Abstract:
In March 1541 Giovanni da Verrazano, a Florentine in the employ of Francis I of France, became the first white man to visit North Carolina. He wrote of his travels up the coast from North Carolina to New York, but France was too occupied at the time with European concerns to consider attempts at colonization. It would be almost sixty years before Verrazano's writings would be published in Richard Hakylut's Diver's Voyages (1582).