Dieppe on his return from his voyage of discovery had reached Lyons,
and that the navigator himself was expected soon to be in that city
for the purpose of conferring with its merchants on the subject of
the new countries which he had discovered, and had described in a
letter to the king, a copy of which letter was enclosed. He thus
explicitly declares not only that news of the discovery had reached
Lyons, but that the letter to the king was known to the merchants at
that place, and that a copy of it was then actually in his
possession and sent with his own. The result of the expedition was,
therefore, notorious, and the letter had attained general publicity
at Lyons, without the presence there of either Francis or
Verrazzano.

This statement must be false. Granting that such a letter, as is
ascribed to Verrazzano, had been written, it was impossible that
this obscure young man at Lyons, hundreds of miles from Dieppe,
Paris and Blois, away from the king and court and from Verrazzano,
not only at a great distance from them all, but at the point to
which the king was hastening, and had not reached, on his way to the
scene of war in the southern portion of his kingdom, could have come
into the possession of this document in less than a month after it
purports to have been written for the king in a port far in the
north, on the coast of Normandy. It obviously could not have been
delivered to him personally by Verrazzano, who had not been at
Lyons, nor could it have been transmitted to him by the navigator,
who had not yet presented himself before the king, and could have
had no authority to communicate it to any person. It was an official
report, addressed to the king, and intended for his eye alone, until
the monarch himself chose to make it public. It related to an
enterprise of the crown, and eminently concerned its interests and