Читать книгу The Colonies, 1492-1750 - Reuben Gold Thwaites - Страница 7
ОглавлениеPortugal reaches India by the southeast.
The year 1498 was one of the most notable in the long and splendid history of maritime discoveryYoung Vasco da Gama, of Portugal, turned the Cape of Good Hope, and gayly sailed his little fleet into the harbor of Calicut (May 20). At last India had been discovered by the southeast passage: Portugal had first reached the goal. In May, also, Columbus set forth upon his third voyage, during which he first discovered the mainland of South America; |Sebastian Cabot's voyage.| and in the same month John Cabot's second son, Sebastian, left Bristol in the hope of finding the northwest passage, which his father had failed to reach, and which was undiscovered until our own times (1850). Icebergs turned Sebastian southward, and he explored the American shores down to the vicinity of Chesapeake Bay. From this voyage sprang the claim under which the English colonies in North America were founded.
Three years later (1501) a Portuguese mariner, Gaspar Cortereal, explored the American coast south of the Gulf of St. Lawrence for a long distance. |Newfoundland as a colonial nucleus.| By 1504 we know that fishermen from Brittany and Normandy were at Newfoundland, and from that time forward there appear to have been more or less permanent colonies of fishermen there,—French, Portuguese, Spanish, and English,—with their little huts and drying scaffolds clustered along the shores. Newfoundland proved valuable as a supply and repair station for future explorers and colonizers. It was the nucleus of both French and English settlement in America. By 1578 there were no less than one hundred and fifty French vessels alone employed in the Newfoundland fisheries, and a good trade with the Indians had been established.
Searching for a short cut through America.
The idea that America was but a projection of Asia possessed all the early explorers; and indeed it was a century and a half later (1728) before Bering sailed from the Pacific Ocean to the Arctic and proved that America was insulated. There was another geographical error, which took even a longer time to explode,—the notion that a waterway somewhere extended through the American continent, uniting the Atlantic and the Pacific. John Smith and other English colonists thought that by ascending the James, the York, the Potomac, the Roanoke, or the Hudson, they could emerge with ease upon waters flowing to the ocean of the west. Champlain sent (1634) the fur-trader Nicolet up the Ottawa River and the Great Lakes into Wisconsin, which he thought to be Asia; and Jolliet and Marquette (1673) imagined they had found the highway thither when their birch-bark canoes glided into the upper Mississippi at Prairie du Chien.
One hundred and seven years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, Balboa scaled the continental backbone at Darien (1513), and in the name of Spain claimed dominion over the waters of the Pacific. With undaunted zeal did Spanish explorers then beat up and down the western shore of the Gulf of Mexico, vainly seeking for a passage through by water. A great stimulus had now been given to the general desire to reach India by sea; for the Turks were overrunning Egypt (1512-1520) and despoiling the caravans from the East, so that the manufactures and trade of western Europe were sadly crippled. But thus far Portugal alone held the key to the sea-route to India.
9. Spanish Exploration of the Interior (1513-1542).
This same year (1513) was notable also for the first visit made by Spaniards to the mainland of North America. |Ponce de Leon in Florida.| Ponce de Leon, a valiant soldier worn out in long service, and who had been serving as governor of Porto Rico, went to the Florida mainland, where a popular legend said there was a fountain giving forth waters capable of recuperating life. The country was ablaze with brilliant flowers, but the elixir of life was not there, and he returned disappointed.
In 1519 Pineda, another Spaniard, explored the northern shore of the Gulf of Mexico. |Vasquez in South Carolina.| The following year (1520) a slave-hunting expedition, under Vasquez, visited the coast of South Carolina, which the commander styled Chicora. The brilliant conquest of Mexico by Cortez (1519-1521) had made that hardy adventurer the hero of Christendom; and in the hope of rivalling his splendid achievement, Vasquez returned to Chicora in 1525, commissioned by Charles V. as governor of the country. But Chicora was not Mexico, and the Red Indians were of a different temper from the Aztecs. The expedition met with disaster. While Vasquez was fighting the embittered savages in South Carolina, Gomez, also in behalf of Spain, was ranging along the Atlantic coast from Newfoundland to New Jersey, and instituting a successful trade with the natives.
