Page:Columbus and other heroes of American discovery; (IA columbusotherher00bell).pdf/67

 CHAPTER III

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 north