{"id":1898,"date":"2021-02-16T15:44:29","date_gmt":"2021-02-16T15:44:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/wm-ushistory1\/chapter\/english-colonization\/"},"modified":"2022-07-25T19:17:17","modified_gmt":"2022-07-25T19:17:17","slug":"english-colonization","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/wm-ushistory1\/chapter\/english-colonization\/","title":{"raw":"The English in America","rendered":"The English in America"},"content":{"raw":"<div class=\"textbox learning-objectives\">\r\n<h3>Learning Objectives<\/h3>\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li>Describe the development of English\u00a0colonization in the Americas, including the attempted settlement at Roanoke<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<h2>English Motives for Colonization<\/h2>\r\nSpain had a one-hundred year head start on New World colonization and a jealous England eyed the enormous wealth that Spain gleaned from the New World.\r\n\r\nDisruptions during the Tudor monarchy\u2014especially the creation of the Protestant Church of England by Henry VIII in the 1530s, the return of the nation to Catholicism under Queen Mary in the 1550s, and the restoration of Protestantism under Queen Elizabeth\u2014left England with little energy for overseas projects. More important, England lacked the financial resources for such endeavors. Nonetheless, English monarchs carefully monitored developments in the newly emerging Atlantic World and took steps to assert England\u2019s claim to the Americas. As early as 1497, Henry VII of England had commissioned John Cabot, an Italian mariner, to explore new lands. Cabot sailed from England that year and made landfall somewhere along the North American coastline. For the next century, English fishermen routinely crossed the Atlantic to fish the rich waters off the North American coast. However, English colonization efforts in the 1500s were closer to home, as England devoted its energy to the colonization of Ireland.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1166\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"678\"]<a href=\"http:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/text\/wp-content\/uploads\/77788633_2000x8831.jpg\"><img class=\"wp-image-1166 \" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images-archive-read-only\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/880\/2015\/04\/23193027\/77788633_2000x8831-1000x441.jpg\" alt=\"The Battle of Gravelines\" width=\"678\" height=\"299\" \/><\/a> <strong>Figure 1<\/strong>. Nicholas Hilliard, <em>The Battle of Gravelines<\/em>, 1588, via <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalgeographic.com.es\/articulo\/historia\/grandes_reportajes\/7643\/armada_invencible.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">National Geographic Espa\u00f1a.<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe Protestant Reformation had shaken England but Elizabeth I\u2019s assumption of the crown in 1558 marked the beginning of England\u2019s so-called \u201cgolden age,\u201d when the nation flourished culturally and economically. Shakespeare and Marlowe would author works that transformed both literature and spoken English. English mercantilism, a state-assisted manufacturing and trading system, created and maintained markets, ensured a steady supply of consumers and laborers, stimulated economic expansion, and increased English wealth.\r\n\r\nHowever, wrenching social and economic changes unsettled the English population. The island\u2019s population increased from fewer than three million in 1500 to over five million by the middle of the seventeenth century. The skyrocketing cost of land coincided with plummeting farming income. Rents and prices rose but wages stagnated. Moreover, the so-called \u201cenclosure\u201d movement\u2014sparked by the transition of English landholders from agriculture to livestock-raising\u2014evicted tenants from the land and created hordes of landless, jobless peasants that haunted the cities and countryside. One-quarter to one-half of the population lived in extreme poverty.\r\n<h3>Religion's role in English colonization<\/h3>\r\nNew World colonization won support in England amid a time of rising English fortunes among the wealthy, a tense Spanish rivalry, and mounting internal social unrest. But English colonization supporters always touted more than economic gains and mere national self-interest. They claimed to be doing God\u2019s work.\r\n\r\nMany cited spiritual concerns and argued that colonization would glorify God, England, and Protestantism by Christianizing the New World\u2019s pagan peoples. Advocates such as Richard Hakluyt the Younger and John Dee, for instance, drew upon <i>The History of the Kings of Britain<\/i>, written by the twelfth-century monk Geoffrey of Monmouth, and its mythical account of King Arthur\u2019s conquest and Christianization of pagan lands to justify American conquest. Moreover, promoters promised that the conversion of New World Indians would satisfy God and glorify England\u2019s \u201cVirgin Queen,\u201d Elizabeth I, who was approaching\u00a0a nearly-divine\u00a0status among the English. The English\u2014and other European Protestant colonizers\u2014imagined themselves superior to the Spanish, who still bore the Black Legend of inhuman cruelty. English colonization, supporters argued, would prove that superiority.