I shall enumerate the authorities for the voyage of Gomez later in this essay; but as Mr. Murphy finds in it the source of the forged Verrazano letter, something must be said of it here. First, it is to be noticed that while Mr. Murphy refuses the narrative of Verrazano’s voyage utterly, he finds no difficulty in accepting one of Gomez’ which is to a great degree of his own (Murphy’s) construction. Dr. Kohl and other scholars have found it impossible to decide with any certainty as to the extent and direction of this voyage. Mr. Murphy presents us with full details,—a landfall in South Carolina; a coasting voyage to the north as far as Cape Breton, a careful observation on the return of rivers, capes, and bays; a temporary belief that he had found the strait he was seeking in the Penobscot, or “Rio de los Gamos,” on account of the great tide issuing from it, and a return to Spain by way of Cuba. The authorities cited in support of these statements are Peter Martyr’s _Decades_, Herrera, and Cespedes’ _Yslario general_,—the last in manuscript. The extracts from Martyr and Herrera I have reserved for another part of this chapter.[84] They do not support Mr. Murphy’s details. The Cespedes manuscript was the subject of some remarks by Mr. Buckingham Smith before the New York Historical Society, briefly reported in the _Historical Magazine_.[85] Mr. Smith had not been able to find this manuscript, but understood that it contained a full account of the voyage of Gomez. Mr. Murphy’s note shows that he knew of its existence in the National Library at Madrid. The director of that library has examined this manuscript at the request of Harrisse, and has not found in it any report of the voyage of Gomez by the navigator, nor does it contain any detailed account of the expedition. There is a reference which shows, perhaps, that Cespedes had seen one of Gomez’ writings.[86] The attempt to derive the Verrazano letter from the voyage of Gomez is called by Mr. Major the “climax of the series of Mr. Murphy’s constructive imputations.”[87] His elaborate comparison of the courses of Verrazano with similar divisions on Ribero’s map is open to serious question. There are no such divisions on the map. He argues from a knowledge of the two extreme terms of Verrazano’s voyage, and neglects the intermediate term, the latitude of the harbor where the explorers spent fifteen days, doubtless the most accurate latitude taken. And even at the close of his comparison he allows that the latitudes of Ribero’s map are wrong, and says that the map does not give a faithful representation of the voyage of Gomez. It does not give by name the “Rio de los Gamos” which Cespedes says Gomez discovered, although that estuary was already drawn, in the same form given to it by Ribero, on the earlier Weimar map of 1527, which map omits the name of Gomez altogether.[88]