March 18 marks the 500-year Anniversary of Verrazzano’s landfall on the Carolina Coast

Five centuries ago, on March 7, 1524, (or March 18 on our modern Gregorian calendar), La Dauphine, a 100-ton, three-masted caravel from Dieppe, France, cautiously crept westward toward the North American continent, constantly probing the turquoise depths by soundings.

A week earlier, the trans-Atlantic expedition of a single vessel sponsored by the French king, Francis I, encountered the Gulf Stream where its crew of 50 men observed sudden changes of the sea state: a difference in water color, an abundance of fish and sea birds, and the thick fog formed when late-winter’s prevailing northeast winds blanket the warm water flowing from the tropics.

The most discerning Gallic noses aboard soon after sniffed a “salubrious” sweet aroma of cypress, bayberry, and earthy peat, delivered by a shifting of the wind. To the west, the blue sky appeared tinged with a mystifying mustard color from billowing clouds of pine pollen. On the water were long streaks of cordgrass and the occasional driftwood, the telltale signs of nearby land.

“Ten fathoms, nine, eight, seven,” cried out an excited sailor aloft in the ship’s rigging as the hours passed. The lead plummet of the sounding line confirmed that the ocean bottom was rising.

Land must be close by, but where? Familiar geographic features were not yet evident, no headland appeared, no rocky cliffs, nor distant hills or mountains. The island of Madeira could be seen for three days before the inbound sailor arrived upon its shores! What a strange and ghostly place that new world must have seemed to those early explorers—an invisible world of only sound and smell.

Ears listened for the thump of breaking waves amid the sounds of seawater slapping the hull, the groans of the ship’s weary timbers, and the protesting creaks of the spruce masts and hemp rigging. Strident commands of the ship’s master, Antoine de Conflans, belied the tension, the apprehension, the anticipation of what lay beyond.

The lookouts atop the mast saw it first, their shouts alerting the ship’s company. A thin yellowish line gradually appeared along the horizon. As the ship rose on the ocean’s swells and closed the distance to land, a string of sandy hills appeared scattered along a flat, featureless beach. Landfall!

“We are seeing a new land which has never been seen by any man, either ancient or modern,” declared the French expedition’s leader, the Lyon, France-born Giovanni da Verrazzano, remembered by history as “the Florentine Explorer,” as he stroked his rust-colored beard.

On both a vellum portolano and companion routier—bound pages of compass routes—the date and latitude were noted routinely and without consideration of their historical significance by the ship’s navigator. Fifty days since departing the archipelago of Madiera, La Dauphine and Verrazzano were about to write the first chapter of recorded history on the Carolina coast.

Four months later, after returning to Dieppe, France, Verrazzano wrote a report to his royal patron, Francis I. In his narrative letter, the Explorer noted the approximate location of his North American landfall: “Sta questa terra i guardi trentaquattro,” or, “This land lies at 34 degrees.”

Ever since, the point of Verrazzano’s historic landfall, most often stated as occurring at Cape Fear, has been figuratively carved in historical stone, perpetuated by writers without challenge in numerous encyclopedias, books, and articles. Ignored is the fact that the 34th parallel intersects with the continent at Kure Beach, 11.3 miles north of Cape Fear and about 261 yards north-northeast of the Kure Beach Pier.

The precise location of Verrazzano’s landfall stands among the great uncertainties of North Carolina’s early history. Was Cape Fear (or Kure Beach), in fact, Verrazzano’s landfall? The answer to this question will surely not be welcome news to proud residents of a Wilmington residential golf development named Landfall.

The journey to the Carolinas

On Sunday, January 17, 1524, the Verrazzano expedition hoisted anchor off Ilhas Desertas near Madeira and set sail across the sea. Their endeavor was made evermore dangerous because they were sailing unaccompanied, which was uncommon at the time. There would be no rescue were they to encounter a catastrophe as so many early transatlantic exploratory voyages experienced.

To avoid the entanglements of encountering the Spanish king’s galleons, Verrazzano set a great circle course along the 32nd parallel, a course well to the north of the easterly trade winds traditionally traveled by the Spanish. Along that latitude they were purposely aiming to reach terra incognita—an un-surveyed coastline to the north of previous Spanish explorations and claims.