Narvaez in the Florida wilds.
In April, 1528, Narvaez, with three hundred enthusiastic young nobles and gentlemen from Spain, landed at Tampa Bay and renewed his sovereign's claim to Florida and its supposed wealth of mines and precious stones. Led by the fables of the wily native guides, who were careful to tell what their Spanish tormentors wished most to hear, they floundered hither and thither through the great swamps and forests, continually wasted by fatigue, famine, disease, and frequent assaults of savages. At last, after many distressing adventures, but four men were left out of this brilliant company,—Cabeza de Vaca, treasurer of the expedition, and three companions. For eight years did these four bruised and ragged Spaniards wearily roam through the region now divided into Texas, Indian Territory, New Mexico, and Arizona,—through entangled forests, across broad rivers and desert stretches beset with wild beasts and wilder men, but ever spurred on by vague reports of a colony of their countrymen in the far southwest. At last (May, 1536), the miserable wanderers reached Culiacan, on the Gulf of California, whence they were borne in triumph to the city of Mexico as the guests of the province.
Spaniards reaching northward from Mexico.
Their coming revived the shadowy native tales of gold mines and wealthy cities to the north, which had for some years been exciting the cupidity of the conquerors of Mexico. In response to these rumors there had been frequent reachings out northward. In 1528 Cortez had despatched Maldonado up along the Pacific coast for three hundred miles. Two years later (1530) Guzman penetrated to the mouth of the Gulf of California and established the town of Culiacan. Cortez again had vessels on the Pacific in 1532, and by 1535 his lieutenants were claiming for him the Lower California peninsula. It is possible that Spanish vessels coasted northward beyond the Columbia; but no news of their discoveries reached the geographers in Europe.
It was in 1530 that specific reports first came, through native slaves, of seven great cities of stone-built houses a few hundred miles north of the capital of the Aztecs, where the inhabitants had such a profusion of gold and silver that their household utensils were made of those metals. |The "Seven Cities of Cibola."| The search for "the seven cities of Cibola," as these alleged communities came to be called by the Spaniards, was at once begun. Guzman, just then at the head of affairs in New Spain, led northward a considerable expedition of Spanish soldiers and Indians, which suffered great hardships, but failed to discover Cibola.
Cabeza de Vaca and his fellow-adventurers claimed, upon their arrival, to have themselves seen the seven cities; and they enlarged on the previous stories. |Coronado's march.| Coronado, governor of the northern province of New Gallicia, was accordingly sent to conquer this wonderful country which Guzman had failed to find. Early in 1540 he set out with a well-equipped following of three hundred Spaniards and eight hundred Indians. The Cibola cities were found to be but pueblos in Arizona or New Mexico, like the communal dwellings of the Hopis and Zuñis, with the aspect of which we are so familiar to-day; while the mild inhabitants destitute of wealth, peacefully practising their crude industries and tilling their irrigated fields, were foemen hardly worthy of Castilian steel. Disappointed, but still hoping to find the country of gold, Coronado's gallant little army, frequently thinned by death and desertion, beat for three years up and down the southwestern wilderness,—now thirsting in the deserts, now penned up in gloomy cañons, now crawling over pathless mountains, suffering the horrors of starvation and of despair, but following this will-o'-the-wisp with a melancholy perseverance seldom seen in man save when searching for some mysterious treasure. Coronado apparently crossed the State of Kansas twice; "through mighty plains and sandy heaths, smooth and wearisome and bare of wood.... All that way the plains are as full of crookback oxen as the mountain Serena in Spain is of sheep.... They were a great succor for the hunger and want of bread which our people stood in. One day it rained in that plain a great shower of hail as big as oranges, which caused many tears, weaknesses, and vows." The wanderer ventured as far as the Missouri, and would have gone still farther eastward but for his inability to cross the swollen river. Co-operating parties explored the upper valleys of the Rio Grande and Gila, ascended the Colorado for two hundred and forty miles above its mouth, and visited the Grand Cañon of the same river. Coronado at last returned, satisfied that he had been made the victim of travellers' idle tales. He was rewarded with contumely and lost his place as governor of New Gallicia; but his romantic march stands in history as one of the most remarkable exploring expeditions of modern times.
De Soto follows Narvaez.
