Concerning the outset of French North Atlantic operations. Like the Spanish and English, early efforts by France were heavily influenced by Northern Italian banking interests who transferred operations to France, Holland and England along with navigational know how, such as Cabot. Much of the activity from 1492 thru 1588 is so intensely technological in competitive scope, that I liken it to the Space Race and Atomic armament during the Cold War.
-1453, Western France devastated from 100 Years War, King requires mariners to sign charters not to attack friendly shipping, largely ignored.
-1483, Pierre Garcie, publishes Routier, a sailing and navigational guide
-1489, French wine cargoes insured by banks
-1493, Marie Johan is rigged in a manner a hundred years ahead of the time. (The French did exceed the English in sailing ship design up until 1815.)
-1504, Normans fishing on Grand banks off Newfoundland
-1507, seven “sauvages” brought from Newfoundland to Rouen
-1508, two Norman ships exploring Newfoundland, Verrazzano possibly among the “supercargo”.
-1509, a third Norman ship imports seven Indian slaves, probably Beothuk, in Rouen, from “Terra Nova”
-1510, King of Portugal complains to French King that he has lost 300 sail to French pirates since 1500!
-1511, Scotland launches the Great Michael, able to carry 1,000 men.
-1515, bill of sale for small ocean going French ship, likely for the fishery, 17,500 pounds of salted cod brought back to Rouen in one ship
-1517, Le Havre harbor improved for deep water vessels, 500 ton L’Hermine built, Varrazzano sails to the Levant
-1519, SaintMalo set aside shoreline for curing fish hauls from Newfoundland, La Dauphine, the ship destined to carry Varrazzano built, capable of twice the range and crew of Cabot’s flagship Matthew
-1520, Norman ship building expands dramatically, to handle transAtlantic commerce. Jean Ango of Rouen begins exploration and piracy, capturing hundreds of vessels with a private fleet, flying a Turkish crescent flag, even claiming unexplored Canada as a personal fief.
-1521 thru 27, the five masted 1500 ton French ship built and failed to launch, being scrapped
-1521, Gordillo, sailing from Santo Domingo, raids Carolina coast for 70 slaves, which were liberated by the governor Ayllon
-1522, September, after a three year voyage round the world, the Vittoria under Cano, with 18 crew, who were jailed, just because they were sailors, returned from the 5 ships and 239 men who set out with Magellan, sparking a search for a quicker route to China, north of Florida
-1523, Florentine Italian bankers in Lyons France, form a syndicate to promote a French backed voyage by Verrazzano, whose house coat of arms was a six pointed star, to be made in 4 ships, reduced to 2 by a storm. Giovanni, or Jean Varranzzano, does not mention a single member of his two crews by name in his log, rather, in a letter to his French backers, despises them as “the maritime mob.”
-1523, French corsair, Jean Fluery of Dieppe, plunders Spanish treasure fleet. Three French vessels fishing off Newfoundland, 5 departures from La Rocelle to Grand Banks. The French proved no better neighbors than the piratical English in the New World, addicted to plunder and slave raiding.
-1523, March, Gomez contracted by King of Spain to find Northwest Passage, Cristobol de Haro, Dutch merchant and outfitter ordered to build ship
-1524, 17th January, at the end of the year, which began on March 1 until 1756 [check date], Varrazzano set sail for The New World. On March 1 Cape Fear is made, the natives are described as “the color of russet.” A sailor was made to swim to shore to parley with the natives, was marooned and saved by the natives who sent him back after marveling at “the whiteness of his skin.” It does seem here and elsewhere that the idea of “whiteness” or “white” people in North America and western Europe, seems to have come from the heavy influx of Italian bankers and merchants recently cut out of the “white” slave trade in North Africa and the Middle East by the ongoing collapse of Constantinople, which had been reduced to an isolated city in the 1400s. The young unnamed sailor observed that the natives of Virginia had skin “inclining towards black.”
-1524, April, Varrazzano and his men find a woman with a baby, and she is so beautiful they try and abduct her, but take only the baby, back as a prize to France, for she was tall and limber. How one wonders was a suckling babe kept alive? [1] The native skin is lightening as the French and Italian mob sails north.
