Backgrounds and Beginnings

  Although intrepid Norsemen skirted the New World's Northern shore about A.D. 1000, the news of their discovery remained veiled in the mist of Viking sagas for centuries.  The Americas were not visited again until 1492, when Christopher Columbus reached the Bahamas.  North America was at first considered nothing but a vast, maddening obstacle between spice-hungry Europe and the riches of the orient.  For 150 years it remained largely unsettle by Europeans.  During that time, however, Spanish adventurers roamed Florida, the gulf coast, and the Southwest in a vain search for treasure, French voyageurs braved the Canadian wilderness in pursuit of furs, and Dutch and Swedish traders established small outposts on the Northeast coast in present-day New York and Delaware.

  The English, too, came looking for easy riches, but they proved more adaptable than their rivals and readier to see the possibilities of colonization.  Between 1607, when the first ill-equipped settlers landed at Jamestown, and 1733, when a shipload of British debtors went ashore to found Georgia, Britain managed to establish a dozen bustling Colonies.  Thirty years later, after France had met defeat in the French and Indian War and had ceded its Louisiana colony to Spain, Britain had all bet eliminated its chief competitor from the North American Continent.

  The Britisk Colonies scattered along the Atlantic seaboard varied widely.  Wome were divided into hundreds of small farms, others had a few sprawling plantations intermingled with smaller holdings, but all drew sustenance from the production fo agricultural raw materials for the mother country.  The Colonies often quarreled among themselves, but loyalty to the King and faith in parliamentary self-government were common to all.  As long as the distant rulers kept their hands off local matters, relations were geneerally friendly.  It was only after 1763, when London sought closer control over their affairs without consulting them, that the colonists rebelled.

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  Eight decades before the Normans and Saxons clashed at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the story goes, Norse seaman Bjarni Herjolfsson and his crew, lost in a thick fog whil sailing between Scandinavian outposts in Iceland and Greenland, glimpsed an unknow land that was "level and covered with wood". They cruised along its coast for several days.  The tale may not be true, but if it is, Bjarni Herjolfsson's men were the first Europeans to view the north American shore.  It has been extablished that about a decade later Leif Ericsson, another Norseman, camped briefly on the Newfoundland coast, thus becoming the earliest known man from the Old World to set foot in the New.  The Icelander Thorfinn Karlsefni may have followed in a year or two, but for four centuries thereafter the two vast, linked "American Continents remained unknown.

  The search for a sea route to Asia brought about the accidental rediscovery of the New World.  In the mid-15th century the land passage that merchants had been using to bring the silks and spices of the Orient to Europe's Renaissance courts was blocked by hostile Turks.  Enterprising mariners of may lands took to the sea to clude the blockade.  Some fovored sailing southward around the tip of Africa, but Christopher Columbus, a fearless Genoan financed by Spain, believed he could reach the orient by voyaging westward across the uncharted Atlantic.

  On October 12, 1492, after 6 1/2 weeks and several thousand miles of sailing, Columbus and his exhausted crew sighted a small island, in the archipelago now known as the Bahamas, and went ashore. Columbus named the island San Salvador and, convinced he had reached he Indies, dubbed the half-naked Arawaks he saw "Indians".  three later voyages did nothing to shake his belief; Columbus went to his grave in 1506 serenely confident that he had reached Asia.

  Subsequent expeditions proved him wrong, and European countries continued to send mariners to probe the Eastern coasts of both continents in a frestrated search for a natural waterway to the Far East.  The idea of colonizing the new lands began to grow,  In 1565 Spain established St. Augustine, the first permanent settlement north of Mexico, and set up a chain of forts and missions in Florida and along the Southeastern coast to protect its claims to the land it called New Apain.  In the Southwest the Spanish conquered the native Indians in 1598, called the region New Mexico, and 11 years later founded Santa Fe.  Meanwhile the French were exploring the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes and laying claim to an area in the Northeast they called New France.  after short-lived attempts to start colonies in Quebec, the Carolinas, and Florida, in 1605 France extablished a permanent settlement at Port Royal (later, under the British, Annapolis Royal) on Nova Scotia. 

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