60 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
“incompatible with the historical traditions of our faith:
since to assert that there were inhabited lands on the oppo-
site side of the globe, would be to maintain that there were
nations not descended from Adam, it being impossible for
them to have passed the intervening ocean.”7
Although neither trade, nor colonization, nor the propa-
gation of the faith sufficed as motives to get an English ship
successfully to sea for America until 1527, there was in Eng-
land a good source of information about North America be-
fore that time. This was Giovanni Verrazano, a Florentine
who was sent out by Francis I to explore the New World. He
had sailed from Madeira on January 17, 1524, on his first
transatlantic voyage, and wrote his report on it from Dieppe
to King Francis on July 8 of the same year. Afterwards he
seems to have gone out again, and upon his return found
Francis a prisoner of war in Spain. It was at this point that he
must have taken himself to England to seek the patronage of
Henry; for Hakluyt reports that he was in England, and that
he presented a parchment chart of his discoveries to the
King. Neither this nor any other document now exists to
confirm Verrazano’s visit to England; but Hakluyt’s word is
sufficiently authoritative to justify the use of the letter to
Francis as evidence for the stories that Verrazano must have
told the English Court, and probably a wider London circle,
in 1526-27.
He had sailed along the North American coast south-
wards from his landfall for 50 leagues looking for a good
harbor, and then turned back (to avoid encroachment upon
Spanish territory) and revisited his original landfall, which
has been identified as Cape Fear, North Carolina. He
anchored there and sent a boat ashore to reconnoiter. There
his men found “great store of people,” “marveiling greatly
at our appareil, shape and whitenes....”