Now that the way across the Atlantic was learned, chivalrous sailors hurried to add what they could to the map. Corte-Real, a Portuguese of rank, struck northwest, and hit upon and named Labrador as early as 1500. The next voyage of prominence introduces the French as competitors, Francis I sending the Florentine Verrazano, a typical sea-rover of the period, who had already been to Brazil and the East Indies and was finally hanged as a pirate, to find out what he could about northern America. He steered west from the Madeira Islands in January, 1524, found land near Cape Fear (North Carolina), and claimed to have traced the coast as far north as Nova Scotia, besides entering a large bay (either New York or Narragansett). His whole story, however, rests on certain letters and maps the authenticity of which has been hotly disputed; and at any rate little, if anything, came of this voyage. It was far different with the next one, however,—that one sent from France in 1534, under the command of Jacques Cartier, who sailed from St. Malo in two tiny vessels to Newfoundland, and learned of the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. Then, like all the other captains, none of whom could stay over winter in America, because their vessels were too small to store provisions, and because they were beset by fears, not only of visible savages, but of invisible hobgoblins, he returned to France. The next year found him back again, however, this time steering his vessels up the St. Lawrence to “Hochelaga” (Montreal), and later carrying home an account that led to so immediate a movement on the part of France that Canada was the scene of the earliest colonization of the New World, properly speaking, for the Spanish settlements in the south were thus far nothing but military stations. France, indeed, dreamed of obtaining the whole of North America for herself, and attempted soon after to colonize Florida and the Carolinas; but these attempts failed, and she was able to hold only the valley of the St. Lawrence and the shore of its gulf. These things happened later, however, and for many years the Atlantic coast of North America was left unclaimed by any one, while the English and Dutch were busy in the far north, the Spanish were rioting in the tropics, and the Portuguese turned their attention to the southern and eastern quarters of the globe. It is one of the most striking curiosities of the history of the development of civilization on the globe, following the stagnation of the middle ages and the desolation of the plague-ridden thirteenth century, that the most remote, unprofitable, unhealthy regions were so fiercely struggled for, while the best parts of the New World were left until the last.