other travelers and explorers and would-be colonists, but it's the Pilgrims we remember.