By Kevin P. Duffus
Five-hundred-year anniversaries don’t come around very often. An opportunity to observe the earliest documented exploration and survey of the North Carolina coast slipped by the attention of the state’s stewards of its history this past spring with nary a nod.
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, made landfall on the North American coast, likely in the vicinity of Murrell’s Inlet, South Carolina.
“We are seeing a new land which has never been seen by any man, either ancient or modern,” declared the French expedition’s leader, Giovanni da Verrazzano, remembered by history as “the Florentine Explorer.”
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.
Verrazzano’s account of his voyage as his expedition made its way northward along the barrier islands of North Carolina 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,” wrote the late Brown University research professor Lawrence C. Wroth.
Among the notable occurrences during the exploration was the first documented instance of lifesaving 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 local inhabitants along the shore of Bogue Banks. The Frenchman was rescued by native Americans, revived, and warmed next to a beach fire before swimming back out to an awaiting boat. That remarkable but under-appreciated event 500 years ago, alone, ought to be commemorated annually.
It was not until 1909 that Verrazzano’s original draft of his narrative report, known as the Cèllere Codex, to the French king was discovered in a private library in Rome. 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.”
The most historically noteworthy of the handwritten annotations describes what La Dauphine’s company observed after passing to the north of Cape Lookout and the southern islands of the Outer 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.”
Across the thin strips of sand that we know as Portsmouth and Ocracoke islands, Verrazzano thought he was gazing upon the Pacific Ocean.
Instead, what he saw and documented for the first time in recorded history was the vast inland estuary of Pamlico Sound.
Verrazzano’s remarkable annotation revealing his misinterpretation of the sound was not known to modern historians until the Cèllere Codex was discovered in 1909.
But the same false “Oriental Sea” spotted by Verrazzano, eventually referred to as “Verrazzano’s Sea,” was depicted for the next 100 years on some of the most influential maps of the Great Age of Exploration.
History abounds with pivotal moments when the future is altered by human miscalculations or ill-informed choices. Such was the case when Verrazzano mistook Pamlico Sound for the long-sought shortcut to the Orient. On that day the future of North Carolina’s history was fundamentally changed.
The Florentine explorer’s mistake “stimulated the imagination” of Elizabethan explorers, including Sir Walter Raleigh. 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 July of 1585, when Sir Richard Grenville departed Ocracoke Island with four small vessels and 60 men to circumnavigate Pamlico Sound and 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 shortcut to the fabled shores of China.
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.
Inexplicably, Verrazzano’s exploration of the Carolina coast is history not worth remembering by today’s historians.
Kevin Duffus, named the 2014 North Carolina Historian of the Year by the North Carolina Society of Historians, is the author of “The Last Days of Black Beard The Pirate,” and five books and four award-winning documentary films, all on North Carolina maritime history. See more online at https://www.facebook.com/KevinPDuffus.
