Explorer eaten by cannibals

Italian explorer, Giovanni da Verrazzano, passed by Cape Fear, North Carolina, on his ship, La Dauphine, in March, 1524. He reported to his sponsor, King Francis 1 of France, that he had found the entrance to the Pacific Ocean, an error that would influence maps of North America for hundreds of years to come.

Continuing his voyage northwards along the coastline of New Jersey,Verrazzano observed natives, the Lenni Lenape or Delaware, living beside what he took to be a large lake, but was, in fact, the entrance to the Hudson River. He sailed along Long Island and entered Narragansett Bay where he met with a delegation of Wampanoag natives.

For charting the Atlantic coast of North America between the Carolinas and Newfoundland, including New York Harbour, a bridge was named after him; the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge in New York.

It's such a shame then that the explorer who had mapped out the coastline of New Jersey ended up being eaten by Caribe cannibals on one of the Lower Antilles in 1528!