History of the Colony and Ancient Dominion of Virginia

The discoveries attributed by legendary story to Madoc, the Welsh prince, have afforded a theme for the creations of poetry; those of the Northmen of Iceland, better authenticated, still engage the dim researches of antiquarian curiosity. To Columbus belongs the glory of having made the first certain discovery of the New World, in the year 1492; but it was the good fortune of the Cabots to be the first who actually reached the main land. In 1497, John Cabot, a Venetian merchant, who had become a resident of Bristol in England, with his son Sebastian, a native of that city, having obtained a patent from Henry the Seventh, sailed under his flag and discovered the main continent of America, amid the inhospitable rigors of the wintry North. It was subsequent to this that Columbus, in his third voyage, set his foot on the main land of the South. In the following year, Sebastian Cabot again crossed the Atlantic, and coasted from the fifty-eighth degree of north latitude, along the shores of the United States, perhaps as far as to the southern boundary of Maryland. Portuguese, French, and Spanish navigators now visited North America. Dreadful circumstances attended the foundation of the ancient St. Augustine. The blood of six hundred French Protestant refugees has sanctified the ground at the mouth of St. John's River, where they were murdered "not as Frenchmen, but as heretics," by the ruthless Adelantado of Florida, Pedro Menendez, in the year 1565. In the summer of the ensuing year he sent a captain, with thirty soldiers and two Dominican monks, "to the bay of Santa Maria, which is in the latitude of thirty-seven degrees," together with the Indian brother of the cacique, or chief of Axacan, (who had been taken thence by the Dominicans, and baptized at Mexico, by the name of the Viceroy Don Luis de Velasco,) to settle there, and undertake the conversion of the natives. But this expedition sailed to Spain instead of landing. This region of Axacan comprised the lower part of the present State of North Carolina. The Spanish sound of the word is very near that of Wocokon, the name of the place, according to its English pronunciation, where the colony sent out by Raleigh subsequently landed. In the year 1570 Father Segura and other Jesuit missionaries, accompanied by Don Luis, visited Axacan, but were treacherously cut off by him. In the same year, or the following, the Spaniards repaired to the place of their murder and avenged their death. In 1573 Pedro Menendez Morquez, Governor of Florida, explored the Bay of Santa Maria, "which is three leagues wide, and is entered toward the northwest. In the bay are many rivers and harbors on both sides, in which vessels may anchor. Within its entrance on the south the depth is from nine to thirteen fathoms, (about five feet nine inches English,) and on the north side from five to seven; at two leagues from it in the sea, the depth is the same on the north and the south, but there is more sand within. In the channel there are from nine to thirteen fathoms; in the bay fifteen, ten, and six fathoms; and in some places the bottom cannot be reached with the lead." Barcia describes the voyage of Morquez from Santa Helena "to the Bay of Santa Maria, in the latitude of thirty-seven degrees and a half," and makes particular mention of the shoal running out from what is now Cape Lookout, and that near Cape Hatteras, the latitude and distances given leaving no doubt but that the Bay of Santa Maria is the same with the Chesapeake. Ten years will probably include the period of these early Spanish visits to Axacan and the Chesapeake; and these explorations appear to have been unknown to the English, and Spain made no claim on account of them. Had she set forth any title to Virginia, Gondomar would not have failed to urge it, and James the First would have been, probably, ready to recognize it.