\r\n<div class=\"textbox key-takeaways\">\r\n<h3>In Defense of Colonization<\/h3>\r\nIn his 1584 \u201cDiscourse on Western Planting,\u201d Richard Hakluyt amassed the supposed religious, moral, and exceptional economic benefits of colonization. He repeated the \u201cBlack Legend\u201d of Spanish New World terrorism and attacked the sins of Catholic Spain. He promised that English colonization could strike a blow against Spanish heresy and bring Protestant religion to the New World. English interference, Hakluyt suggested,\u00a0might\u00a0provide the only salvation from Catholic rule in the New World. The New World, too, he said, offered obvious economic advantages. Trade and resource extraction would enrich the English treasury. England, for instance, could find plentiful materials to outfit a world-class navy. Moreover, he said, the New World could provide an escape for England\u2019s vast armies of landless \u201cvagabonds.\u201d Expanded trade, he argued, would not only bring profit, but also provide work for England\u2019s jobless poor. A Christian enterprise, a blow against Spain, an economic stimulus, and a social safety valve all beckoned the English toward a commitment to colonization.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<div class=\"textbox tryit\">\r\n<h3>Try It<\/h3>\r\nhttps:\/\/assess.lumenlearning.com\/practice\/e8d66442-c0af-4679-9bc7-578e923c61cf\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<h2>English-Spanish Tensions and the Spanish Armada<\/h2>\r\nRather than formal colonization, however, the most successful early English ventures in the New World were a form of state-sponsored piracy known as privateering. Queen Elizabeth sponsored sailors, or \u201cSea Dogges,\u201d such as John Hawkins and Francis Drake, to plunder Spanish ships and towns in the Americas. Privateers earned a substantial profit both for themselves and for the English crown. Each year the English took more than \u00a3100,000 from Spain in this way; English privateer Francis Drake first made a name for himself when, in 1573, he looted silver, gold, and pearls worth \u00a340,000. England practiced piracy on a scale, one historian wrote, \u201cthat transforms crime into politics.\u201d Francis Drake harried Spanish ships throughout the Western Hemisphere and raided Spanish\u00a0fleets\u00a0as far away as the coast of Peru on the Pacific Ocean. In 1580 Elizabeth rewarded her skilled pirate with knighthood. But Elizabeth walked a fine line. Protestant-Catholic tensions were already running high, and English privateering provoked Spain. Tensions worsened after the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, a Catholic. In 1588, King Philip II of Spain unleashed the fabled <strong>Spanish<\/strong>\u00a0<strong>Armada<\/strong>. With 130 Ships, 8,000 sailors, and 18,000 soldiers, Spain launched the largest invasion in history to destroy the British navy and depose Elizabeth.\r\n\r\nAn island nation, England depended upon a robust navy for trade and territorial expansion. England had fewer ships than Spain but they were smaller and swifter. They successfully harassed the Armada, forcing it to retreat to the Netherlands for reinforcements. But then a fluke storm, celebrated in England as the \u201cdivine wind,\u201d annihilated the remainder of the fleet. The destruction of the Armada changed the course of world history. It not only saved England and secured English Protestantism, but it also opened the seas to English expansion and paved the way for England\u2019s colonial future. By 1600, England stood ready to embark upon its dominance over North America.\r\n<h3>Roanoke<\/h3>\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"390\"]<img src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images-archive-read-only\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/883\/2015\/08\/23202110\/CNX_History_02_03_Hariot.jpg\" alt=\"An engraving shows two natives of the New World cooking fish, which lie on a wooden rack built over a fire.\" width=\"390\" height=\"258\" \/> <strong>Figure 2<\/strong>. In 1588, a promoter of English colonization named Thomas Hariot published <em>A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia<\/em>, which contained many engravings of the native peoples who lived on the Carolina coast in the 1580s. This print, \u201cThe brovvyllinge of their fishe ouer the flame\u201d (1590) by Theodor de Bry, shows the ingenuity and wisdom of the \u201csavages\u201d of the New World.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nElizabeth sanctioned an early attempt at colonization in 1584, when Sir Walter Raleigh, a favorite of the queen\u2019s, attempted to establish a colony at Roanoke, an island off the coast of present-day North Carolina. The colony was small, consisting of only 117 people, who suffered a poor relationship with the local Indians, the Croatans, and struggled to survive in their new land. Their governor, John White, returned to England in late 1587 to secure more people and supplies, but events conspired to keep him away from Roanoke for three years. By the time he returned in 1590, the entire colony had vanished. The only trace of the colonists left behind was the word <em>Croatoan<\/em> carved into a fence surrounding the village. Governor White never knew whether the colonists had decamped for nearby Croatoan Island (now Hatteras) or whether some disaster had befallen them all. Roanoke is still called \u201cthe lost colony.