-Next a man of “olive” skin tone parleys with the ruthless invaders, shaking in fear. He was left alone, assuring us that the rapist baby thieves were heterosexual.
-April 17, Staten and Manhattan Islands are reached, where the native skin tone continues to lighten as the folk are described by Jean as “the people are almost like unto ours and clad in feathers…”
-April, late, contact with Wompanoags of Mass and Rhode Island, who are described as big, strong, moral people with black hair and their skin tone like variations of “brasse.” The Crew were unable to rape the well guarded women, indicating that these tribes had experience with European mariners.
-May, early, the “Land of Bad People,” which became Maine was so named because the Abnaki men fought off the invaders and even bared their butts at them, with no women seen, indicating that these people had a lot of experience with slave hunting, rapist explorers.
-July 8, Giovanni returns to Dieppe, with no indication if the baby survived.
-1524, September, Gomez sails from Corunna
-1525, February, Gomez makes Cape Breton, does not stay where the Portuguese had been driven out by the Abnaki, and sails south to explore Maine down to Newport R.I. abducts a load of friendly Indians, many of whom die on the return to Corunna, where the people, expecting a load of cloves, are so disgusted with Gomez for slave raiding, that these Indians are freed, hopefully to be adopted into families and not reduced to starvation and beggary like Europe’s indigenous poor.
-1525 Jean Jolivet’s map of Normandy illustrates state of the art ships.
-1525, Ayllon sails with a fleet, 500 men, women, children and black slaves to about Wilmington Carolina, which he names Chicora, Indians are still pissed over slave raids, and his settlers misbehave.
-1526, October 18, Allyon dies of fever and only 150 survivors return. Did all of the others die? If not, they may have been absorbed by the tribes, possibly including the first African North Americans.
-1527, Giovanni Verrazzano sailed again, tricked the mutinous crews of two of his ships, cut wood in Brazil and returned.
-1528, Giovanni sails to the West Indies and is eaten alive by Caribs, raw, in front of his brother who was rowing off in their boat with members of his “maritime mob.”
-1529, French Newfoundland fish being re exported to England, Ribero World map illustrates astrolabe and quadrant, but not the cross staff, indicating that navigation was still fraught with guesswork.
-1530, the Bailly Globe shows a Sea of Verrazzano
-1534, explorers Cartier finds a fishing vessel from La Rochelle ahead of him
-1541, Roberval sails from La Rochelle
-1542, Norman map makers improve cartography based on navigational reports. In a single day 60 fishing ships and boats sailed from Rouen to Newfoundland… That the Beothuk survived this level of contact for over a hundred years and resisted planting and military expeditions until 1800, without adopting European technology, is amazing, or is it causal?
-1547, banks begin insuring English cargo
-1555, beautiful, oceangoing French ships depicted in Guillaume le Testu album
-1559, departures from La Rochelle, a single port, for Newfoundland number 49 ships
-1571, Protestant uprisings in France fuel migration to the New World.
-1573, (the Vagabond Act codifies and encourages slave raiding in England, or the rounding up of the poor to be put into unpaid service, to be “employed” or “used.”)
-1587, John Davis sails a leaky clinker built pinnace into the Arctic and back.
-1628, French protestants crushed in France.
-1637, Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, writes “at Aquednetick, now called by us Rhod Island.”
-1644, March 13, assembly votes to rename Aquednetick “Isle of Rhods” reflecting, but possibly not following, Verrazzano’s description from 1524 “about the bigness of the Islande of the Rhods.”
…
Notes
-0. This is a correction of this reader’s earlier impression that racial notions of “white” and “black” were absorbed in the west through Spain. For there are zero ancient Arуan uses of the term white as a racial noun. The desire for domestic slaves that could be shielded from the sun and rendered pale as ivory and used in North Africa and the Near East for pleasure, would continue and increase until 1804 when the U.S. sent warships to subdue Tripoli.
-1. In my novel Ire and Ice the baby’s survival is credited to a female dog’s milk, a fancy more humane that the probable fate of the child.
