Gomez may have seen--the true mouth of Hudson's river eighty-five
years before Hudson, by actual exploration of it, made himself its
discoverer. But Verrazano, by his own showing, came but a little
way into the Upper Bay--which he called a lake--and he made no
exploration of a practical sort of the harbor that he had found.

It is but simple justice to Verrazano and to Gomez to put on record
here, along with the story of Hudson's effective discovery, the
story of their ineffective finding. Fate was against them as
distinctly as it was with Hudson. They came under adverse
conditions, and they came too soon. Back of the explorer in the
French service there was not an alert power eager for colonial
expansion. Back of the explorer in the Spanish service there was a
power so busied with colonial expansion on a huge scale--in that
very year, 1524, Cortes was completing his conquest of Mexico, and
Pizarro was beginning his conquest of Peru--that a farther
enlargement of the colonization contract was impossible.

[Illustration: FAC-SIMILE OF TITLE-PAGE OF THE MOST FAMOUS SEA
HANDBOOK OF HUDSON'S TIME]

Therefore we may fall back upon the assured fact--in which I see
again the touch of fatalism--that not until Hudson came at the
right moment, and at the right moment gave an accurate account of
his explorations to a power that was ready immediately to colonize
the land that he had found, were our port and our river,
notwithstanding their earlier technical discovery, truly discovered
to the world. As for the river, it assuredly is Hudson's very own.