1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/De Costa, Benjamin Franklin

DE COSTA, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (1831–1904), American clergyman and historical writer, was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, on the 10th of July 1831. He graduated in 1856 at the Biblical Institute at Concord, New Hampshire (now a part of Boston University), became a minister in the Episcopal Church in 1857, and during the next three years was a rector first at North Adams, and then at Newton Lower Falls, Mass. After serving as chaplain in two Massachusetts regiments during the first two years of the Civil War, he became editor (1863) of The Christian Times in New York, and subsequently edited The Episcopalian and The Magazine of American History. He was rector of the church of St John the Evangelist in New York city from 1881 to 1899, when he resigned in consequence of being converted to Roman Catholicism. He was one of the organizers and long the secretary of the Church Temperance Society, and founded and was the first president (1884–1899) of the American branch of the White Cross Society. He became a high authority on early American cartography and the history of the period of exploration. He died in New York city on the 4th of November 1904. In addition to numerous monographs and valuable contributions to Winsor’s Narrative and Critical History of America, he published The Pre-Columbian Discovery of America by the Northmen (1868); The Northmen in Maine (1870); The Moabite Stone (1871); The Rector of Roxburgh (1871), a novel under the nom de plume of “William Hickling”; and Verrazano the Explorer; being a Vindication of his Letter and Voyage (1880).