Wayne County, NC - Heritage Series

Reprinted with permission of the Mount Olive Tribune and cannot be 
reproduced without permission. 
Transcribed by Barbara Kawamoto.

                   Varrazano’s North Carolina Visit             

"Our Heritage"
By Claude Moore

   In 1524, sixty years before Sir Walter Raleigh’s attempts to settle 
Roanoke Island, Giovanni da Varrazano, a native of Florence, Italy, in the 
service of King Francis I of France, discovered the coast of North Carolina.

   On July 8, 1524, Varrazano wrote a letter to the King of France 
describing this voyage, and a copy of this letter published in 1556 has 
recently been discovered in the Strozzi Library in Florence.  Verrazano was 
born in Florence in 1480.  At an early age he became a sea captain and 
entered the business of trading in the East.  In 1552 he captured a Spanish 
ship laden with treasures off the Azores and was escorted into a French Port.

   Captain Varrazano was Commissioned by King Francis to make explorations 
for France in the new world.  He set sail in the ship, the Dauphine, with a 
crew of fifty men late in 1523 and after about three months (1524) he 
anchored at the mouth of the Cape Fear River, about thirty miles below 
Wilmington.  In his journal he mentions the sand dunes, the fine woodlands, 
the fertile plains, the abundance of wild game as well as the mildness of 
the weather.  He specifically mentioned that he was in the vicinity of 34 
degrees north latitude.

   Varrazano sailed northward along the coast of Virginia, Maryland, and New
Jersey, and he discovered the Hudson River and the New York Bay.  The bridge
connecting Brooklyn and Staton Island, completed in 1964 is named for 
Varrazano.  He sailed on along the coast to Rhode Island where he spent 15 
days in the harbor at Newport.  As he proceeded northward, he found that 
the Indians were more hostile.  He abandoned plans to visit Newfoundland and
returned to France, arriving at Dieppe in July 1524.  

   Little is known of the life of Varrazano after this voyage, but we do 
know that he returned to privateering, was captured and hanged for piracy at
New Castille, Spain, in November 1526.  In 1529, Varrazano’s brother, 
Hieronimo, made a large map of the world on which the discoveries of
Giovanni were shown.  The original of this map is now preserved in the 
College of Propaganda in Rome.

   This map shows North Carolina (named in 1629) as part of Florida.  He 
believed that the Hudson River was a passage to the Western Seas where Japan
was located.

   The next explorer to visit the coast of North Carolina was a Spaniard by 
the name of Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon who attempted to plant a colony on the 
west bank of the Cape Fear River in 1526.  This attempt was unsuccessful.  
The first permanent settlement in North Carolina was around 1653 on 
Albemarle Sound.

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File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by
Barbara Kawamoto <bakawamoto.earthlink.net>

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