VERRAZANO, GIOVANNI. — Florentine navigator, b. around 1485 to a family originally from Val di Greve; killed on an expedition in 1528.
Nothing is known of his youth, except that, having taken up travel at a very early age, he had lived for a long time in Cairo and in other places of the Levant. By at least 1522 he was established in France, and in 1524, commissioned by King Francesco I, he undertook a memorable expedition along the coasts of North America, concerning which, other documents having been lost, there survives an important letter-report from the navigator to the Sovereign, sent in copy also to a Florentine merchant established in Lyon and by him transmitted to Florence. The purpose of the expedition was to find a passage to reach Cathay, that is, northern China, by a shorter route than that followed by Magellan across the Pacific, which had by then proved enormously long.
Of the four ships that were to make up the expedition, only one remained, the Delfina, which secretly departed from a deserted rock near Madeira on 17 January 1524 and, having reached the coast of present-day Carolina on 7 March, after a brief southerly course, sailed back up the entire coastline as far as the vicinity of Cape Breton, entering the numerous, deeply indented inlets and making frequent stops (among them in New York Bay, of which the first accurate description is given). During the long voyage, it was also believed that the passage to the west had been glimpsed in the lagoon region now called Pamlico Sound: indeed, some maps, which together with the aforementioned report constitute our only authentic sources, hypothetically represent a strait there. The Delfina returned to France, to Dieppe, in the first days of July 1524. V.’s voyage provided definitive proof that the lands discovered beyond the Atlantic formed a single mass, from the Arctic Circle to the Strait of Magellan, completely isolated from the Old Continent; hence its exceptional importance.
V. also commanded a second oceanic expedition, which departed in 1528, about which, however, very little information is available. It seems that it was bound for the Caribbean Sea and Darién, and that V. met his death there on an unidentifiable little island, massacred and devoured by the natives. His brother Gerolamo, himself a navigator and cartographer and, among other things, the author of a large planisphere depicting his brother’s discoveries (Vatican Apostolic Library), is said to have witnessed the horrible scene from afar.