Exploration, Conquest, and Settlement, Era of European

Exploration, Conquest, and Settlement, Era of European. From 1487 to 1497, explorers sailing for the Portuguese, Castilian (Spanish), and English crowns opened three routes to “the Indies,” soon learning that two led not to Asia, but to the Americas.

Early Voyages, Conflicts, and Colonizing Ventures

. In 1487, Portuguese Bartholomeo Díaz explored the entire west coast of Africa. Nine years later, Vasco da Gama rounded Africa and established a dangerous but lucrative Indian Ocean trade link with Asia. In 1492, Christopher Columbus, a Genoese working for the Spanish crown, sailed westward from Iberia and reached islands in the Caribbean, which he believed to be the eastern fringe of Asia. John Cabot, a fellow Genoese sailing for Henry VII of England, in 1497 crossed the North Atlantic and sighted land in Newfoundland or Cape Breton.

Europe's expansion arose from a restless striving for wealth and territory and the renewal of learning during the Renaissance and Reformation. The mastery of transoceanic travel culminated centuries of attempts by Christians to gain ascendancy over their Muslim rivals, who controlled trade routes into Africa and Asia. Western Europeans achieved these feats of exploration by borrowing from their adversaries' mathematical and navigational technology, such as the astrolabe, magnetic compass, and lateen (triangular) sails, which allowed tacking into the wind.

European fishermen seeking to feed a protein‐hungry Europe may have reached Newfoundland before Cabot's voyage of 1497, although the documentary record is unclear. A cargo of Newfoundland fish reached England in 1502, and by 1506 the Portuguese were taxing cod caught off the Grand Banks. Soon upwards of three hundred ships and ten thousand men from Portugal, the Basque country, the Azores, France, and Spain were visiting the fishing banks every summer.

For most of the sixteenth century, the Iberians dominated European expansion, as dynastic controversies and religious upheavals preoccupied European powers. By mid‐century, the Portuguese had established sugar plantations on islands off Africa's west coast, worked by black slaves purchased or captured in west Africa. In 1532, the Portuguese extended sugar plantation slavery into Brazil, their only colony in the Western Hemisphere.

The Spanish, meanwhile, established a colony on the islands claimed by Columbus in 1492. Fanning out from Hispaniola (modern‐day Haiti/Dominican Republic), Spaniards enslaved Arawakan‐ and Taino‐speaking “Indians” for mining and agricultural enterprises. Abusive labor regimes, together with European diseases such as smallpox, influenza, measles, chicken pox, and mumps, to which indigenous populations had no immunities, soon decimated entire tribes. Spanish conquistadors seeking gold, silver, pearls, and gems explored coastlines and portions of the North American mainland. Expeditions led by Juan Ponce de León to Florida (1512–1513; 1521), Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón to the Carolina coast (1526), Hernando de Soto to Florida and the interior Southeast (1539–1542), Francisco Vásquez de Coronado to the Southwest (1540–1542), and Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo along the California coast (1542–1543) left no permanent colonies.

Spain conquered the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán (Mexico City) by 1521 and the Inca capital, Cuzco, by 1535. Both empires had amassed exquisite gold and silver objects, which the conquistadors under Hernando Cortés in Mexico and Francisco Pizarro in Peru plundered. Spain quickly established the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, claimed all native gold and silver mines, and forced Indians to work them. By mid‐century, Spanish galleons loaded with treasure sailed annually for Europe, becoming prey to pirates, many of them English, based in the Bahamas. Spain established Florida (1565) in response to the French colony at Fort Caroline (1562) and to reduce privateering by Elizabethan “seadogs” like Francis Drake. In 1598, a wealthy Spaniard sent five hundred colonists to present‐day New Mexico, hoping to reap a fortune from silver mining. The resultant colony remained a permanent Spanish borderland, but did not produce the hoped‐for wealth.

England and France had only a few royally sponsored voyages of discovery in the sixteenth century, mostly searching for the elusive Northwest Passage: Sebastian Cabot in 1507, and the French‐sponsored Giovanni de Verrazano (1524) and Jacques Cartier (1535). Cartier's exploration and attempted colonization established France's claim to “Canada,” an Iroquois term. The French and English made scattered attempts at colonization, but not until Samuel de Champlain established Port Royal in Acadia (1605) and Quebec City on the St. Lawrence (1608) did the French gain a permanent presence in North America.

European fishermen on the Grand Banks and in the Gulf of St. Lawrence had long bartered with local Indians, and the establishment of a permanent French presence profoundly affected Native political and economic alliances. Quebec (1608) and later Montreal (1642) were strategically located on an east‐west trade axis linking Algonquian‐speaking tribes of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence. French missionaries and merchants grafted themselves onto the system organized by the Hurons and their allies. (Similarly the Dutch, beginning in 1624, established fur trade posts on the Hudson River and supplied the Iroquois and their allies with guns and other manufactured items.) To rebuild trade and alliances disrupted by epidemics and intertribal wars, French traders and missionaries moved into the western Great Lakes and southward into the Mississippi River system. In 1663, Louis XIV took over the colony of Canada, and in 1698 established the province of Louisiana, controlling the entire Mississippi River with the founding of Detroit (1701) and New Orleans (1718).

The seventeenth century brought a wave of English colonization. The English woolen trade had flourished in the previous century, enriching the commercial elite. Farming improvements coupled with the enclosure of monastic estates displaced thousands of yeomen and day laborers, many of whom became indentured servants in the Americas. Religious strife in England between Protestants and Catholics and within the Church of England made colonization in North America an attractive alternative to many townspeople with capital.

