On our Florida History page, Yaddyra Peralta reviews America’s REAL First Thanksgiving, a book about the Spanish and Timucua in St. Augustine, whose feast, Sept. 8, 1565, preceded the Pilgrims’ dinner by 56 years.  As Peralta points out, the book suppresses some of history’s true tensions, as, indeed, the Pilgrim story does.
    Did you know that St. Augustine became the first continuous European settlement in the U.S. by assuring the temporary status of another group’s venture in Florida?  A French Protestant expedition led by navigator Jean Ribault got to the St. John’s River in 1562, then went up to what is now Parris Island to build Charlesfort, where Ribault left some settlers while he headed back for supplies.  Things didn’t go well (most of the colonists tried to leave in an open boat, and, after some cannibalism, the survivors were rescued in English waters).  Reinforced with new settlers, Charlesfort leader René Laudonnière went back to St. John’s Bluff to found Fort Caroline on June 22, 1564.  After getting through one tough year there, they were joined by Jean Ribault who brought a fleet and hundreds of soldiers and settlers.  But in short order, Admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, who had been named Spanish Governor of Florida, arrived, with a mission to get the French out of Florida.  After a skirmish, the Spanish retreated south and founded St. Augustine.  Ribault went after the Spanish by sea, but while his fleet was caught in a bad storm that lasted for days (every Florida story has a hurricane), Menendez marched overland and surprised and took the fort and killed most of the Huguenots.  The French fleet was busted up in the storm, and those who survived, including Ribault, were captured and killed by the Spanish at Matanzas (massacres) Inlet.
    Jacques Le Moyne, a skilled artist, was with the French.  His original depictions of the expedition and the Timucua were destroyed when Fort Caroline fell, but he got away and reached England, where he redid his drawings and a map from memory.  He died in London in 1588, and his widow sold his manuscripts to engraver Theodore De Bry.  Le Moyne’s account was published postumously in 1591.  His works are the earliest records we have of the Timucua, but their accuracy is subject to many questions.  First there is the issue of how things were transformed in the artist’s memory and imagination.   Consider, for instance, this illustration of the Timucua’s alligator hunt:

    And there is dispute as to how much Le Moyne fictionalized his observations, and then how much De Bry embellished Le Moyne’s work, and some question whether LeMoyne ever did any such work, making it all DeBry's invention or even the work of someone else altogether.
    History’s timeline is full of erasures and back-dating.  Perhaps you’d prefer the theory of British amateur historian Gavin Menzies, whose 2002 book 1421 maintains that a Chinese admiral, Zheng He, with a fleet of 100 ships, got to the Americas before Columbus and circumnavigated the globe before Magellan.  Menzies argues that the European explorers set sail with Chinese maps.  Menzies used modern astronomy software to recreate the skies in 1421, and then coordinated these with period Chinese star charts.  Genetics and artifacts are adduced to argue that, while the Native Americans are of Asian origin, there was simply not one long march from Siberia over to Alaska and then on down eventually to the Tierra del Fuego (the theory that was charted in my schoolbooks), but various voyages across the Pacific by different Asian groups contributing to the Native American gene pool and cultures.  A website offers info. from Menzies’ book along with all sorts of other discoveries and speculations contributed by enthusiasts.  You can view the artifacts found in what may or may not be a Chinese shipwreck in the Caribbean, or read about jade pieces in Indian mounds in Illinois.  And a quick Google will lead you to the many historians rebutting and denouncing Menzies.
    My father was fond of the claims of the Vikings.  (My father was Irish-American, but since the Vikings raided Ireland regularly, he considered them ancestors.)  Erik the Red was a ruffian kicked out of Norway, who made sufficient trouble in Iceland that he sailed out of there, westward.  He returned with claims of having found Greenland.  My favorite gleaning about him is that he named it “Greenland” to appeal to people in Iceland and so recruit colonists; if nothing else, he is the patriarch of the American real estate tradition of naming as-yet-unbuilt-developments with enticing names.  Circa 985 A.D. he founded the first of two settlements in Greenland.  His son, Leif Eriksson, carried on the family business, landing on Newfoundland and Labrador.  There are various speculations about the location of his settlement, Vinland (doing his dad one better, he found vines—and presumably grapes).  And Eriksson enthusiasts don’t think he stopped there.  If one could get to Newfoundland, wouldn’t one have roved southward?  Claims of Norse coins and runic inscriptions fill New England.   Some states like Minnesota celebrate Leif Ericson day on Oct. 9, which, of course, is BEFORE Columbus Day.
    But there are other stories: Barry Fell, a professor of zoology at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology (his area was starfish and sea urchins), made his name, or ruined it, with his work on New World epigraphy (the study of inscriptions) in books published in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  He claimed pre-Columbian artifacts showed Old World scripts, for instance Old Irish Christian inscriptions in West Virginia from the 6th-8th centuries. A.D., made, he maintained, by Irish monks.
    Genetic research is the new, more scientific epigraphy, finding what’s inscribed in DNA.  As detailed in a fascinating PBS documentary "Coming Into America" there are, among Native Americans, four main DNA groupings, or "haplogroups": A, B, C, and D.  A less-common one, known as haplogroup X, does not exist in Asia, as A through D do, but is common in Europe, especially the Mediterranean region.  This has led to the Solutrean hypothesis, that a stone-age people from France or northern Spain crossed the Atlantic around 17,000 years ago, bringing haplogroup X to North America.  Haplogroup X is most common among Algonquian peoples along the northeast coast of North America, the postulated point-of-arrival for the Solutreans.
    The Solutreans' import of stone arrowheads may have given rise to the Clovis tool-making culture in the Americas, which is first known to have appeared around 13,500 years ago.  One of the major archaeological sites used to support this hypothesis is the Page-Ladson site in the Big Bend region of Florida.  Tools and arrowheads there, crafted at roughly a mid-point between the Solutrean style in Europe and the Clovis style in the Americas, are dated to 14,500 years ago, about midway between the postulated Solutrean arrival and the rise of Clovis culture.
    Then there’s a popular theory, with no scientific support, that the ancient Sumerians originated in Bolivia.  Some think the Phoenicians sailed this far.  The story told in my childhood, that the oceans were impassible barriers, feared edges of the earth, has given way to the notion that they were highways, crisscrossed by many who left tantalizing traces.  And so I’ll leave you with this vision of everyone zipping around.  Thanksgiving is the Travel Holiday, after all.  Drive safely.