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhen Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, no Englishmen had yet established a permanent North American colony.\r\n\r\nAfter King James made peace with Spain in 1604, privateering no longer held out the promise of cheap wealth. Colonization assumed a new urgency. In the early 1600s, wealthy English merchants and the landed elite began to pool their resources to form joint-stock companies. In this novel business arrangement, which was in many ways the precursor to the modern corporation, investors provided the capital for and assumed the risk of a venture in order to reap significant returns. The companies gained the approval of the English crown to establish colonies, and their investors dreamed of reaping great profits from the money they put into overseas colonization. The Virginia Company, established in 1606, drew inspiration from Cortes and the Spanish conquests. It hoped to find gold and silver as well as other valuable trading commodities in the New World: glass, iron, furs, pitch, tar, and anything else the country could supply. The Company planned to identify a navigable river with a deep harbor, away from the eyes of the Spanish. There they would find an Indian trading network and extract a fortune from the New World.\r\n<p id=\"fs-idm13021840\">The first permanent English settlement was established by a joint-stock company, the Virginia Company. Named for Elizabeth, the \u201cVirgin Queen,\u201d the company gained royal approval to establish a colony on the east coast of North America, and in 1606, it sent 144 men and boys to the New World. In early 1607, this group sailed up Chesapeake Bay. Finding a river they called the James in honor of their new king, James I, they established a ramshackle settlement and named it Jamestown. Despite serious struggles, the colony survived.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<h2>Accelerating Colonization<\/h2>\r\n<p id=\"fs-idp87524800\">By any measure, England came late to the race to colonize. As Jamestown limped along in the 1610s, the Spanish Empire extended around the globe and grew rich from its global colonial project. Yet the English persisted, and for this reason, the Jamestown settlement has a special place in history as the first permanent colony in what later became the United States.<\/p>\r\n<p id=\"fs-idp68631664\">After Jamestown\u2019s founding, English colonization of the New World accelerated. In 1609, a ship bound for Jamestown floundered in a storm and landed on Bermuda. (Some believe this incident helped inspire Shakespeare\u2019s 1611 play <em>The Tempest<\/em>.) The admiral of the ship, George Somers, claimed the island for the English crown. The English also began to colonize small islands in the Caribbean, an incursion into the Spanish-American empire. They established themselves on small islands such as St. Christopher (1624), Barbados (1627), Nevis (1628), Montserrat (1632), and Antigua (1632).<\/p>\r\nFrom the start, the English West Indies had a commercial orientation, for these islands produced cash crops: first tobacco and then sugar. Very quickly, by the mid-1600s, Barbados had become one of the most important English colonies because of the sugar produced there. Barbados was the first English colony dependent on slavery, and it became a model for other English slave societies on the American mainland. These differed radically from England itself, where slavery was not practiced.\r\n<h3>Pilgrims and Puritans<\/h3>\r\n<p id=\"fs-idp31677424\">English Puritans also began to colonize the Americas in the 1620s and 1630s. These intensely religious migrants dreamed of creating communities of reformed Protestantism where the corruption of England would be eliminated. One of the first groups of Puritans to relocate to North America, known as Pilgrims, settled at Plymouth in 1620. The Pilgrims differed from other Puritans in their insistence on separating from what they saw as the corrupt Church of England. For this reason, Pilgrims are known as Separatists.\u00a0In 1630, a much larger contingent of Puritans left England to escape conformity to the Church of England and founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In the following years, thousands more arrived to create a new life in the rocky soils and cold climates of New England.<\/p>\r\n<p id=\"fs-idm1598880\">In comparison to Catholic Spain, however, Protestant England remained a very weak imperial player in the early seventeenth century, with only a few infant colonies in the Americas in the early 1600s. The English never found treasure equal to that of the Aztec city of Tenochtitl\u00e1n, and England did not quickly grow rich from its small American outposts. The English colonies also differed from each other; Barbados and Virginia had a decidedly commercial orientation from the start, while the Puritan colonies of New England were intensely religious at their inception. All English settlements in America, however, marked the increasingly important role of England in the Atlantic World.