With medieval single-mindedness they were plundering, enslaving and killing. It was the only way the criminal conquistadors knew to reward themselves. Because the natives were accounted to be bloodthirsty cannibals their enslavement or liquidation was looked upon with favor by Spanish authorities. It also greatly simplified the acquisition of aboriginal treasures and mines. Cruelties, so artfully practiced at home, became sheer brutality when transferred to a frontier where the number of victims seemed inexhaustible. Roasting alive, tearing by hounds, dismembering, were all part of the customary Spanish pattern at the time; it was just that these atrocities were committed with higher frequency in America. Wholesale annihilation was the order of the day. Spain was not so absorbed however that she did not make threatening gestures against those who would intrude on her new possessions. England, following up Cabot’s discoveries, made a prideful attempt to launch a colonizing venture. But it died in birth. The Spaniards warned against any encroachments in their American sphere and the English admiralty was in no position to contest the point. Not so, the French! * * * * * Loot from the Aztec Empire proved too tempting to French captains of swift, handy ships which had been commissioned as privateers. Armed with official “letters of mark” to challenge Spanish depredations on the high seas they found clever ways to exceed their authority when they overhauled cumbersome, treasure-laden galleons from America. It wasn’t too long before it was difficult to distinguish between a French privateer and a plain pirate. And Francis I, winking broadly, said he knew of no clause in Father Adam’s will which left all the new world and its riches to his cousin Charles of Spain. Whereupon the French monarch went further. He sent out a capable Florentine pilot, Giovanni da Verrazano, to discover and claim lands in America, and if possible to locate a passage to the Indian Ocean. Verrazano, with a crew of fifty Normans in _La Dauphine_, made his landfall in 1524 just above Spanish Florida. He coasted northward past the entrance to Chesapeake Bay. It appears that he glimpsed the bay and identified it as the great ocean of the East reaching to China; then he sailed on to the Hudson River. The natives encountered by the Frenchmen along the way were gentle and playful. It was spring and Verrazano’s mariners succumbed to the beauty of the Indian women who braided their hair and modestly covered their loins with soft furs. Otherwise they were quite naked. The sailors gave the aborigines toy bells, bits of paper and colored beads, and found them in turn “very liberal, for they give away what they have.”