Early in the summer of 1539 Hernando de Soto, the favorite of Pizarro in the conquest of Peru (1532), anchored his fleet in the bay of Espiritu Santo, Florida, determined to gain independent renown as the conqueror of the North American wilds. His was a much larger and better-equipped party than had subjugated either Mexico or Peru. But he met the fate of Narvaez. False Indian guides led him hither and thither through the swamps and moss-grown jungles of the Gulf region, and the survivors formed a sorry company indeed when the Mississippi River was reached (April, 1541),—probably at the lowest Chickasaw Bluff,—after two years of fruitless wandering. The next winter, still betrayed by his savage guides and harassed by attacks from other natives, he spent upon the Washita, but despairing of reaching Mexico by land, he returned to the Mississippi, where he died of swamp-fever (May 21, 1542). The great river he had discovered was his tomb. His wretched followers, by this time much reduced in numbers, descended the stream, and after great hardships finally reached the Mexican coast-settlements in September.
10. Spanish Colonies (1492-1687).
A half century had now passed since the advent of Columbus in the Bahamas; yet upon the mainland to the north, Spain as yet held neither harbor, fort, nor settlement. In the southwest, the proximity of Mexico and the milder character of the natives made it easier to maintain a settlement in what is now United States territory. |Spanish friars in the southwest.| In 1582, forty years after Coronado's march, Franciscan friars opened missions in the valleys of the Rio Grande and the Gila,—the Cibola of old. Sixteen years later (1598) Santa Fé was established as the seat of Spanish power in the north; by 1630 this power was at its highest in New Mexico and Arizona, fifty missions administering religious instruction to ninety Pueblo towns. In 1687 the chain of missions had reached the Gulf of California, and then slowly extended northward along the Pacific coast till San Francisco, with its system of Indian vassalage, was established in 1776. In Florida, after the extermination of the French Huguenot colony in 1564, Spain made wholesale claims to all that region; but De Gourgues dealt her settlements a staggering blow, and she seemed thereafter incapable of further colonizing the province. |Spain's American possessions at close of sixteenth century.| At the close of the sixteenth century Spain held but few points in what is now the United States,—Santa Fé in New Mexico, a few scattering missions along the Gila and Rio Grande, and St. Augustine in Florida.
11. The French in North America (1524-1550).
The French enter the field.
The French were not far behind the Spanish in their attempts to colonize North America. In 1524 John Verrazano, a Florentine in the employ of Francis I., while seeking the supposed water passage through America to China, explored the coast from about Wilmington, N. C., to Newfoundland. Ten years later (1534) Jacques Cartier, a St. Malo seaman, sailed up the north shore of the estuary of the St. Lawrence "until land could be seen on either side." |Cartier at Montreal;| The next year he was back again, and ascended to the first rapids at La Chine, naming the island mountain there, Mont-Réal. Having spent the winter in this inhospitable region, his reports were such as to discourage for a time further attempts at colonization in America by the French, who were just now engaged at home in serious difficulties with Spain.
A truce being at last declared between France and Spain, Cartier was made captain-general and chief pilot of an American colonizing expedition which Francis allowed the lord of Roberval to undertake. But this conflict of authority was distasteful to both Cartier and Roberval, and the former started off before his chief in May, 1541. |and Quebec.| He built a fort near Quebec, but a year later returned to France, just before Roberval arrived with reinforcements for the colony. The latter remained for a year in America before returning home, and it is thought that he visited Massachusetts Bay in his voyages alongshore. France was now ablaze with civil war, and the Huguenots, with their independent notions, were engaging all the resources of the royal power, so that further American discoveries were for the time postponed. The Newfoundland industry, however, grew apace, for the Church prescribed a fish diet on certain days and at certain seasons, and the consumption of salted fish in Europe had grown to be enormous. Breton vessels were from the first prominent in the traffic.
12. French Attempts to colonize Florida (1562-1568).
Coligny's colony at Port Royal.