<\/p>\r\nEnglish colonization would also look very different from Spanish or French colonization, as was indicated by early experiences with the Irish. England had long been trying to conquer Catholic Ireland. The English used a model of forcible segregation with the Irish that would mirror their future relationships with Native Americans. Rather than integrating with the Irish and trying to convert them to Protestantism, England more often simply seized land through violence and pushed out the former inhabitants, leaving them to move elsewhere or to die.\r\n<div class=\"textbox tryit\">\r\n<h3>TRY IT<\/h3>\r\nhttps:\/\/assess.lumenlearning.com\/practice\/22fbb316-89a6-4aea-b544-9134df00999d\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<div class=\"textbox learning-objectives\">\r\n<h3>Glossary<\/h3>\r\n<strong>Spanish Armada<\/strong>: Spain's 1588 attempt to invade England failed, allowing England to emerge as major power in North America\r\n\r\n<\/div>","rendered":"<div class=\"textbox learning-objectives\">\n<h3>Learning Objectives<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Describe the development of English\u00a0colonization in the Americas, including the attempted settlement at Roanoke<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<h2>English Motives for Colonization<\/h2>\n<p>Spain had a one-hundred year head start on New World colonization and a jealous England eyed the enormous wealth that Spain gleaned from the New World.<\/p>\n<p>Disruptions during the Tudor monarchy\u2014especially the creation of the Protestant Church of England by Henry VIII in the 1530s, the return of the nation to Catholicism under Queen Mary in the 1550s, and the restoration of Protestantism under Queen Elizabeth\u2014left England with little energy for overseas projects. More important, England lacked the financial resources for such endeavors. Nonetheless, English monarchs carefully monitored developments in the newly emerging Atlantic World and took steps to assert England\u2019s claim to the Americas. As early as 1497, Henry VII of England had commissioned John Cabot, an Italian mariner, to explore new lands. Cabot sailed from England that year and made landfall somewhere along the North American coastline. For the next century, English fishermen routinely crossed the Atlantic to fish the rich waters off the North American coast. However, English colonization efforts in the 1500s were closer to home, as England devoted its energy to the colonization of Ireland.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_1166\" style=\"width: 688px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/text\/wp-content\/uploads\/77788633_2000x8831.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1166\" class=\"wp-image-1166\" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images-archive-read-only\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/880\/2015\/04\/23193027\/77788633_2000x8831-1000x441.jpg\" alt=\"The Battle of Gravelines\" width=\"678\" height=\"299\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p id=\"caption-attachment-1166\" class=\"wp-caption-text\"><strong>Figure 1<\/strong>. Nicholas Hilliard, <em>The Battle of Gravelines<\/em>, 1588, via <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalgeographic.com.es\/articulo\/historia\/grandes_reportajes\/7643\/armada_invencible.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">National Geographic Espa\u00f1a.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>The Protestant Reformation had shaken England but Elizabeth I\u2019s assumption of the crown in 1558 marked the beginning of England\u2019s so-called \u201cgolden age,\u201d when the nation flourished culturally and economically. Shakespeare and Marlowe would author works that transformed both literature and spoken English. English mercantilism, a state-assisted manufacturing and trading system, created and maintained markets, ensured a steady supply of consumers and laborers, stimulated economic expansion, and increased English wealth.<\/p>\n<p>However, wrenching social and economic changes unsettled the English population. The island\u2019s population increased from fewer than three million in 1500 to over five million by the middle of the seventeenth century. The skyrocketing cost of land coincided with plummeting farming income. Rents and prices rose but wages stagnated. Moreover, the so-called \u201cenclosure\u201d movement\u2014sparked by the transition of English landholders from agriculture to livestock-raising\u2014evicted tenants from the land and created hordes of landless, jobless peasants that haunted the cities and countryside. One-quarter to one-half of the population lived in extreme poverty.<\/p>\n<h3>Religion&#8217;s role in English colonization<\/h3>\n<p>New World colonization won support in England amid a time of rising English fortunes among the wealthy, a tense Spanish rivalry, and mounting internal social unrest. But English colonization supporters always touted more than economic gains and mere national self-interest. They claimed to be doing God\u2019s work.