Early European Settlement Attempts in North America
Many people think of Jamestown and the Plymouth Plantation as the first European settlements in North America, but they were simply the first successful English settlements. Starting about 1000 AD the Norse had settlements in their “Vinland” which probably extended south along the coast of North America at least as far as the Hudson Valley in present day New York. Italian Christopher Columbus was claiming territory in the West Indies for Spain by 1492. By 1496, the Spanish were working their way north from the Caribbean and South America.
Italians John and Sebastian Cabot got things going for the English with a 1497 expedition to Newfoundland, and in 1498, they sailed from Labrador to Virginia, claiming the territory for Henry VII who had provided the funding. Two years later, the Spanish and Portuguese began mapping the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, and in 1525, Estêvão Gomez sailed into New York Bay. Fishermen from a number of different nations began using the Newfoundland coast as a fishing station, and adventurers began trading with the native peoples up and down the coast. The French were exploring “New France” starting about 1534 in the area that is now Canada and spreading south through the Mississippi Valley into the heartland of North America. The Spanish, working north from Florida and Mexico, were doing the same thing.
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In 1579, on his way around the world, Sir Francis Drake stopped off on the coast of California and claimed “New Albion” (all of North America above Mexico from coast to coast), for England. His half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, tried to assert English authority over the fishing station at Newfoundland, but that was stopped by his untimely death. Exploring and staking claims was one thing; being able to create lasting settlements was something else. The Norse abandoned their last settlements in Greenland sometime between 1450 and 1480. |
The Spanish had tried to create settlements in North America starting in 1521, failing in Florida, in South Carolina, and Georgia. They finally succeeded in 1565 with St. Augustine, in Florida.
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April 27, 1584 Sir Walter Raleigh of England. financed an expedition to set up a colony on Roanoke Island (shown in pink on this map). The people there disappeared within two years, and we don’t know what happened to them.
1602 - English Explorer Bartholomew Gosnold tried to plant a colony on Cuttyhunk Island in Massachusetts. His company built a fort but left after only a month.
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At that time, the British called the whole coast of North America “Virginia”, after Elizabeth - the “Virgin Queen”. Not only was there competition for colonization rights between countries, there were several joint stock companies in England that were
competing for settlement rights in North America, and King James was encouraging investment in this venture. Two of those companies, The Virginia Company of London, and The Virginia Company of Plymouth, or Plymouth Company, were given overlapping
settlement rights along the northern coast.
The East India Company hired Captain George Weymouth to seek the northwest passage to India. In 1602, he sailed the ship, Discovery, 300 miles into the Hudson Strait, but turned back when many of his men became ill.
In 1605, Weymouth was sent by the Earl of Southampton and Thomas Arundell, along with other investors, to explore the coast of Maine and Massachusetts, looking for good places to establish settlements. During that expedition along the Maine Coast, Captain Weymouth reportedly captured a young Pawtuxet Indian named Tisquantum, along with four Penobscots, because he thought his financial backers in Britain might want to see some Indians. The news of this spread throughout the New England tribes, creating mistrust and animosity toward Europeans.
Weymouth took the Indians to England, where Tisquantum and two of the other captured Indians were given to one of the investors, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, the half-brother of Sir Walter Raleigh. He was a naval and military commander and governor of the important port of Plymouth in England. The Indians lived with him, and he taught them English. Then as a shareholder in the Plymouth Company, he hired them as interpreters and guides, and sent them back to New England.
Now fluent in English, Tisquantum returned to his homeland in 1614 with English explorer John Smith, possibly acting as a guide while Smith mapped the coast, but he was captured again by another British explorer, Thomas Hunt, and sold into slavery in Spain. Tisquantum escaped, lived with monks for a few years, and eventually returned to North America in 1619, only to find his entire Patuxet tribe dead, probably from smallpox. Tisquantum went to live with the nearby Wampanoags.