Admiral Coligny, the great Huguenot leader, was ambitious to establish a colony of French Protestants in America which should be a refuge for his persecuted countrymen whenever it became desirable for them to seek new seats. Jean Ribaut went out under his auspices in 1562, discovered St. John's River in Florida, went up Broad River, named the country Carolina, after the boy-king, Charles IX., and left twenty-six colonists at Port Royal, on Lemon Island. But the settlers soon tired of their enterprise, and the following year set out for home. An English cruiser captured the party on the high sea when it was reduced to the last extremity for want of food. The more exhausted of the company were landed in France; the rest were taken to England.
Laudonnière in Florida.
The succeeding season (1564), another colonizing expedition, made up of Protestants, headed by René Goulaine de Laudonnière, and aided by the king, sought Carolina. Avoiding Port Royal as ill-omened, they established themselves on St. John's River. The emigrants were a dissolute set, as emigrants were apt to be in an age when the sweepings of European jails and gutters were thought to furnish good colonizing material for America. Laudonnière hung some of his followers for piracy against Spanish vessels; others were captured in the act by the Spaniards, and sold into slavery in the West Indies. What remained of the colony soon lost, through dishonesty and severity, the respect of the Indians, who had at first received the intruders kindly. When, in August, 1565, Sir John Hawkins, the noted slaver and navigator, appeared with his fleet, he was able to render the now half-starved settlers most needed help. Ribaut soon came also, with recruits, provisions, seeds, domestic animals, and farming implements, greatly to the joy of the little colony.
But this happiness was not of long duration. The attention of Philip II. of Spain was at length called to this colony of French heretics which was gaining a foothold upon his domain of Florida. |The Spanish massacre.| In August, 1565, his agent, Pedro Melendez de Aviles, appeared on the scene and announced his purpose to "gibbet and behead all the Protestants in these regions." Melendez established St. Augustine, which is thus the oldest town in the United States east of the Mississippi, and then with blood-thirsty deliberateness proceeded to wipe the French settlement out of existence. French writers claim that nine hundred persons were cruelly massacred; and the Spanish estimate is not far below that number.
A Gascon soldier, Dominic de Gourgues, soon came over (1567) to avenge the wrong done his fellow-Huguenots. |The Huguenots avenged.| He captured all the Spanish establishments left by Melendez, except St. Augustine. When he found, the following year, that he could not hold his prizes, he hung the Spanish prisoners to trees and hastened back to France. His king, however, being under the influence of Spain, disavowed this act of reprisal, and relinquished all further claim to Florida.
13. The French in Canada (1589-1608).
The colonial policy of Henri IV. (1589-1610) was more progressive and enlightened than that of his immediate predecessors on the throne of France. But he had not yet learned what succeeding generations were to discover to their cost,—that criminals and paupers do not make good colonists. |De la Roche's ill-fated venture.| In 1598 the familiar error was repeated, when the Marquis de la Roche took out a company of forty jail-birds, liberated for the purpose, and landed them on the dreary, storm-washed Isle of Sable, off the Nova Scotia coast, where, eighty years earlier (1518), the Baron de Léry had made a vain attempt to start a colony. La Roche, beggared on his return home, was unable to succor his colonists, who on their inhospitable sands lived more like beasts than men. Five years later the twelve skin-clad survivors were picked up by a chance vessel and taken back to France, to tell a tale of almost matchless horror.
Champlain's first voyage.
It was an age of licensed commercial monopolies, as well as of other economic experiments. In the year 1600 Chauvin obtained the exclusive right to prosecute the fur-trade in the New Land to the west, and united with him a St. Malo merchant, Pontgravé. They made two lucrative voyages, but established no settlement. Samuel de Champlain, in Pontgravé's company, went out in 1603, ascending the St. Lawrence as far as Montreal. |De Monts' colony.| Later (this same year) De Monts, a Calvinist, was given the viceroyalty and the fur-trade monopoly of Acadia,—between the fortieth and sixtieth degrees of latitude,—and religious freedom was granted there for Huguenots, though the Indians were to be instructed in the Romish faith. De Monts and his strangely assorted party of vagabonds and gentlemen first settled on an island, near the present boundary between Maine and New Brunswick, in the fall of 1604, but the following spring moved to Port Royal,—now Annapolis, Nova Scotia. This, the first French agricultural colony yet planted in America, suffered disaster after disaster; but although Port Royal was abandoned in 1607, the germ of colonization lived. |Quebec established.| In 1608, Champlain—who had, four years before, while in the employ of De Monts, explored the coast as far south as Cape Cod—set up a permanent French post upon the gloomy cliff at Quebec. Soon the Jesuits came; and by the time the "Mayflower" had reached New England, New France was established beyond a doubt, and French influence was penetrating inland. Wandering savages from the Upper Lakes, nearly a thousand miles in the interior, had at last seen the white man and begun to feel his power.
