Giovanni da Verrazzano

Giovanni da Verrazzano was born in 1491 in the Republic of Florence, but his later expeditions sailed under the French flag of King Francis I. In 1524 he led the voyage that would define his legacy: charting a sweeping stretch of North America's Atlantic seaboard no European had documented before, from Florida up through New Brunswick. Along the way he entered New York Bay and Narragansett Bay, both unnamed and unsettled by Europeans at the time. The expedition gave France its first detailed glimpse of the eastern coastline. He died in 1528, four years after that landmark journey.