uniform practice of the Catholic navigators of that early period,
among whom, according to the import of the letter, Verrazzano was
one, to designate the places discovered by them, by the names of the
saints whose feasts were observed on the days they were discovered,
or of the festivals of the church celebrated on those days; so that,
says Oviedo, it is possible to trace the course of any such explorer
along a new coast by means of the church calendar. This custom was
not peculiar to the countrymen of that historian. It was observed by
the Portuguese and also by the French, as the accounts of the
voyages of Jacques Cartier attest. But nothing of the kind appears
here. These omissions of the ordinary and accustomed practices of
voyagers are suspicious, and of themselves sufficient to destroy all
confidence in the narrative. But to proceed to what is actually
stated in regard to the coast.

Taking the landfall to have occurred, as is distinctly claimed, at
latitude 34 Degrees, which is a few leagues north of Cape Fear in
North Carolina, and which is fixed with certainty, for the purposes
of the letter, at that point by the estimate of the distance they
ran northerly along the coast before it took an easterly direction,
the discovery must be regarded as having commenced somewhat south of
Cape Roman in South Carolina, being the point where the fifty
leagues terminated which they ran along the coast, in the first
instance, south of the landfall. It is declared that from thence,
for two hundred leagues, to the Hudson river, as it will appear,
there was not a single harbor in which the Dauphine could ride in
safety. [Footnote: A league, according to the Verrazzano letter,
consisted of four miles; and a degree, of 15,625 leagues or 62 1/3
miles.] The size of this craft is not mentioned, but it is said she
carried only fifty men, though manned as a corsair. Judging from the