<\/p>\n<p>Many cited spiritual concerns and argued that colonization would glorify God, England, and Protestantism by Christianizing the New World\u2019s pagan peoples. Advocates such as Richard Hakluyt the Younger and John Dee, for instance, drew upon <i>The History of the Kings of Britain<\/i>, written by the twelfth-century monk Geoffrey of Monmouth, and its mythical account of King Arthur\u2019s conquest and Christianization of pagan lands to justify American conquest. Moreover, promoters promised that the conversion of New World Indians would satisfy God and glorify England\u2019s \u201cVirgin Queen,\u201d Elizabeth I, who was approaching\u00a0a nearly-divine\u00a0status among the English. The English\u2014and other European Protestant colonizers\u2014imagined themselves superior to the Spanish, who still bore the Black Legend of inhuman cruelty. English colonization, supporters argued, would prove that superiority.<\/p>\n<div class=\"textbox key-takeaways\">\n<h3>In Defense of Colonization<\/h3>\n<p>In his 1584 \u201cDiscourse on Western Planting,\u201d Richard Hakluyt amassed the supposed religious, moral, and exceptional economic benefits of colonization. He repeated the \u201cBlack Legend\u201d of Spanish New World terrorism and attacked the sins of Catholic Spain. He promised that English colonization could strike a blow against Spanish heresy and bring Protestant religion to the New World. English interference, Hakluyt suggested,\u00a0might\u00a0provide the only salvation from Catholic rule in the New World. The New World, too, he said, offered obvious economic advantages. Trade and resource extraction would enrich the English treasury. England, for instance, could find plentiful materials to outfit a world-class navy. Moreover, he said, the New World could provide an escape for England\u2019s vast armies of landless \u201cvagabonds.\u201d Expanded trade, he argued, would not only bring profit, but also provide work for England\u2019s jobless poor. A Christian enterprise, a blow against Spain, an economic stimulus, and a social safety valve all beckoned the English toward a commitment to colonization.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"textbox tryit\">\n<h3>Try It<\/h3>\n<p>\t<iframe id=\"assessment_practice_e8d66442-c0af-4679-9bc7-578e923c61cf\" class=\"resizable\" src=\"https:\/\/assess.lumenlearning.com\/practice\/e8d66442-c0af-4679-9bc7-578e923c61cf?iframe_resize_id=assessment_practice_id_e8d66442-c0af-4679-9bc7-578e923c61cf\" frameborder=\"0\" style=\"border:none;width:100%;height:100%;min-height:300px;\"><br \/>\n\t<\/iframe><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<h2>English-Spanish Tensions and the Spanish Armada<\/h2>\n<p>Rather than formal colonization, however, the most successful early English ventures in the New World were a form of state-sponsored piracy known as privateering. Queen Elizabeth sponsored sailors, or \u201cSea Dogges,\u201d such as John Hawkins and Francis Drake, to plunder Spanish ships and towns in the Americas. Privateers earned a substantial profit both for themselves and for the English crown. Each year the English took more than \u00a3100,000 from Spain in this way; English privateer Francis Drake first made a name for himself when, in 1573, he looted silver, gold, and pearls worth \u00a340,000. England practiced piracy on a scale, one historian wrote, \u201cthat transforms crime into politics.\u201d Francis Drake harried Spanish ships throughout the Western Hemisphere and raided Spanish\u00a0fleets\u00a0as far away as the coast of Peru on the Pacific Ocean. In 1580 Elizabeth rewarded her skilled pirate with knighthood. But Elizabeth walked a fine line. Protestant-Catholic tensions were already running high, and English privateering provoked Spain. Tensions worsened after the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, a Catholic. In 1588, King Philip II of Spain unleashed the fabled <strong>Spanish<\/strong>\u00a0<strong>Armada<\/strong>. With 130 Ships, 8,000 sailors, and 18,000 soldiers, Spain launched the largest invasion in history to destroy the British navy and depose Elizabeth.<\/p>\n<p>An island nation, England depended upon a robust navy for trade and territorial expansion. England had fewer ships than Spain but they were smaller and swifter. They successfully harassed the Armada, forcing it to retreat to the Netherlands for reinforcements. But then a fluke storm, celebrated in England as the \u201cdivine wind,\u201d annihilated the remainder of the fleet. The destruction of the Armada changed the course of world history. It not only saved England and secured English Protestantism, but it also opened the seas to English expansion and paved the way for England\u2019s colonial future. By 1600, England stood ready to embark upon its dominance over North America.<\/p>\n<h3>Roanoke<\/h3>\n<div style=\"width: 400px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images-archive-read-only\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/883\/2015\/08\/23202110\/CNX_History_02_03_Hariot.jpg\" alt=\"An engraving shows two natives of the New World cooking fish, which lie on a wooden rack built over a fire.\" width=\"390\" height=\"258\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><strong>Figure 2<\/strong>. In 1588, a promoter of English colonization named Thomas Hariot published <em>A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia<\/em>, which contained many engravings of the native peoples who lived on the Carolina coast in the 1580s. This print, \u201cThe brovvyllinge of their fishe ouer the flame\u201d (1590) by Theodor de Bry, shows the ingenuity and wisdom of the \u201csavages\u201d of the New World.