The basic theme of this thoroughly researched story is the driving passion for fame and wealth that pushes Giovanni Verrazzano to attempt dangerous adventures and discover unknown lands. His ultimate failure brings him to the harsh and painful reality of disappointment. Verrazzano falls from high expectations into bitter despair.
A history professor, Ross Turner, using the Villon Library in Rouen, France makes a valuable find when he discovers an unknown journal by Gerolamo Verrazzano written during a voyage of discovery in 1524 to North America with his more famous brother, Giovanni. Professor Turner immediately begins a translation of the journal, which reveals many previously unknown details about the voyage along with insights to life and people in the sixteenth century including Erasmus, Martin Luther, and Francis 1st.
Using the journal translations and the professor's commentaries, this historical fiction tells the story of the Verrazzano brothers' efforts to realize their separate ambitions through a voyage to the New World. Giovanni, the ship's captain, is ambitious to find wealth and fame that surely await him beyond the horizon, and his muse, Orizontas, urges him on. When he finds no signs of wealth along the coast of North America, he sees impending failure. Giovanni is determined to convince the king to sanction a return voyage for more thorough search. Disappointment comes when he returns to France to find the king, Francis 1st, embroiled in battles with the Holy Roman Emperor and uninterested in more voyages to the New World.
Giovanni's brother, Gerolamo, a cartographer, is eager to produce the first map defining lands between the Spanish discoveries in Florida and the English discoveries in Labrador, but even this ambition is thwarted when the king unexpectedly gives the ship logs to another cartographer. In his journal Gerolamo records events on the ship including storms, betrayal by a senior officer, kidnapping a small Indian boy, lives of the Indians in North America, and murder of a seaman. Forced to give up exploration, Giovanni and Gerolamo become merchant mariners trading in brazilwood (for dyes) in South America. On his final voyage in 1528 Giovanni goes ashore with six men. They are attacked, killed, and butchered on the beach by Carib cannibals. Poor Gerolamo is on board the ship watching the gory spectacle and is suddenly faced with command of the ship.
In a concurrent side story Professor Turner records his own experiences as he becomes involved with the archives librarian, Nicole. and falls out with his American girl friend, Lorena, who suddenly arrives in Rouen for a short but stormy visit. During the course of translating Gerolamo's journal, the history professor also makes historical comments, and takes a walk through Verrazzano's home port of Dieppe, France, looking for traces of the sixteenth century.