La Dauphine plodded westward “on the gentle breath of a light easterly wind” over the period of 50 days, covering about 3,000 nautical miles and averaging 2.5 knots over the entire voyage. Their route took them through the northern fringes of the great clockwise ocean gyre 700 miles east-southeast of Cape Fear and its vast patches of seaweed known as the Sargasso Sea (also, sadly, known in modern times as the North Atlantic Garbage Patch).

Three hundred miles east of Bermuda, after enduring a storm about “as violent as ever sailing man encountered,” wrote Verrazano, their course veered slightly north of the 32nd parallel. Consequently, they passed the Bermuda archipelago but did not spot it.

By early March, the expedition encountered the Gulf Stream. Whether Verrazano and Conflans had previously learned of this powerful ocean current is not known. The Gulf Stream crossing, which would have dragged their westward course somewhat to the north, was not noted in the extant sources documenting the voyage.

Despite some historians’ aspersions on Verrazzano’s navigational skills suggesting that he had made the Atlantic crossing solely by using compass headings and that he must have been ignorant of a compass’ deviation from true north, there exists significant evidence to the contrary. No one has provided a more complete analysis of the route of La Dauphine’s voyage and Verrazzano’s methods of navigation than the late Brown University research professor Lawrence C. Wroth. “There is every reason to hold and affirm belief in the Explorer’s intelligence and knowledge of his craft,” Wroth wrote in 1970.

Verrazzano navigated the vast Atlantic using a combination of newly developed techniques: by frequently computing the ship’s latitude, the distance north or south of the equator based on the observed angle of the sun; and by estimating longitude —or westward progress—using dead reckoning or the continuous record of a vessel’s presumed location based on compass headings, duration, and distance traveled.

Dead reckoning is as much an art as it is a science, requiring both diligence and some measure of luck. A ship’s perceived progress over the ocean bottom thousands of feet below can be altered imperceptibly by currents, by leeway (sideways drift), and inevitably by human error caused by periodic distractions like life-threatening storms lasting many hours or days.

In addition to possessing the latest navigational instruments of the time—a quadrant, a cross-staff, a compass, a tide calculator, and a sounding line—La Dauphine assuredly had aboard a published set of tables for computing latitude based on the angle of the sun at noon on any given day over a period of four years.

When Verrazzano wrote at the conclusion of his six-month voyage that the land he first visited was at 34º, historians seem to have taken the Lyonnais-Italian navigator literally, that landfall occurred precisely at 34º north. But latitude was not the only geographic reference he described in his expedition narrative to Francis I:

“We saw that the land stretched southward, and coasted along it in search of some port where we might anchor the ship and investigate the nature of the land, but in fifty leagues [125 nautical miles] we found no harbor or place where we could stop with the ship. Seeing that the land continued to the south (so as not to meet the Spaniards) we decided to turn and skirt it toward the north, where we found the land we had sighted earlier. So we anchored off the coast and sent the small boat in to land.”

Had Verrazzano actually made landfall at 34º north, in the vicinity of today’s Kure Beach, the coastline, indeed, would have continued south, but for only about four and a half leagues to the tip of Cape Fear, not 50 leagues as reported by Verrazzano. While the length of a French league varied over the centuries, in the early 1500s it was about 2.5 nautical miles.

It is doubtful that Verrazzano rounded the cape and its protruding shoals when he described coasting southward along the land, especially since the shoreline of Long Bay, encompassing Oak Island, Holden Beach, Ocean Isle, and Sunset Beach, turns due west and continues that way for more than 35 miles, or nearly 14 leagues, before again turning to the south.

A reasonable argument can be made that Verrazzano’s reckoning that the land he found was at 34º north was intended to be read in general terms. The latitude may have also been inaccurate, perhaps due to the violent storm they had encountered two weeks earlier, or their inability to sight the sun while in the thick fog of the Gulf Stream.

In late-April, however, during his survey of the North American coastline that ranged as far north as Newfoundland, Verrazzano accurately computed the latitude of Narragansett Bay on the same parallel as Rome at 41º 40’ N. He named the bay Refugio for its idyllic setting. While anchored there for 15 days, unlike his transit of the Carolina coast, he had numerous chances during pleasant spring weather to fix his location from the stable deck of La Dauphine.

In his analysis of the problem, Wroth wrote that, “It may be now suggested, but not affirmed, that the landfall was not exactly at 34º … nor at Cape Fear, but rather near the place where today’s boundary line between the Carolina’s reaches the sea.”

