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The failure at Roanoke, together with continued war with Spain, suspended English colonial efforts until 1606, when the king authorised the London Company to establish settlements. The result was the founding of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, an event that many view as the real beginning of northern American colonial history. Even this was not easy; one-third of the colonists died during the voyage, while another third died in the first year in a period of adjustment that came to be called ‘the seasoning’. Furthermore, the first 20 years were wracked by hunger and disease, requiring the settlers to be supplied by England until they could look after themselves. The colony was saved by growing tobacco, which had become increasingly fashionable to smoke and which was relatively easy to grow. It was not long before cheap Virginian tobacco flooded the markets.
The French founded their first permanent settlement in Quebec in 1608, and in 1609, Sir Henry Hudson, an English mariner in Dutch pay, discovered Manhattan Island. The island was initially used as a base for traders but the Dutch began to send settlers in 1624, purchasing it from the Indians for a few trinkets, a trade recognised as the best real estate deal in history. They named it New Amsterdam. Forty years later, the English decided New Amsterdam was blocking their westward expansion, so they captured it and renamed it New York, in honour of the Duke of York, brother of King Charles II. In return, and as part of the treaty to end the Anglo-Dutch war, the English ceded their part of Suriname in South America to the Dutch in maybe the worst real estate deal in history!
As word spread of the opportunity to be had in the Americas, more and more Europeans decided to emigrate. In 1610, on the other side of the continent, the Spanish founded the city of Santa Fe. In 1620 a group of religious separatists fleeing persecution in England landed in Plymouth, in present-day New England, on the Mayflower. A year later they celebrated the success of their first corn harvest together with their native American allies in a thanksgiving ceremony still remembered by Americans every year.
The Europeans soon earned a bad reputation among the native American Indians, who referred to them, among other names, as ‘people greedily grasping for land’ or the ‘coat-wearing people’. Over the course of the next few hundred years the native Indians would be destroyed by European diseases, principally smallpox and cholera.
The Europeans were generally surprised by the friendliness of the natives that survived, but nevertheless went on to butcher them. Time and time again the white settlers broke their treaties while the native Americans, not understanding why the newcomers needed more land than that on which they could grow food, failed to unite against them. Eventually they could no more hold out against the diseases the Europeans brought with them than against their lust for land, and were slowly but surely dispossessed, subjugated and exterminated. To the native Americans, the arrival of the Europeans was a holocaust in itself.
Things were not so different in South America, however, where those who had survived disease were often worked to death in mines or on farms by the Spanish and the Portuguese. It was the high death rate of the native populations that led the Europeans to look for a new source of labour.