14. English Exploration (1498-1584).
English interests at Newfoundland.
England would have followed up Cabot's discovery of North America with more vigor had not Henry VII., being a Catholic prince, hesitated to set aside the Pope's bull giving the new continent to Spain. His subjects, however, made large hauls of fish along the foggy shores of Newfoundland, and in 1502 some American savages were exhibited to him in London. Henry VIII. was at first similarly scrupulous; but when, in 1533, he got rid of his queen, Catharine of Aragon, he was free from Spanish entanglements, and aspired to make England a maritime nation. Among many other enterprises the northwest passage allured him, although nothing came of his ventures in that direction. With the accession of Edward VI. (1547) a progressive era opened. The Newfoundland fisheries were now so effectively encouraged that by 1574, under Elizabeth, from thirty to fifty English ships were making annual trips to the Grand Banks.
Elizabeth's courtiers looking towards America.
The most popular ventures among the nobles of Elizabeth's court were the northwest passage, American colonization, and freebooting voyages. Writers of voyages and travels and cartographers sprang up on every hand, the most noteworthy being Richard Eden, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Richard Hakluyt, and Martin Frobisher. Patronized by the powerful Earl of Warwick, Frobisher in three successive voyages (1576-1578) vainly sought gold in Labrador. Francis Drake, on his famous buccaneering tour around the world, explored the Pacific coast of the United States as far north as Cape Blanco (1579), unsuccessfully searching for a short cut by water through the continent.
Gilbert's voyage.
Gilbert saw that Newfoundland must thereafter be considered as the nucleus of English settlement in America; and in 1579 Sir Humphrey, himself a soldier and a member of Parliament, accompanied by his step-brother, Sir Walter Raleigh, went out to lead the way. Storms and other disasters drove them back, and it was 1583 before another squadron could be equipped. Raleigh remained in England; but Gilbert landed at St. John's, where he found that four hundred vessels of various nationalities, mainly Spanish and Portuguese, were annually engaged in the fisheries. He took possession of the island for the queen, examined the neighboring mainland, and freighted his ships with glistening rock, ignorantly declared by an unskilful expert accompanying the expedition to contain silver. Upon the return voyage the vessel carrying Gilbert was lost, the companion ship, with its worthless cargo, reaching Falmouth safely.
15. English Attempts to colonize (1584-1606).
Amadas and Barlowe.
Under Raleigh's auspices two vessels set out in 1584, commanded by Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe. They landed at the island of Roanoke, the southernmost of the reefs enclosing Albemarle Sound, in North Carolina; but although charmed with the country, which they declared to be "the most plentiful, sweet, fruitful, and wholesome of all the world," and well treated by the Indians,—"people most gentle, loving, and faithful,"—they made no settlement, and returned to England. Raleigh, however, was pleased by the reports brought back; he was knighted, his claim was confirmed, he named the country Virginia, in token of his virgin queen, and he entertained visions of establishing a considerable province there, and of enjoying a comfortable rent-roll.
Raleigh's first colony.
In 1585, aided by the queen, he sent out seven vessels and one hundred and eight colonists, the fleet being commanded by Sir Richard Grenville, and the intending settlers by Ralph Lane, a soldier of much merit. Few maritime enterprises were sent out by England in the Elizabethan age that did not include in their orders a project for preying on Spanish commerce by the way; for our ancestors were as yet not far removed in this regard from the spirit of the old Norse pirates. Grenville therefore sailed around by the Canaries, picked up Spanish prizes partly to meet the cost of the undertaking, and in due time anchored at Wocoken, whence he proceeded to Roanoke island.