There is one problem with Wroth’s analysis. Had Verrazzano approached the coastline on a due-west heading as he stated in his expedition summary, and had his landfall, according to Wroth, been “near the place where today’s boundary line between the Carolinas reaches the sea,” La Dauphine would have had to round the southern extremity of Frying Pan Shoals, the unmistakeable gauntlet of sand bars and maelstrom of waves that eventually lent Cape Fear its infamous name. Upon clearing the shoals, in order to make Wroth’s proposed landfall between Cherry Grove Point, South Carolina, and Bird Island, North Carolina, the ship would have had to alter its course by as much as 30 degrees to starboard.

Verrazzano’s account makes no mention of Frying Pan Shoals. Two months later, Verrazzano observed and noted the great navigational obstacle and seaward bulge of “sandbanks” east of Nantucket and the Cape Cod peninsula: “Over them the water was never less than three feet deep; thus there is great danger in sailing there.” It would seem that had the expedition encountered Frying Pan Shoals, which is equally hazardous, Verrazzano would have mentioned it in his narrative.

It is probable, just as La Dauphine sailed close by but missed Bermuda, she likewise passed just to the south of Cape Fear and its attendant shoals without detecting them. Therefore, had she continued a due westerly course after safely clearing Frying Pan Shoals to the north, landfall was more likely somewhere on Waccamaw Neck in the vicinity of Murrells Inlet in South Carolina.

The date of Verrazzano’s historic landfall is also often misstated in published sources. It is not clear why there is such confusion. Some sources, like the online resource “NCpedia,” claim that the landfall occurred on March 20, 1584, while other writers suggest that March 1 was the date of the landfall. The correct date in 1524 is not so difficult to compute. Verrazzano clearly wrote that landfall took place 50 days after departing from Madeira on January 17, hence Monday, March 7 is when the historic event occurred. However, March 7 on Verrazzano’s Julian calendar correlates to March 18 on our modern Gregorian calendar so that date technically marks the quincentenary of Verrazzano’s landfall this year.

Verrazzano’s history

Other inaccuracies in Verrazzano’s traditional history abound, including his often-claimed Florence, Italy, birthplace. It is now generally accepted by informed scholars that he was born in Lyon, France, to an Italian father and a French mother.

And much like the fictional origins of Verrazzano’s heritage, his frequently reproduced image depicting a furrowed brow, a prominent Roman nose, and wavy hair, is not a true likeness of the man but was probably based on a painting, likewise apocryphal, made 128 years after his death.

Misleading interpretations by Verrazzano journalists notwithstanding, the record of his voyage, first published in English in 1582 in Richard Hakluyt’s “Divers Voyages touching the Discoverie of America,” was historically, topographically, and ethnologically significant. “And not the least among the recorded observations of the author was his account of the native inhabitants of the new land, the earliest firsthand commentary upon the Indians of the United States north of the Gulf coast of Florida,” Wroth wrote.

The first documented instance of life-saving in America

Students and enthusiasts of North Carolina’s early history may be familiar with the story of the La Dauphine crew member who was accidentally cast ashore and nearly drowned while attempting to deliver presents to the native American inhabitants along the shore of Onslow Bay. The Frenchman was rescued, revived, and warmed next to a beach fire by local residents before swimming back out to an awaiting boat. That remarkable but underappreciated event 500 years ago should be acknowledged and commemorated as the first documented instance of life-saving in North Carolina and America.

Verrazzano’s report of the journey, and the Outer Banks connection

It was not until 1909 that Verrazzano’s original draft of his narrative report to the French king was discovered in a private library in Rome. Known as the Cèllere Codex, the document was composed in Italian by a clerk at the Explorer’s direction.

According to Verrazzano scholar Wroth, what sets the Cèllere Codex apart from two other previously known but less-detailed manuscripts was “the presence in its margins and between its lines of 26 explicatory annotations.” Most authorities, including Canadian historian and cartographer William F. Ganong, have agreed that the annotations are “quite reasonably interpretable as Verrazano’s own.” Wroth adds, “Invariably the annotations make more explicit the meaning of the text.”

