Although the “mighty large olde mappe in parchemente” of Verrazzano’s drafting is lost, there are several maps extant which seemingly represent the territory of North America as it was delineated by him. The rarest and the most valuable of these is a vellum-map of the world in the Ambrosian Library at Milan, made in 1527. It is five feet seven inches long and one foot eleven inches wide, and bears this inscription: “Vesconte de Maiollo conposuy hanc cartan. In Janua anno dñy, 1527, die xx. decenbris.” (Visconte de Maiollo composed this chart, in Genoa, in the year of the Lord, 1527, the twentieth day of December). The narrow isthmus, near the fortieth parallel, and the “number of Italian names” from “Tera Florida” to “C. de Bertoni” on this map, fully agree with Hakluyt’s description of Verrazzano’s chart.[427]
Hieronymus, the brother of the navigator, it seems, also made a map of the New Land, which, it is conjectured, he drafted in 1529.[428] The original is a planisphere delineated on parchment, fifty-one by one hundred and two inches. This map is in the Borgian museum in Rome. The inscription: “Hieronimus de Verrazanus faciebat” (Hieronimus de Verrazano made it), permits the inference that the map was not the one which Hakluyt described, for had Hieronymus da Verrazzano’s name been inscribed on it, the English collector, it seems, would have mentioned the fact. The representation of the so-called Western Sea, or “Mare Indicum” (the Chesapeake Bay), with the explanatory inscription on Hieronymus da Verazzano’s map, indicates that he had some knowledge of the cartographic features of his brother’s chart, and of the geographical memoranda recorded in the little book which the latter speaks of in his letter to King Francis I., and which he thought would be serviceable to other navigators.[429]
CHAPTER XI.
(Addenda.)
1526-1614.
After the death of Verrazzano, the French, for a time, made no attempt to search along the coast of the new continent for a short and direct way to Cathay. The losses sustained by the projectors of the expedition of 1526, Ribaut says, gave “small courage to sende thither agayne, and was the cause that this laudable enterprise was left of, vntill the yeere 1534, at which time his Maiestie [Francis I.] (desiring alwayes to enlarge his kingdome, countreys, and dominions, and the aduauncing the ease of his subiectes), sent thither a Pilote of S. Mallowes, a Briton, named James Cartier, well seene in the art and knowledge of Nauigation, and especially of the North parts, commonly called the new land, led by some hope to find passage that waies to the south seas.”[430]
The two ships commanded by Cartier sailed from the port of St. Malo, on the twentieth of April, 1534. Reaching Newfoundland on the tenth of May, Cartier began to search for a navigable channel to India. Three months were passed in exploring the coast of Labrador and the Strait of Belle Isle and a part of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. On the fifteenth of August, Cartier set sail for France, and arrived in the port of St. Malo, on the fifth of September. In the following year, Cartier sailed again to New France and explored the St. Lawrence River to the island of Hochelaga, the site of the city of Montreal. It is said that he was told by the natives that from there it was only “a month’s sailing to go to a land where cinnamon and cloves are gathered.”[431] Returning from this voyage, Cartier reached St. Malo on the sixth of July, 1536.[432]
The first explorers of the new continent called its inhabitants by different names. Columbus and his Spanish companions, imagining the field of their discoveries to be in Eastern Asia, named the aborigines Indians (Indios), believing them to be natives of India. Seven of the people of Canada, carried to France, in 1509, were described by a contemporaneous Latin writer as wood or wild men (homines sylvestres).[433] The French, it appears, called the natives of New France manants or manans, and paysans, peasants, the former name being used in the middle ages as a designation for unintelligent people or those of low condition. The name manants was likewise a designation for persons of this class living in villages and on farms. Manants properly speaking were the natives of a place, and the habitans were those who came to it to reside.[434] The French appellation manants or manans not only fitly expressed the low condition of the natives of New France, but it also gave prominence to the fact that they dwelt in villages and were indigenous people. The French, as late as the year 1677, called the old Indians, or rather the descendants of the Senecas, paisans, peasants.[435] The Italians also called the natives of North America peasants, paesani.[436]
The Manants living on the island on which the city of New York is built, were very friendly to the French who came to the Grande River, in the sixteenth century, to traffic for furs. The Hollanders, however, found them to be quite hostile in the following century. De Laet, the Dutch historian, describing the natives of the Groote River in 1625, remarks: “On the east side, upon the main-land, dwell the Manhattans, a bad race of savages, who have always been very obstinate and unfriendly toward our countrymen.”[437] He also says that Hudson, in 1609, called the Great River “Manhattes from the name of the people who dwelt at its mouth.”[438]
The wrong spelling of the French term manant began with a misconception of its proper pronunciation. The Dutch thinking that the t was sounded, pronounced the name man-ant, whence “man-hat,” “man-ath,” “man-ad,” and other strange forms of the name. Wassenaer, the Dutch historian, in 1624, speaking of the Indian tribes of New Netherland, says: “The Manhates are situated at the mouth” of the Mauritius River.[439] De Laet writes the name Manhattes, Manatthans, Manatthanes, and Manhattans.[440] De Vries, the Dutch navigator, who could speak French, spells the appellation Menates and Minates.[441] In the deposition of Catelyn Trico, a French woman, who emigrated from Holland, in 1624, to New Netherland, the term is written Mannantans.[442] Besides these peculiar changes the name has many other anomalous forms.[443]
When the first French explorers sailed along that massive bulwark of trap-rock, now called The Palisades, rising on the west side of the Grande River to varying altitudes from two to five hundred feet above the level of the stream, and ranging northward and southward a distance of more than ten miles, they were peculiarly impressed with its grandeur, and figuratively called it L’Anormée Berge, (The Grand Scarp.)