Columbus and Other Heroes of American Discovery

by N. D'Anvers

EARLY FRENCH SETTLERS IN NORTH AMERICA, AND THEIR STRUGGLE WITH THE SPANISH IN FLORIDA.

THE work begun by Vasco Nuñez de Balboa in the great journey already related, which terminated so disastrously for himself, was completed in 1522 by the sailing round the globe of one of the ships of the Magellan expedition, thus proving the existence of a southern oceanic passage to the East, and stimulating the eagerness with which the European nations sought to find a shorter north-western route. The French, hitherto indifferent to what was going on in the New World, seem now to have been suddenly aroused to a sense of the fact that the English, Portuguese, and Spanish were contending, not, as was at first supposed, for the possession of scattered and unimportant islands, but for that of a vast continent of as yet undetermined extent; and Francis I., then smarting under the loss of the Imperial Crown he had so eagerly coveted, resolved to make up for the priority of his rivals in the field by new discoveries in the North. “Why,” he is reported to have said, “should the Kings of Spain and Portugal divide all America between them without suffering me to take a share as their brother? I would fain see the article in Adam’s will that bequeaths that vast inheritance to them.”

The first result of this new interest in the affairs of the West was the fitting out of an expedition, consisting of four ships, under the command of Giovanni Verrazano, a native of Florence, already mentioned. Of these four vessels, three were disabled almost before they set sail, leaving to the sole survivor, the Dauphine, the whole burden of the trip. In that vessel Verrazano left the Madeiras in January, 1524, with the intention of reaching the American coast somewhere above Florida, and thence sailing due north till he came to the North-West Passage.

The first part of this programme was duly carried out, the Dauphine having made land about 34° N. lat., whence she cruised down the coast in search of a harbor some two hundred leagues, thus passing the most northerly point visited by the Spaniards. The natives of the coasts, belonging probably to the same race as those who had so hospitably received De Ayllon before his real character appeared, crowded to the beach to stare at what must have seemed to them a strange monster of the deep; and when they found the “monster” was, after all, the servant of men such as themselves, they beckoned their visitors to land.

MOUTH OF THE HUDSON RIVER.

One sailor alone had the courage to respond to the invitation, and he was nearly drowned in attempting to swim to the shore. Picked up in an exhausted condition by the Indians, he was, however, restored by their tender treatment. Fires were lighted, by which his clothes were dried; and when he was completely restored, he was allowed to return to his comrades, who had all the while been watching the proceedings on shore in horror-struck silence, expecting the lighting of the fires to be the preliminary of a human sacrifice. In the hands of a true leader of men this little episode might have been made the foundation of lasting and, eventually, beneficial relations between the Indians and their guests. Verrazano, however, was no exception to the explorers of his day; he rewarded those who had saved the life of his sailor by carrying off a young boy as a slave, and then, weighing anchor, he set sail with his solitary prize for the North, arriving, after a long cruise, in what is supposed to have been the harbor of New York. Then, as now, though its aspect is so materially changed, the mouth of the Hudson presented a beautiful appearance, with what are now known as Staten and Long Islands on one side, and the magnificent sheet of water flowing into the sea on the other. Instead of the stately vessels and trim little gun-boats which now guard the approach to the capital of the Metropolis, Indian canoes were shooting here and there on the sunlighted waters, their rowers pausing again and again to look at the strange intruder from the South.

Verrazano remained at anchor off the mouth of the Hudson for about fifteen days, receiving visits on board from the natives—a kindly, cheerful race, with regular features, clear complexions, long, straight hair, and good figures. Then steering up the shores of New England for some forty or fifty leagues, he came to the harbor of Nova Scotia, where he would gladly have rested awhile, but finding his provisions failing him, and the Indians meeting his advances with coldness and suspicion, he turned the Dauphine’s head eastward-ho, arriving at Dieppe after an absence of only six months.

JACQUES CARTIER.