      —Lynne Barrett

     Among those responding to our Book Fair live-blog coverage this weekend was someone serving in Iraq, who commented on how far he was from real arepas.
     When I was a little girl, people commonly wore red paper poppies on Veterans' Day, a symbol from World War I, the War to End All Wars, its Armistice on 11/11 what established the date for this day of remembrance.   You may see women collecting for veterans today and giving out paper poppies, outside Publix.  I'm going to see if I can find one of them now.  —Lynne Barrett

    On Wednesday, at the Miami Book Fair’s "An Evening With Richard Russo," after Mr. Russo had entranced the audience with two scenes from The Bridge of Sighs, questioners lined up. In short order, a woman at the mike asked him about his "writing process: Did he write with pencil? Computer? At what time of day?"
    Around me, several people groaned.  But Mr. Russo answered with charm and freshness, as if he’d never been asked this before.  He recounted how he goes each morning, 7 days a week, to a local deli and writes, feeling he’s done his job if in an hour and a half or two hours he has written “3 decent pages.”
    What size pages? his ineluctable questioner asked.
    Not a legal pad size, he said, comically rueful.  He didn’t quite indicate the dimensions of his notebook, but went on to say that he goes home and in the afternoon puts those pages into his computer, “and that’s a revision.”  (And here he indicated, but didn’t go into, one of the answers no one wants to hear, the many revisions, the amount of work being good really takes.)
    I went off thinking about the question and the questioner.  At book fairs and bookstores, audiences meet writers wanting not just to be enveloped by the magic of listening to language and tale.  They want to see behind the magic, to unravel how the trick is done.  The magic of writing happens in the imagination, that black hat into which the world, a red scarf, is put and somehow turned into winged, fluttering words.  So they ask about what goes in there: What do you read? How much research do you do?  Have you or anyone you know been a mermaid, a killer, a millionaire, a suffering soul?  Ah, you were once a little boy with a feckless father, that explains it—but of course it doesn’t.
    And they ask about the form in which the magic first emerges—pencil or computer? morning or night?—hoping to learn the ritual that will somehow explain the magic, account for it, make it imitable.  Mr. Russo DID account for it, quite well, talking about how his years as a literature student studying Twain, Melville, Cather, Dickens have made him a “19th century novelist born out of his time,” as he put it.  He spoke of his love of story, and the need for the writer to slow down and look at ordinary things as if they were extraordinary, to avoid being worn down by the repetition in life—which he illustrated, in fact, by the way he addressed each question, buoyantly, seriously.
        He began the evening by mentioning a first reading he did years ago in Chicago, where eight chairs were optimistically set out, with most to be filled by bookstore staff—and then Mr. Russo waved his arms to indicate our somewhat astonishing numbers in Chapman Auditorium.  That’s magic too: to make all these readers appear, the patient magic spun by writing book after book, three decent pages at a time.  The transformation of the ordinary into the extraordinary has brought Mr. Russo the love of readers of his novels—one spoke of how many times she’d read Nobody’s Fool, “an immensely comforting book”—and it was clear that Mr. Russo is not out of his time, but speaking for it and to it.
     So, to follow MR. Russo’s lead, let’s listen freshly.  What questions did authors get asked at the fair, and what interesting answers did you hear?  Friendly or adversarial, illuminating or dumbfounding—tell us about it  You can let us know by coming by booth 277C or emailing us at flbookreview@aol.com.  And read some of your answers on our Miami Book Fair page, where our blogging has already begun.

              —Lynne Barrett