appended to this memoir, enable us to fix the date of his execution, for although not dated themselves, they contain a reference to the date of the cedule, ordering the execution, by which it can be determined.  Giles mentions that this cedule was dated at Lerma, on the 13th of last month, showing that it was made there on the 13th of some month.  According to the Itinerary of Charles V, kept by his private secretary, Vandernesse, containing an account of the emperor’s journeys from the year 1519 to 1551, Charles went to Lerma, a small town in Old Castile, for the first time on the 9th of May, 1524 and returned thence to Burgos on the 12th of that month, going to Lerma again on the 21st of July of that year and leaving it on the 24th for Vallidesole.  He was not there afterwards, until the 12th of October, 1527, where he remained until the 17th of that month when he went to Burgos.  He went to Lerma again on the 20th of February 1528, and remained there for two days only.  These are all the occasions of his presence at Lerma during the whole period of the Itinerary.  These dates prove that the only possible occasion for issuing the order of execution was the 13th of October 1527.  The prisoners left under guard, on the 15th of that month for Madrid, and the letter apprising the emperor that the order had been executed upon Verrazzano must have been written in November, the month following.

The Itinerary will be found in the Correspondence of the Emperor Charles V, by William Bradford, London, 1850.]

And thus finally the testimony, upon which the tale of discovery was credited and proclaimed to the world, is contradicted and disproved.  The statement that Verrazzano and a member of his crew were killed and then feasted upon by the inhabitants of the coast which he had visited a second time, has no support or confirmation in the history of that rude and uncivilized people; for, however savage and cruel they were towards their enemies, or, under provocation, towards strangers, no authenticated instance of their canibalism has ever been produced; but on the contrary the testimony of the best authorities, is that they were guiltless of any such horrid practice.  Yet that statement was a part of the information which Ramusio received and communicated to his readers at the same time with the Verrazzano letter; and constituted a part of the evidence upon which he relied.  How utterly false it was is shown by the agreement with Chabot and the capture and execution of Verrazzano by the Spaniards.  It is now seen how the credulity of the historian was imposed upon, and he was led by actual misrepresentations to adopt a narrative which has no foundation in truth, and whose inconsistencies and incongruities he vainly sought to reconcile, but which, for three centuries, sanctioned by his authority alone, has been received as authentic and true; until at length, by the exposure of its original character, and the circumstances of its publication by him, with the production of undoubted evidence from the records of the time, it is proven to be a deliberate fraud.