Over the first 150 years after Columbus's voyages, the native population of the Americas plummeted by an estimated 80% to 90%. Estimates of the number of native deaths between 1492 and 1650 range between 10 million and 50 million people, mostly due to outbreaks of Old World diseases such as smallpox, typhus (1546), influenza (1558), diphtheria and measles.
Popham Colony or Sagadahoc Colony
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In 1607 the Virginia Company of Plymouth, under the leadership of Ferdinando Gorges, sponsored the Popham Colony at the location of present-day Phippsburg, Maine at the mouth of the Kennebec River. It was abandoned after a year when conditions proved too difficult for the 120 settlers. The Virginia Company of Plymouth fell into disuse following this failure. |
French Colonies
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Meanwhile, the French managed, after numerous failed attempts, to establish their first successful settlement at Porte-Royal Nova Scotia in 1605. The French named the area Acadia. French and English settlers would contest central Maine until the 1750s when the French were defeated in the French and Indian War. The French developed and maintained strong relations with the area's Native American tribes through the medium of Catholic missionaries. |
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In 1608, Quebec was founded by Samuel de Champlain. |
Jamestown
| At about the same time as the attempt to settle the Popham Colony, the Virginia Company of London sponsored an expedition to the Colony of Virginia under the direction of Captain John Smith. It was a commercial venture. On May 14, 1607 they established Fort James, the first permanent English settlement in North America. In 1619, it became Jamestown, which would serve as the capital of the colony for 83 years. |  |
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The settlement was located within the territory of a political entity known as Tsenacommacah, the state of the Powhatan Confederacy, with around 14,000 native inhabitants, and specifically was in part of the subdivision known as the Paspahegh tribe. The natives initially gave the English a lavish welcome and provided crucial provisions and support for the survival of the colonists, for whom the venture was a get-rich-quick scheme, and who were not agriculturally inclined. But relations with the newcomers soured quickly, leading to warfare and the total annihilation of the Paspahegh within 3 years.
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Within a year of Jamestown's founding, the Virginia Company brought Polish and Dutch colonists to help improve the settlement.[3] In 1619, the first documented Africans were brought to Jamestown, though the modern conception of slavery in the future United States did not begin in Virginia until 1660. Smith sailed on up the coast and charted the territory there, which he called New England. His maps helped the later English settlements in Massachusetts. |
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By 1624, due to the financial failure of the Virginia Company of London, King James I made Virginia a royal colony to be administered by a governor appointed by the King,. The Virginia Assembly finally received royal approval, in 1627, and this form of government, with governor and assembly, would oversee the colony of Virginia until 1776, except for the years of the English Commonwealth.
The 1607 colony at Jamestown, Virginia, survived, and spread, but it was another seven years and nine more colonization attempts before a second English settlement in North America lasted more than a year.
(The London Company's second settlement, Bermuda, claims to be the site of the oldest town in the English New World, because St. George's, Bermuda was officially established (as New London) in 1612, whereas James Fort, in Virginia, was not converted into James towne until 1619, and it did not survive into the present day.[6] In 1699, the capital was relocated from Jamestown to what is today Williamsburg, after which Jamestown was abandoned as a settlement, existing today only as an archaeological site. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Virginia_Company)
New Netherland
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In 1609 the Dutch sent Henry Hudsen up the Hudsen River. They charted and established competing claims to the territory that he had explored between Cape Cod MA, and Maryland, which they named New Netherland. In 1614, they built a trading post, Fort Nassau, at Castle Island in the Hudson River within the boundaries of present-day Albany, New York, on the site of a previous failed attempt at colonization by the French. The areas of New Netherland they settled are now part of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Connecticut, with small areas of Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. The provincial capital, New Amsterdam, settled in 1624, was located at the southern tip of the island of Manhattan on upper New York Bay.
For information about colonization attempts by Scotland, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Russia, and other European countries, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_colonization_of_the_Americas.