For a son of France was the first of Europeans, so far as we certainly
know, to penetrate beyond the tidewater of those confronting coasts, the
first to step over the threshold of the unguessed continent, north, at any
rate, of Mexico. Columbus claimed at most but an Asiatic peninsula, though
he knew that he had found only islands. The Cabots, in the service of
England, sailing along its mysterious shores, had touched but the fringe
of the wondrous garment. Ponce de Leon, a Spaniard, had floundered a few
leagues from the sea in Florida searching for the fountain of youth.
Narvaez had found the wretched village of Appalache but had been refused
admission by the turbid Mississippi and was carried out to an ocean grave
by its fierce current; Verrazano, an Italian in the employ of France,
living at Rouen, had entered the harbor of New York, had enjoyed the
primitive hospitality of what is now a most fashionable seaside resort
(Newport), had seen the peaks of the White Mountains from his deck, and,
as he supposed, had looked upon the Indian Ocean, or the Sea of Verrazano,
which has shrunk to the Chesapeake Bay on our modern maps and now reaches
not a fiftieth part of the way to the other shore.

It was a true son of France who first had the persistence of courage and
the endurance of imagination to enter the continent and see the gates
close behind him--Jacques Cartier, a master pilot of St. Malo,
commissioned of his own intrepid desire and of the jealous ambition of
King Francis I to bring fresh tidings of the mysterious "square gulf,"
which other Frenchmen, Denys and Aubert, may have entered a quarter of a
century earlier, and which it was hoped might disclose a passage to the
Indies.

It was from St. Malo that Carrier set sail on the highroad to Cathay, as
he imagined, one April day in 1534 in two ships of sixty tons each.
[Footnote: I crossed back over the same ocean, nearly four hundred years