The controversy about this letter and voyage of Verrazano has excited so much interest, that it is well to give a concise summary of Mr. Murphy’s objections to the genuineness of the voyage, and to consider with equal brevity some of the replies to these objections, and the additional evidence for the support of the narrative which has been discovered since the date of Mr. Murphy’s essay.
The conclusions which Mr. Murphy seeks to establish are set forth in the following brief:—
“That the letter, according to the evidence upon which its existence is predicated, could not have been written by Verrazzano; that the instrumentality of the King of France in any such expedition of discovery as therein described is unsupported by the history of that country, and is inconsistent with the acknowledged acts of Francis and his successors, and therefore incredible; and that its description of the coast and some of the physical characteristics of the people and of the country are essentially false, and prove that the writer could not have made them from his own personal knowledge and experience, as pretended; and, in conclusion, it will be shown that its apparent knowledge of the direction and extent of the coast was derived from the exploration of Estévan Gomez, a Portuguese pilot in the service of the King of Spain; and that Verrazzano, at the time of his pretended discovery, was actually engaged in a corsairial expedition, sailing under the French flag, in a different part of the ocean.”[60]
Mr. Murphy argues, first, that the letter is not genuine, because no original has ever “been exhibited, or referred to in any contemporary or later historian as being in existence; and, although it falls within the era of modern history, not a single fact which it professes to describe relating to the fitting out of the expedition, the voyage, or the discovery, is corroborated by other testimony, whereby its genuineness might even be inferred.”[61] He considers it “highly improbable” that there could have been a French original of the letter, from which two translations were made, with an interval of twenty-seven years between them, “and yet no copy of it in French, or any memorial of its existence in that language, be known.”[62] As the Carli copy contains a Cosmographical Appendix not in the Ramusio text, Mr. Murphy assumes that Ramusio took his version from the Carli manuscript, revising it, and changing its language to suit his editorial taste. Later in his book he goes farther, and accuses Ramusio of suppressing a fact here and adding another there, to make the Verrazano narrative agree with other documents in his possession. As Carli’s letter to his father covered his copy of Verrazano’s letter, the inquiry is narrowed down to a question of the authenticity of the Carli letter. Mr. Murphy argues that this letter cannot be genuine, because it was written by an obscure person, at a great distance from the French Court, and from Dieppe (the port from which Verrazano wrote), only twenty-seven days after the date of the letter which it pretended to enclose.
Mr. Murphy, in the next division of his argument, asserts that no such voyage was made for the King of France:—
“Neither the letter, nor any document, chronicle, memoir, or history of any kind, public or private, printed or in manuscript, belonging to that period or the reign of Francis I., who then bore the crown, mentioning or in any manner referring to it, or to the voyage and discovery, has ever been found in France; and neither Francis himself, nor any of his successors, ever acknowledged or in any manner recognized such discovery, or asserted under it any right to the possession of the country; but, on the contrary, both he and they ignored it, in undertaking colonization in that region, by virtue of other discoveries made under their authority, or with their permission by their subjects.”[63]
He claims that the accounts of Verrazano’s voyage given by French historians all show internal evidence that the information was derived from Ramusio. The life of Francis I., he further says, is a complete denial of the assertion that Verrazano’s voyage was made by his direction. Francis sent out the expeditions of Cartier and of Roberval, and yet never recognized the discovery made by Verrazano. And the map, sometimes called that of Henry II. (the date of which, however, has been supposed to be some years earlier than the accession of that monarch in 1547), an official map displaying all the knowledge the French Court possessed of the American coast, is destitute of any trace of Verrazano.[64]
Mr. Murphy considers next what he calls the misrepresentations in the letter in regard to the geography of the coast. Only to one place, an island, is a name given. A very noticeable omission is that of the Chesapeake Bay, which could not have been overlooked by an explorer seeking a passage to Cathay; and not even the named island really exists: there is none on the coast answering its description.
He next undertakes to show that the letter claims the discovery of Cape Breton and the southerly coast of Newfoundland; and that Ramusio, knowing this claim to be false, “deliberately” interpolated into his text a clause to limit Verrazano’s discoveries to the point where those of the Bretons began.