220 
CAPE COD. 
mine of copper.” This will do for an offset to our Gov* 
ernor’s Muscovy Glass.” Of all these adventures and 
discoveries we have a minute and faithful account, giv¬ 
ing facts and dates as well as charts and soundings, all 
scientific and Frenchman-like, with scarcely one fable 
or traveller’s story. 
Probably Cape Cod was visited by Europeans long 
before the seventeenth century. It may be that Cabot 
himself beheld it. Yerrazzani, in 1524, according to his 
own account, spent fifteen days on our coast, in latitude 
41^^ 40', (some suppose in the harbor of Newport,) and 
often went five or six leagues into the interior there, and 
he says that he sailed thence at once one hundred and 
fifty leagues northeasterly, always in sight of the coast. 
There is a chart in Hackluyt’s Divers Voyages,” made 
according to Verrazzani’s plot, which last is praised for 
its accuracy by Hackluyt, but I cannot distinguish Cape 
Cod on it, unless it is the “ C. Arenas,” which is in the 
right latitude, though ten degrees west of Claudia,” 
wdiich is thought to be Block Island. 
The “ Biographie Universelle ” informs us that “ An 
ancient manuscript chart drawn in 1529 by Diego Bi- 
beiro, a Spanish cosmographer, has preserved the mem¬ 
ory of the voyage of Gomez [a Portuguese sent out 
by Charles the Fifth]. One reads in it under {au 
dessous) the place occupied by the States of New York, 
Connecticut, and Bhode Island, Terre d'Etienne Go¬ 
mez, qiCil decouvrit en 1525 (Land of Etienne Gomez, 
wLich he discovered in 1525).” This chart, with a me¬ 
moir, w^as published at Weimar in the last century. 
Jean Alphonse, Boberval’s pilot in Canada in 1642, 
one of the most skilful navigators of his time, and who 
has given remarkably minute and accurate direction fot 