With the colonists was Manteo, a native who had gone to England with some former expedition; and the good-natured fellow secured for his new friends a warm reception on the part of the aborigines. But Grenville before his return treated them harshly, leaving to them and the colonists a legacy of mutual distrust and grievances. In March, 1586, Lane ascended the Roanoke River, hoping to find rich ores and pearls in the upper country; for the deceitful savages, wishing to divide the white men's forces, had told him that the stream had its source near the western ocean, in a country abounding with these articles, and encouraged his expedition with promises of assistance. The enterprise proved full of hardship and peril, and the governor returned just in time to check a conspiracy to attack the garrison.
Lane had employed his men in frequent explorations, their journeyings reaching on the north to Chesapeake Bay and Elizabeth River, on the south to the Secotan. But the situation became irksome. The spirit of adventure and wealth-seeking prevailed among the colonists; it was not a community calculated for the uneventful and toilsome prosecution of agriculture; and before long the fretful disease of homesickness prevailed on the island of Roanoke.
In June, 1586, Sir Francis Drake appeared with twenty-three vessels. He had made a rich haul from Spanish treasure-ships in the West Indies, and had turned aside on his return trip, curious to see how his friend Raleigh's colony fared. Yielding to the importunities of the settlers, he took them aboard his fleet and carried them back to England. |The enterprise abandoned.| They had been gone from Roanoke but a few days, when a ship, bringing supplies sent out by Raleigh, sailed into the inlet, only to find the place deserted. In another fortnight, Grenville appeared with three well-furnished ships, and left fifteen men on the island to renew the colonizing experiment.
Raleigh displayed most remarkable persistence. He was undismayed by this long chapter of disasters. |Raleigh's second attempt.| Men on whose judgment he relied brought back good reports from the site of the ill-fated colony, and again he fitted out an expedition,—this time entirely at his own charge, for Elizabeth had had enough of the experiment. It was in July, 1587, when John White arrived with Raleigh's new colonists off the shores of North Carolina. At Roanoke, deer were quietly grazing in a field fertilized by the bones of Grenville's contingent of the year before, and the fort was in ruins. Governor White re-established the settlement.
Birth of Virginia Dare.
The 18th of August the daughter of White, Eleanor Dare, gave birth to a daughter, called Virginia, after the country,—the first child of English parents born on the soil of the United States. A few days later, White left for England,—ostensibly for recruits and supplies, the colony which he left behind being composed of eighty-nine men, seventeen women, and two children. But England was now threatened with invasion from Spain; the energy and resources of the island were being mustered in its defence; Raleigh, Drake, Grenville, Frobisher, Hawkins, and the rest were engaged in preparing to resist the enemy. It was no time for colonization schemes. The Armada scattered, the father of English colonization in America found himself ruined, having spent £40,000 in his several fruitless ventures. Still hopeful, he next adopted a scheme of making large grants in Virginia to merchants and adventurers, and in this manner obtained some aid.
Wreck of the colony.
In 1591 White returned to Roanoke, to find it again deserted, with no traces of his daughter or of the other colonists. They had probably been overcome by the Indians, and those whose lives were spared adopted into the neighboring tribes. In spite of the many costly attempts, the sixteenth century closed with no English settlement on the shores of America.
Causes of English failures thus far.
Among the principal causes of this early failure in Virginia were the improper character and spirit of the emigrants, who, instead of looking to the soil as the chief source of supplies, expected to find rich mines, or tribes possessing gold, and relied upon England for the necessaries of life; they had not enough occupation to keep them from brooding over their isolation, and by their harshness they turned the Indians into harassing enemies.
Gosnold's voyages.
Bartholomew Gosnold has had the reputation of being the first mariner who set out for America on a direct voyage from England, thus avoiding the West Indies and the Spanish, and saving nearly a thousand miles; but others before him had taken the direct course,—notably Verrazano (1524). |Pring in Maine, and Weymouth at Cape Cod.| In 1602, while trading with the Indians, Gosnold explored the coast from Cape Elizabeth, Maine, to the Elizabeth Islands, on his way landing upon and naming Cape Cod. The following year Martin Pring discovered many harbors and rivers in Maine. In 1605 George Weymouth, sent by the Earl of Southampton and Lord Arundel, explored from Cape Cod northward. He carried back with him several kidnapped natives, three of whom he gave to Sir Ferdinando Gorges, governor of the English port of Plymouth. |Gorges becomes interested.| Gorges was particularly struck with the reported abundance of good harbors in the north, compared with the scarcity of such in Virginia and Carolina, and became at once strongly interested in New England exploration.
