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Three Voyages -- and a Tragic End

By Steve Wick | Staff Writer

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Giovanni Da Verrazano was born in Florence, Italy, in 1470. He moved to France to work as a ship's navigator, and soon earned a reputation as a state-sponsored pirate who raided Spanish and Portuguese ships on the high seas. But it was his sailing along the American coast in 1524 that earned him the reputation that survives today.

There is a bust of Verrazano in Battery Park, in New York City, as well as a mural in the New York Custom House. Of course, there's also a bridge named after him -- it spans the narrows he passed through when he entered New York Harbor between Brooklyn and Staten Island.

On his trip in 1524, he attached the first non-Indian names to large sections of the coastline, from modern-day Georgia to Canada. Some names were based on what he saw, while others were in honor of the French king, Francis I.

He named a section of the Georgia coastline ``Field of Cedars.'' South of what today is called Cape Fear, N.C., he called the area he saw ``Forest of Laurels.'' He named the area north of that ``Annunciata.''

The Hudson River region he called ``Angouleme,'' which was both a family name of the French king and a principality. The bay itself he called ``Bay of St. Marguerite.'' In his letter to Francis I, he said he picked the name of the king's sister ``who vanishes the other matrons for modesty and talent.''

A brave explorer no doubt, it seems Verrazano was also a skillful sycophant.

He named modern-day Block Island ``Louisa Island,'' after the king's mother. The coastline and islands near modern-day Rhode Island he called ``Refugio,'' or refuge. As he passed modern-day Cape Cod, he called the land ``Armellini,'' and the finger of land at the end of Cape Cod he dubbed ``Cape Pallavicino.''

Verrazano evidently did not like the Indians he encountered on the Maine coast. He called this place ``Land of Bad People.'' In the letter to Francis I, he said the Indians there were ``full of uncouthness and vices, so barbarous that we were never able ... to have any intercourse with them. They dress with the skins of bear, lynx, sea-wolves and other animals ... They had no regard for courtesy ... and they shot at us with their bows, sending forth the greatest cries, then fled into the woods.''

At the end of his extraordinary account to his king, Verrazano explained what the purpose of his journey was. ``My intention was in this navigation to reach Cathay and the extreme east of Asia, not expecting to find such an obstacle of new land as I found; and if for some reason I expected to find it, I thought it to be not without some strait to penetrate to the Eastern Ocean.

``And this has been the opinion of all the ancients, believing certainly our Western Ocean to be one with the Eastern Ocean of India without interposition of land.''

Verrazano's second voyage, in 1527, was to Brazil. His third voyage, the following year, was to bring him back to the American coastline in the hope that he could find an opening to that ``Eastern Ocean of India.''

It didn't work out that way.

Instead of striking the American coast, the wind blew him to the West Indies. He stopped at one of the islands -- some historians say it was Guadeloupe -- where he went ashore to make contact. He was grabbed by a group of Indians, who killed him and then ate him.