abots to be the first who
actually reached the main land. In 1497, John Cabot, a Venetian
merchant, who had become a resident of Bristol in England, with his son
Sebastian, a native of that city, having obtained a patent from Henry
the Seventh, sailed under his flag and discovered the main continent of
America, amid the inhospitable rigors of the wintry North. It was
subsequent to this that Columbus, in his third voyage, set his foot on
the main land of the South. In the following year, Sebastian Cabot
again crossed the Atlantic, and coasted from the fifty-eighth degree of
north latitude, along the shores of the United States, perhaps as far as
to the southern boundary of Maryland. Portuguese, French, and Spanish
navigators now visited North America.

Dreadful circumstances attended the foundation of the ancient St.
Augustine. The blood of six hundred French Protestant refugees has
sanctified the ground at the mouth of St. John's River, where they were
murdered "not as Frenchmen, but as heretics," by the ruthless Adelantado
of Florida, Pedro Menendez, in the year 1565.

In the summer of the ensuing year he sent a captain, with thirty
soldiers and two Dominican monks, "to the bay of Santa Maria, which is
in the latitude of thirty-seven degrees," together with the Indian
brother of the cacique, or chief of Axacan, (who had been taken thence
by the Dominicans, and baptized at Mexico, by the name of the Viceroy
Don Luis de Velasco,) to settle there, and undertake the conversion of
the natives. But this expedition sailed to Spain instead of landing.

This region of Axacan comprised the lower part of the present State of
North Carolina. The Spanish sound of the word is very near that of
Wocokon, the name of the place, according to its English pronunciation,
where the colony sent out by Raleigh subsequently landed.[18:A]

In the year 1570 Father Segura and other Jesuit missionaries,
accompanied by Don Luis, visited Axacan, but were treacherously cut off
by him. In the same year, or the following, the Spaniards repaired to
the place of their murder and avenged their death.[18:B]

In 1573 Pedro Menendez Morquez, Governor of Florida, explored the Bay of
Santa Maria, "which is three leagues wide, and is entered toward the
northwest. In the bay are many rivers and harbors on both sides, in
which vessels may anchor. Within its entrance on the south the depth is
from nine to thirteen fathoms, (about five feet nine inches English,