The letter professes to give the origin and results of the voyage; that is, the agency of the king of France in sending forth the expedition, and the discoveries actually accomplished by it.  In both respects it is essentially untrue.  It commences by declaring that Verrazzano sailed under the orders and on behalf of the king of France, for the purpose of finding new countries, and that the account then presented was a description of the discoveries made in pursuance of such instructions.  That no such voyage of discoveries were made for that monarch is clearly deducible from the history of France.  Neither the letter, nor any document, chronicle, memoir, or history of any kind, public or private, printed or in manuscript, belonging to that period, or the reign of Francis I, who then bore the crown, mentioning or in any manner referring to it, or to the voyage and discovery, has ever been found in France; and neither Francis himself, nor any of his successors, ever acknowledged or in any manner recognized such discovery, or asserted under it any right to the possession of the country; but, on the contrary, both he and they ignored it, in undertaking colonization in that region by virtue of other discoveries made under their authority, or with their permission, by their subjects.

I. That no evidence of the Verrazzano discovery ever existed in France, is not only necessarily presumed from the circumstance that none has ever been produced, but is inferentially established by the fact that all the French writers and historians, who have had occasion to consider the subject, have derived their information in regard to it from the Italian so-called copies of the letter, and until recently from that in Ramusio alone.  No allusion to the discovery, by any of them, occurs until several years after the work of Ramusio was published, when for the first time it is mentioned in the account written by Ribault, in 1563, of his voyage to Florida and attempted colonization at Port Royal in South Carolina, in the previous year.  Ribault speaks of it very briefly, in connection with the discoveries of Sebastian Cabot and others, as having no practical results, and states that he had derived his information in regard to it, from what Verrazzano had written, thus clearly referring to the letter.  He adds that Verrazzano made another voyage to America afterwards, “where at last he died.”  As Ramusio is the only authority known for the latter statement, it is evident that Ribault must have had his work before him, and consequently his version of the letter, when he prepared this account. [Footnote:  The original narrative of Ribault, in French, has never appeared in print.  It was probably suppressed at the time for political reasons, as the colony was intended for the benefit of the protestants of France.  It was, however, translated immediately into English and printed in 1563, under the following title:  “The whole and true discoverye of Terra Florida