"
"I am tired of the Guinea trade," the youth repeated; "Cape Breton at
any rate is not Spanish."
"Not yet," said Jean Parmentier with emphasis.
Thus it came about that when Aubert, in 1508, poked the prow of his
little craft into open water to the west of the great island off which
men fished for cod, there stood beside him a young man who had been
learning navigation under his direction, and was now called Jean
Verassen. His real name was Giovanni Verrazzano, but nobody in Dieppe
knew who the Florentine Verazzani might be, and during his
apprenticeship there he had been known as Florin--the Florentine. In his
boyhood the magnificent Medici, the merchant princes, had ruled
Florence. After the fall of Constantinople he had seen the mastery of
the sea pass from Venice to Lisbon. When he left Florence he followed
the call of the sea-wind westward until now he had cast his lot with
the seafarers of northern France, the only bit of the Continent that was
outside the shadow of the mighty power of Spain. That shadow was growing
bigger and darker year by year. The heir to the Spanish throne, Charles,
grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, would be emperor of Germany, ruler
of the Netherlands, King of Aragon, Castile, Granada and Andalusia, and
sovereign of all the Spanish discoveries in the West; and no one knew
how far they might extend.
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