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FOOT IN A COD’S DECAPITATED HEAD, LOOKING VERY

SLIPSHOD, I ASSURE YE.

—Herman Melville, on Nantucket, from Moby Dick or The Whale, 1851

For Europeans, the known world doubled in the course of the sixteenth century. The Dutch had two possibilities to offer the English Puritan refugees : the tiny, well-protected port on the tip of the island of Manhattan, or Guiana, on the shoulder of South America. Of the two, Guiana seemed to offer better opportunities.

More than fifty years earlier, a Spaniard named Juan Martinez had been sent there as a death sentence. He had been found responsible for an accident in which a magazine of gunpowder exploded, and his punishment for negligence was to be dropped off at the unknown northeastern coast of South America in a canoe without supplies. His canoe drifted into the hands of local tribesmen, who blindfolded this first European they had ever seen and brought him to a magnificent city of palaces. After seven months, they loaded Martinez with gold and sent him on his way, again blindfolded. That, at least, was Martinez’s story when he arrived in Trinidad.

Martinez’s fabled city became popularly known as El Dorado. He died soon after in Puerto Rico, and the cause of death, according to many throughout the centuries, was that the gold of Guiana is cursed. In the early 1600s, it was already known that hunts for this El Dorado, even by the great Sir Walter Raleigh, had always ended disastrously. But then, so many voyages to the New World did.

With the world so greatly expanded and seemingly so empty and unknown, searching had become a European passion. Provisioned with nourishing cured cod, some headed to South America looking for gold. Others went to North America looking for cod. But what most who went to either place were really still looking for was Asia. In the sixteenth century, Newfoundland was charted as an island off of China. Europeans had sailed as far south as Maine’s Bay of Fundy and not found a passage. The Spanish and Portuguese had worked south from Florida to the subantarctic tip of Patagonia and had not gotten through either. Still, the idea wouldn’t die.

With the backing of Lyons silk merchants, the French Crown commissioned a Florentine, Giovanni da Verrazzano, to search for a short westward route to China. But France’s Italian failed, just as Spain’s and England’s had. In his 1524 voyage, Verrazzano turned north, following an endless coastline from Cape Fear in present-day North Carolina. He noted that the indigenous people were “nimble and great runners,” optimistically pointing out that he understood this to be characteristic of people in China. He sailed up the coast, found New York Harbor, Narragansett Bay, and an arm-shaped hook of land, which he named Pallavisino after an Italian general. Then he continued up to the coast of Maine, which he called Land of Bad People, and on to what he called “the land that in times past was discovered by the British.” Having exhausted his supplies and found “7000 leagues of new coastline” and still no passage, he gave up and returned to France, where he insisted that there was a whole New World out there.

But ideas are not easily conquered by facts, and seventy-eight years later Bartholomew Gosnold was still looking for the passage to Asia. In 1602, Gosnold sailed beyond Nova Scotia, following the coast south to New England in search of a passage to Asia, where he intended to gather sassafras, which was highly prized because it was thought to cure syphilis.

North America abounds in sassafras. The Native Americans used the leaves to thicken soups. It never cured syphilis, but the roots made an excellent drink later known as root beer. Gosnold did not find China, but he returned to England with sassafras. “The powder of the sassafras,” reported one of his officers, “cured one of our company that had taken a great surfeit by eating the bellies of dogfish—a very delicious meat.”

Europeans still did not understand how large this thing was, this obstacle in the way of Asia. Gosnold’s seemingly