Public attention in England had by this time become strongly attracted to the northern region as probably the most desirable for future experiments in colonization; it was pointed out with much force that the lack of good anchorage was one of the reasons why the southern attempts had failed. Conditions in England, too, had at last so changed as to make it possible to undertake colonization with better assurances of success. But New England was not destined to be the site of the first permanent plantation. That honor was reserved for what is now Virginia.
16. The Experience of the Sixteenth Century (1492-1606).
Sixteenth century notable for interest in discovery and settlement.
In reviewing the period from 1492 to 1606,—practically the sixteenth century,—we see that it was notable for the extraordinary interest displayed in discovery and settlement. Attention has been called to the part played by the general desire of Europeans to secure the trade of India. But we must not forget as well that, as a feature of the great Renaissance and Reformation movement, the spirit of investigation was abroad, in religion, philosophy, and the arts; there had grown up great commercial and trading cities, in which the successful foreign merchant became a part of a powerful aristocracy; popular imagination had been fired by traders' stories of India, China, and Japan; there was an eagerness to reach out into the regions of mystery, to enlarge the horizon of human knowledge. The effect was greatly to increase skill in navigation, to build up a merchant marine, and—it being an age of universal freebooting—to cultivate an experience in naval warfare which was a preparation for the great sea-fights of the eighteenth century.
Of the three nations which, in the sixteenth century, attempted to colonize America north of the Gulf of Mexico, all had practically failed. Spain had with comparative ease conquered the unwarlike natives of Mexico and Peru upon their cultivated plains. |Causes of failure in North American colonization.| That very ease took away the disposition, even had her people been capable of the effort, slowly and painfully to subdue the tangled forests and savage warriors of Florida, with no other promise of reward than the possession of unredeemed soil. Not suited to the task, she utterly wasted alike the resources of the home government applicable to colonization, and those of the established colonies. France had failed because of dissensions at home, inferior powers of organization, the want of the proper colonizing temper, and the severity of the climate in that portion of the New World which she had seized upon as the seat of her colonies. English colonization thus far had been unproductive because there was a want of understanding of the difficulties, because of the selection of colonists who lacked experience in agriculture, because poor harbors were generally chosen, because there was difficulty in keeping up communications with the mother-land, because the resident leaders lacked courage and had not the staying qualities which were in after years the salvation of the Plymouth Pilgrims. But the effect of these early English efforts was important in giving the people needed training in navigation and colonization, and a knowledge of the country.
European claims in America, 1600.
Taking a general view of America at the close of the sixteenth century, we find Spain in undisputed possession of Peru, Central America, the country west and northwest of the Gulf of Mexico, the greater part of the West Indies, and the coast of what is now Florida; while they claimed all of the southern third of the present United States and the greater part of South America, except Guiana and Brazil. The French laid claim to the basin of the St. Lawrence and to the coast northward and southward, but their colonies were not as yet permanently planted; the attempts to make Huguenot settlements in Brazil (1555) and Florida had been unsuccessful, and French claims there had been abandoned under Spanish influence. It was not until 1609, when Hudson sailed up the river named for him, that the Dutch laid any claims to American soil. Cabral discovered Brazil for the Portuguese in 1500; but when Portugal, eighty years later, became the dependency of Spain (a condition lasting sixty years), her South American colonies were harried by the Dutch, though she did not relinquish control of them. The English claimed all the North American coast from Newfoundland to Florida, and of course through to the Pacific, no one then entertaining the belief that the continent was many hundred miles in width; but as yet none of their colonizing efforts had been successful. The Bermudas, Bahamas, and Barbados were neither claimed nor settled by Englishmen until the seventeenth century. The great Mississippi basin had been visited by a few Spanish overland wanderers, but as yet was practically forgotten and unclaimed, except so far as it was included in the undefined Spanish and English transcontinental zones; the Hudson Bay country, Oregon, and Alaska were also undiscovered lands. A few thousand miles of American coast-line were now familiar to European explorers; but of the interior of the continent scarcely more was known than might be seen over the tree-tops from the mast-head of a caravel.