English Colonization I: 1607–1640

. English colonization falls into two distinct chronological phases: 1607–1640 and 1660–1681. Seven English efforts to establish colonies in Newfoundland all failed owing to the harsh winters and scarcity of food. Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, attempted a Newfoundland colony before relocating to Maryland's more temperate clime in 1634. By the time the Calvinistic separatists known as the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1620, English fishermen lived at year‐round fishing stations from present‐day Maine to Massachusetts Bay. English Puritans (nonseparatists seeking to purify the Church of England) secured a charter from Charles I for a Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629. An advance party settled at Salem in 1628, followed in 1630 by a large fleet under John Winthrop. Religious and political controversies soon led some Massachusetts Puritans to found nearby colonies in Connecticut and Rhode Island. Others, seeking economic gain, founded townships in the interior. A healthy climate, good diets, and high fertility rates along with steady immigration led to a dramatic rise in population throughout southern New England. By 1700, Massachusetts Bay Colony, now with a royal charter, had expanded to include adjacent Plymouth Colony.

The nascent Virginia Colony (Jamestown, 1607) did poorly until John Rolfe introduced a hybrid variety of tobacco in 1611. Abuse of indentured servants, Indian warfare, and poor management prompted the Crown to revoke Virginia's commercial charter in 1624 and appoint a royal governor. Lord Baltimore's Maryland (founded 1634) paralleled Virginia economically, but its large Catholic population and its origins in a proprietary royal grant to a single family distinguished it from its larger neighbor. By 1700 both colonies had become more highly stratified in race and class as black slaves replaced white servants, especially after 1660.

For Englishmen seeking riches in the Americas, the Caribbean was the most attractive location, but also the least healthy. Taking small islands on the fringe of Spain's Caribbean holdings, the English soon held Barbados, Antigua, Nevis, St. Kitts, and the Bahamas, as well as Bermuda in the Atlantic. Barbados, founded in 1625, prospered through sugar and rum production. The transition to slavery and sugar monoculture in the Caribbean drove out many English planters in the 1660s, some of whom relocated to mainland colonies, particularly the Carolinas. The Barbadians who founded Charleston in 1670 replicated Caribbean ways, replacing sugar with rice.

English Colonization II: 1660–1681

. The English Civil War interrupted colonization, but the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 spawned expansionist projects by aristocrats jockeying for power. In 1663, Charles II chartered the Carolina Company, which planted a colony south of Virginia and north of Spanish Florida, and the Royal African Company, which challenged Dutch control of the slave trade. Early Carolinians suffered from malaria and yellow fever, but the colony succeeded through the labor of slaves, who by 1750 formed the largest black majority of any mainland colony.

To the north, Charles II sent a naval force in 1664 to take New Netherlands from the Dutch and made his brother, the Duke of York, the proprietor. England's chartering of the Hudson's Bay Company in 1670 put them in direct competition with the French in Canada for control of the fur trade. The last English colony established in the seventeenth century, Pennsylvania (1681), under the proprietorship of William Penn, also incorporated Swedish settlements that had been on the Delaware River since 1655. Delaware gained its own legislative assembly in 1704, but it remained under the governor of Pennsylvania until 1776.

The Stages of Expansion and the Patterns of Interaction

. The era of European exploration, conquest, and settlement illustrates the stages of expansion that historical geographer Donald P. Meinig has suggested as a model for trans‐Atlantic interaction: seafaring, conquering, and planting of colonies. Recurrent general patterns within these three sequences include exploration, whereby information is acquired; gathering of staple commodities such as fish, timber, and salt, along with new cartographic information; barter with Native peoples who trade goods such as furs for goods brought by Europeans; plunder, where Europeans ignore the protocol of Native diplomacy and seize goods and peoples, alienating local populations; establishment of outposts as fixed points of commercial exchange, imperial imposition, whereby Europeans claim lands and introduce political, religious, and social hierarchies in the form of governors, missionaries, and soldiers; implantation, the establishment of permanent colonies; and finally, imperial colonization, where the full complex of European institutions and cultural preferences are transferred and nurtured to promote national goals and further expansion.

By 1700, many colonial regions of North America had reached the last stage of imperial colonization. European societies had been transplanted, along with their values, biases, and worldviews. Beginning with King William's War (1689), Spanish, French, and English colonists and their Native allies found themselves parties in repeated wars as European nations contested for dominance in North America.

Despite their vast claims, European nations in reality occupied only a small portion of the Americas by 1700. Most territory remained in control of Native peoples, on whom Europeans depended for trade, geographic expertise, and military support. While disease, warfare, and expanding settlements continued to decimate many Indian nations, most also found ways to adapt to the presence of Europeans and maintain control over their lives. Some resisted. The Pueblos of New Mexico drove Spaniards out of the region for twelve years in the Great Pueblo Revolt (1680–1692). The Comanche and Apache also rejected missionization and Hispanicization well into the nineteenth century. Others, such as Indian peoples in French‐influenced areas, established ties through trade alliances and intermarriage that produced a creole population of mixed‐bloods or Métis, who played a major role in North American development after 1700.
See also Colonial Era; Columbian Exchange; Fisheries; French Settlements in North America; Indentured Servants; Indian History and Culture: Migration and Pre‐Columbian Era; Indian History and Culture: Distribution of Major Groups; Indian History and Culture: Circa 1500; Indian History and Culture: From 1500 to 1800; Puritanism; Slavery: Development and Expansion of Slavery; Spanish Settlements in North America; Tobacco Industry.

Bibliography

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W.J. Eccles , The Canadian Frontier, 1534–1760, rev. ed., 1974.
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William R. Swagerty and and Elizabeth Mancke