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Elizabeth sanctioned an early attempt at colonization in 1584, when Sir Walter Raleigh, a favorite of the queen\u2019s, attempted to establish a colony at Roanoke, an island off the coast of present-day North Carolina. The colony was small, consisting of only 117 people, who suffered a poor relationship with the local Indians, the Croatans, and struggled to survive in their new land. Their governor, John White, returned to England in late 1587 to secure more people and supplies, but events conspired to keep him away from Roanoke for three years. By the time he returned in 1590, the entire colony had vanished. The only trace of the colonists left behind was the word <em>Croatoan<\/em> carved into a fence surrounding the village. Governor White never knew whether the colonists had decamped for nearby Croatoan Island (now Hatteras) or whether some disaster had befallen them all. Roanoke is still called \u201cthe lost colony.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>When Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, no Englishmen had yet established a permanent North American colony.<\/p>\n<p>After King James made peace with Spain in 1604, privateering no longer held out the promise of cheap wealth. Colonization assumed a new urgency. In the early 1600s, wealthy English merchants and the landed elite began to pool their resources to form joint-stock companies. In this novel business arrangement, which was in many ways the precursor to the modern corporation, investors provided the capital for and assumed the risk of a venture in order to reap significant returns. The companies gained the approval of the English crown to establish colonies, and their investors dreamed of reaping great profits from the money they put into overseas colonization. The Virginia Company, established in 1606, drew inspiration from Cortes and the Spanish conquests. It hoped to find gold and silver as well as other valuable trading commodities in the New World: glass, iron, furs, pitch, tar, and anything else the country could supply. The Company planned to identify a navigable river with a deep harbor, away from the eyes of the Spanish. There they would find an Indian trading network and extract a fortune from the New World.<\/p>\n<p id=\"fs-idm13021840\">The first permanent English settlement was established by a joint-stock company, the Virginia Company. Named for Elizabeth, the \u201cVirgin Queen,\u201d the company gained royal approval to establish a colony on the east coast of North America, and in 1606, it sent 144 men and boys to the New World. In early 1607, this group sailed up Chesapeake Bay. Finding a river they called the James in honor of their new king, James I, they established a ramshackle settlement and named it Jamestown. Despite serious struggles, the colony survived.<\/p>\n<h2>Accelerating Colonization<\/h2>\n<p id=\"fs-idp87524800\">By any measure, England came late to the race to colonize. As Jamestown limped along in the 1610s, the Spanish Empire extended around the globe and grew rich from its global colonial project. Yet the English persisted, and for this reason, the Jamestown settlement has a special place in history as the first permanent colony in what later became the United States.<\/p>\n<p id=\"fs-idp68631664\">After Jamestown\u2019s founding, English colonization of the New World accelerated. In 1609, a ship bound for Jamestown floundered in a storm and landed on Bermuda. (Some believe this incident helped inspire Shakespeare\u2019s 1611 play <em>The Tempest<\/em>.) The admiral of the ship, George Somers, claimed the island for the English crown. The English also began to colonize small islands in the Caribbean, an incursion into the Spanish-American empire. They established themselves on small islands such as St. Christopher (1624), Barbados (1627), Nevis (1628), Montserrat (1632), and Antigua (1632).<\/p>\n<p>From the start, the English West Indies had a commercial orientation, for these islands produced cash crops: first tobacco and then sugar. Very quickly, by the mid-1600s, Barbados had become one of the most important English colonies because of the sugar produced there. Barbados was the first English colony dependent on slavery, and it became a model for other English slave societies on the American mainland. These differed radically from England itself, where slavery was not practiced.<\/p>\n<h3>Pilgrims and Puritans<\/h3>\n<p id=\"fs-idp31677424\">English Puritans also began to colonize the Americas in the 1620s and 1630s. These intensely religious migrants dreamed of creating communities of reformed Protestantism where the corruption of England would be eliminated. One of the first groups of Puritans to relocate to North America, known as Pilgrims, settled at Plymouth in 1620. The Pilgrims differed from other Puritans in their insistence on separating from what they saw as the corrupt Church of England. For this reason, Pilgrims are known as Separatists.\u00a0In 1630, a much larger contingent of Puritans left England to escape conformity to the Church of England and founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In the following years, thousands more arrived to create a new life in the rocky soils and cold climates of New England.