to be described, and not a single cape or headland is referred to.  No name is given to any of them, or to any part of the coast, except the one island which is named after the king’s mother.  It was the 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 size of the vessels used at that time on similar expeditions, she was small.  The two which composed the first expedition of Jacques Cartier carried sixty men and were each of about sixty tons burden.  The Carli letter, which must be assumed to express the idea of the writer on the subject, describes her as a caravel; which was a vessel of light draught adapted to enter shallow rivers and harbors and to double unknown capes where shoals might have formed, and was therefore much used by the early navigators of the new world. [Footnote:  Le Moyen Age et la Renaissance.  Tome Second.  Marine, par M. A. Jal. fol.  V. (Paris 1849.)] Columbus chose two caravels, out of the three vessels with which he made his first voyage; and the third one, which was larger than either of the caravels, was less than one hundred tons.  The Dauphine is therefore to be considered, from all the representations in regard to her, of less than