GIOVANNI DA VERRAZZANO
By 1524, with the inking of new discoveries, a full image of the world was taking shape. The Americas, in particular, were blossoming on the map: Pigafetta and the rest of Magellan’s crew had returned with data tracing the southernmost coastline, and the confirmation that the ‘Sea of the South’ sighted on the other side of the continent by Vasco Núñez de Balboa was, in fact, an entirely new ocean – the Pacific. Farther north lay Juan Ponce de León’s 1513 discovery of the ‘island’ of La Florida; and to its west, Mexico, first arrived at by the Spanish forces of Hernán Cortés in 1517 and conquered by 1521, felling the Aztec Empire for the rule of Castile. The Spanish explorer and cartographer Alonso Álvarez de Pineda had followed the northern shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico in 1519, searching for a passage through to the Pacific; while to the far north John Cabot had landed in the region of Newfoundland.
This, then, left the vast majority of North America’s eastern seaboard – some 1864 miles (3000km) – left for discovery, with the tantalizing possibility of there being a navigable passage through to the Pacific and on to the riches of China. Like others of his profession, the Florentine explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano cared little about the flag his expedition bore, so long as the command was his. For the silk merchants of Lyon (a major economic centre in the sixteenth century, home to 169 of France’s 209 major trading companies), the chance of finding a convenient route to the Orient – in a temperate climate, no less – was worth the investment, and so King Francis I was convinced to back the Florentine and throw France into the new land rush.
Verrazzano set off from Madeira with fifty men in January 1524, leaving behind the unready La Normande, the ship that was to accompany them. After eight weeks sailing across the Atlantic they neared Cape Fear on the North Carolinian coast and, after a short stay, cruised north so as not to encounter Spanish ships to the south. They arrived at an isthmus, where Verrazzano made the blunder for which he is most famous: spying glittering waters on the other side of the narrow strip of land, he assumed this to be the narrowest point of the Americas. What he was actually looking at was Pamlico Sound (in North Carolina), the largest lagoon on the North American east coast, but in a letter to King Francis he wrote that he could see the Pacific:
From the ship was seen the oriental sea between the west and north. Which is the one, without doubt, which goes about the extremity of India, China and Cathay. We navigated along the said isthmus with the continual hope of finding some strait or true promontory at which the land would end toward the north in order to be able to penetrate to those blessed shores of Cathay. To which isthmus was given by the discoverer [the name] Verrazzano: as all the land found was named Francesco for our Francis.
‘Verrazzano’s Sea’, as it became known, would lead to a century of confusion for cartographers and navigators.
Unable to find any inlet into the Sound (despite there being several) they continued northwards, recording the coastline. Although they missed the openings to Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay and the Delaware Bay, the Verrazzano expedition became the first to enter New York Bay and the Hudson River, which they studied in detail, and headed north to Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay. Reaching Nova Scotia meant a re-emergence into charted territory, and Verrazzano plotted a return course to Dieppe, reaching France two months later in early July, 1524.
The failure to find a passage to Cathay did little to diminish the significance of Verrazzano’s voyage. His letters to King Francis provided detailed descriptions of encounters with natives along their journey, as well as reports on the flora, fauna and minerals to be found in the region. The mistaken sighting of the Pacific was an anomaly in an otherwise efficient navigation – in fact, one might be forgiven in wondering if it was a deliberate slip, designed to excite the wealthy backers of the mission and mitigate the sting of failure.
What became of Verrazzano himself is a greater mystery as accounts of his fate differ. After a second voyage much farther south (again, it is curious that he didn’t follow up on his Pacific sighting if he did indeed believe it to be the ocean that he had seen); and on a third, exploring Florida, the Bahamas and the Lesser Antilles, some reports have it that Verrazzano was executed for piracy by the Spanish, at Puerto del Pico, Spain. Other sources suggest an even bloodier end: it was claimed that, after the explorer landed on the island of Guadeloupe, he was promptly killed, cooked up and devoured by the Carib natives.