<\/p>\n<p id=\"fs-idm1598880\">In comparison to Catholic Spain, however, Protestant England remained a very weak imperial player in the early seventeenth century, with only a few infant colonies in the Americas in the early 1600s. The English never found treasure equal to that of the Aztec city of Tenochtitl\u00e1n, and England did not quickly grow rich from its small American outposts. The English colonies also differed from each other; Barbados and Virginia had a decidedly commercial orientation from the start, while the Puritan colonies of New England were intensely religious at their inception. All English settlements in America, however, marked the increasingly important role of England in the Atlantic World.<\/p>\n<p>English colonization would also look very different from Spanish or French colonization, as was indicated by early experiences with the Irish. England had long been trying to conquer Catholic Ireland. The English used a model of forcible segregation with the Irish that would mirror their future relationships with Native Americans. Rather than integrating with the Irish and trying to convert them to Protestantism, England more often simply seized land through violence and pushed out the former inhabitants, leaving them to move elsewhere or to die.<\/p>\n<div class=\"textbox tryit\">\n<h3>TRY IT<\/h3>\n<p>\t<iframe id=\"assessment_practice_22fbb316-89a6-4aea-b544-9134df00999d\" class=\"resizable\" src=\"https:\/\/assess.lumenlearning.com\/practice\/22fbb316-89a6-4aea-b544-9134df00999d?iframe_resize_id=assessment_practice_id_22fbb316-89a6-4aea-b544-9134df00999d\" frameborder=\"0\" style=\"border:none;width:100%;height:100%;min-height:300px;\"><br \/>\n\t<\/iframe><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"textbox learning-objectives\">\n<h3>Glossary<\/h3>\n<p><strong>Spanish Armada<\/strong>: Spain&#8217;s 1588 attempt to invade England failed, allowing England to emerge as major power in North America<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t <section class=\"citations-section\" role=\"contentinfo\">\n\t\t\t <h3>Candela Citations<\/h3>\n\t\t\t\t\t <div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t <div id=\"citation-list-1898\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t <div class=\"licensing\"><div class=\"license-attribution-dropdown-subheading\">CC licensed content, Shared previously<\/div><ul class=\"citation-list\"><li>American Yawp. <strong>Located at<\/strong>: <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/index.html\">http:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/index.html<\/a>. <strong>Project<\/strong>: American Yawp. <strong>License<\/strong>: <em><a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"license\" href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/4.0\/\">CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike<\/a><\/em><\/li><\/ul><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t <\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t <\/div>\n\t\t\t <\/section>","protected":false},"author":29,"menu_order":7,"template":"","meta":{"_candela_citation":"[{\"type\":\"cc\",\"description\":\"American Yawp\",\"author\":\"\",\"organization\":\"\",\"url\":\"http:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/index.html\",\"project\":\"American Yawp\",\"license\":\"cc-by-sa\",\"license_terms\":\"\"}]","CANDELA_OUTCOMES_GUID":"9689737f-1d2c-4c5b-a40c-550083b809ae, 710d2f2c-6f11-440c-b5dd-f9223df91593","pb_show_title":"on","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":[],"pb_section_license":""},"chapter-type":[],"contributor":[],"license":[],"class_list":["post-1898","chapter","type-chapter","status-publish","hentry"],"part":1894,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/wm-ushistory1\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/1898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/wm-ushistory1\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/wm-ushistory1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chapter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/wm-ushistory1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"version-history":[{"count":35,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/wm-ushistory1\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/1898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8363,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/wm-ushistory1\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/1898\/revisions\/8363"}],"part":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/wm-ushistory1\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/parts\/1894"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/wm-ushistory1\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/1898\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/wm-ushistory1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/wm-ushistory1\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=1898"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/wm-ushistory1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=1898"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/wm-ushistory1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=1898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}