None of the handwritten annotations are more historically noteworthy and explicit than the one describing what La Dauphine’s company observed after passing to the north of Cape Lookout and Core Banks on the day of the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25:

We called it Annunciata from the day of our arrival, and found there an isthmus one mile wide and about 200 miles long, in which we could see the eastern sea [Mare Orientale] from the ship, halfway between west and north. This is doubtless the one which goes around the tip of India, China, and Cathay [Manchuria]. We sailed along this isthmus, hoping all the time to find some strait or real promontory where the land might end to the north, and we could reach those blessed shores of Cathay.

On that historic date, probably abeam of Portsmouth or Ocracoke islands, Verrazzano did not set his eyes upon the fabled eastern sea leading to the Orient but instead, Pamlico Sound. The barrier islands of the Outer Banks were the isthmus.

Verrazzano’s remarkable annotation revealing his misinterpretation of the great inland estuary that is today Pamlico Sound was not known to historians until the Cèllere Codex was discovered in 1909. The same false Oriental Sea spotted by the Explorer, however, appeared on two maps, one in 1527 by Genoese cartographer Vesconte de Maggiolo, and the other drawn by Verrazzano’s brother, Gerolamo da Verrazzano in 1529.

The conclusion reached by scholars including Wroth and Ganong was that both Maggiolo and Gerolamo must have been familiar with the draft version of the narrative letter written to the king of France or had access to a sketch map by Verrazzano and his personal log book of the expedition. Unfortunately, neither the sketch map nor the log book have survived the ages.

For the next 100 years after it was first spotted by the Explorer, the false sea, eventually referred to as “Verrazzano’s Sea,” was depicted on some of the most influential maps of the Great Age of Exploration.

History abounds with pivotal moments in time when the future is altered by human miscalculations or ill-informed choices. Those turning points, Churchill’s “hinge of fate,” if you will, are when ensuing events swing on the balance of seemingly inconsequential judgements leading to either success or catastrophe. Often, human lives are at stake. Such was the case when Verrazzano mistook Pamlico Sound for the long-sought shortcut to the Orient. On that day, March 25, 1524, the future of North Carolina’s history was fundamentally changed.

Verrazzano’s miscalculation while sailing up the sand banks of the Carolina coast “stimulated the imagination” of Elizabethan explorers including Sir Humfrey Gilbert and his half-brother, Sir Walter Ralegh. The historic blunder appeared on numerous maps in the 16th century including Sebastian Münster’s influential map of 1540, Michael Lok’s map published in Hakluyt’s “Diverse Voyages,” and Dr. John Dee’s polar map of 1582. Consequently, Verrazzano’s Sea “was one of the motivating factors behind the establishment of the Roanoke colony,” concluded esteemed North Carolina cartographic historian William P. Cumming.

Not until the summer of 1585, when Sir Richard Grenville with four small vessels and 60 men circumnavigated Pamlico Sound for the purpose of surveying Verrazzano’s Sea and to seek its connection to the Orient, was it learned from their Algonquian hosts that tributaries of the great estuary ended at their sources in the uplands. There was no route to the fable shores of Cathay.

But by then it was too late. The die was cast. Verrazzano’s blunder was the irresistible but unattainable pot of geographic gold that partly influenced Raleigh and his adventurers to attempt to settle their ill-fated colony inside the Outer Banks at Roanoke Island.

Historians are inevitably tempted by a game of “what if?”

What if Verrazzano had determined that Pamlico Sound was just that, an inland estuary with no connection to the coveted route to Cathay? Would Ralegh’s three expeditions in 1584, 1585, and 1587 have instead sought a more suitable site within the shores of Chesapeake Bay?

Had that happened, North Carolina would have been deprived of its claim as the “Birthplace of English America” and its monumental three-year celebration of the state’s 400th Anniversary between 1984 and 1987. Strangely, except for forthcoming social media blurbs and blogs, there seems to be no such observance planned for Verrazzano’s historic landfall and survey of the North Carolina coast 500 years ago.

Kevin Duffus is a noted North Carolina author, documentary filmmaker, and research historian who, for more than 50 years, has successfully unraveled dozens of longstanding maritime mysteries. He is the author of seven books: The 1768 Charleston Lighthouse—Finding the Light in the Fog of History; Shipwrecks of the Outer Banks—An Illustrated Guide; War Zone—World War Two Off the North Carolina Coast; The Last Days of Black Beard the Pirate; The Story of Cape Fear and Bald Head Island; Into the Burning Sea—The 1918 Mirlo Rescue; and The Lost Light—A Civil War Mystery.