Chapter 4:

European Settlements
Core Lesson 1
A Northwest Passage
 Searching for a Passage
to Asia
 Have you ever taken a shortcut?

 Europeans were in search of a shortcut
to Asia.
 They were certain that there had to be
a faster way to Asia than traveling
around the tip of South America.
 What was their purpose of traveling to
Asia?
 John Cabot
 Italian Explorer
 Thought he could sail across the Atlantic
Ocean and reach Asia.
 Left England in 1497.
 Sailed for a month and finally reached
land. He thought he was in Asia, but was
actually in present day Canada.
 After exploring the land and waters, he
didn’t find any people, gold or spices,
but he DID find a rich fishing area off the
coast of Canada.
 After returning to England and reporting
his findings, European fishing boats
began sailing these waters.
 People soon realized that what Cabot
had found was NOT Asia, and
continued searching for a sea route to
Asia.
 The sea route that explorers were
searching for became known as the
NORTHWEST PASSAGE.
 France Explores
North America
 France sent their own explorer in 1524 by the
name of Giovanni da Verrazano
 He explored much of the east coast of North
America, including present day New York.
 10 years later, they continued their search by
sending Jacques Cartier, who sailed far up
the St. Lawrence River in Canada.
 In 1608, Samuel de Champlain founded a fur
trading post on the St. Lawrence River. He
called it Quebec, from the Indian word
kebec meaning “the place where the river
narrows.”
 QUEBEC WAS THE FIRST PERMANENT
FRENCH SETTLEMENT IN NORTH AMERICA!
 Henry Hudson


 Hired by the Dutch (people of the

Netherlands) to try to find the Northwest
Passage.
 Sailed up the Hudson River in New York.
 The Dutch claimed land in this area
 Claim- something declared as one’s own,
especially a piece of land.
 The following year, the Dutch started a
colony here.

 Henry Hudson made a voyage for
England in 1610.
 Came upon a bay that he thought would
lead to the Pacific, but found that it
did NOT!
 This bay was named the Hudson Bay
after Henry Hudson.
 The land around the Hudson Bay was
later claimed by England.

 So where was the Northwest
Passage???
 THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE WAS NEVER
FOUND!!
 Instead, they found more forests, fish,
and wildlife.

 SPAIN AND ENGLAND
 Spain and England were led by the 2 most powerful leaders in
the world, King Philip II of Spain and Queen Elizabeth I of
England.
 The Spanish found gold and silver in the lands they claimed in
America.
 They tried to take these treasures back across the Atlantic, but
were attacked time and time again. Their treasures were
stolen.
 Francis Drake attacked many of these Spanish ships and
carried the gold and silver back to Queen Elizabeth of
England.
 This made King Philip of Spain very angry.
 Spain and England were not only had conflict over land in the
Americas, but also over religion.
 Spain was a Roman Catholic country, while England broke away
from the Roman Catholic church during the Protestant
Reformation.

 The Spanish Armada
 King Philip didn’t like that England had left the
Catholic church. He wanted them to be a
part again.
 He was part of the Counter Reformation,
which was a movement that tried to spread
the Catholic religion.
 He was also very upset about his ships being
attacked and he wanted to stop them, so
he put together an armada of 130 warships.
 Armada-Spanish word for a large fleet of
ships.
 The Spanish Armada sailed to England in
1588 to attack!!

 England was already prepared for the
invasion.
 invasion- an attack by an armed force to
conquer another country.
 Sir Francis Drake and his men were ready
for the Spanish Armada when they
attacked and sank many of their ships.
They chased the rest of them back to
Spain.
 England was now more powerful and used
its power to claim more land in the
Americas.
 King Philip II of Spain
 Spain was already a powerful nation
when Philip took over.
 He managed his empire from his office
in Madrid.
 He sent many explorers over to start
colonies in the Americas.
 He enlarged his army and navy.
 He tried very hard to strengthen Roman
Catholicism.

 Queen Elizabeth I of England
 When she became Queen, England was not as
strong as Spain.
 She reorganized the government so it would run
better.
 She was very involved and surrounded herself with
trustworthy advisors.
 She was very social and always seen in public.
 She built the English navy while being very careful
about money.
 She sent explorers on costly expeditions to find new
trade colonies.
 By the end of her reign, England was one of the
most powerful nations.
Roanoke and Jamestown
 Core Lesson 2
 Words to pay attention to:
› Charter
› Invest
› Stock
› Cash crop
› Indentured servant
 Think about a time when something
didn’t go exactly as expected. Maybe
there was an unexpected change of
plans:
› Sickness
› Unexpected move
› Punishment
› Unexpected loss
›
 ***Write a paragraph about that
unexpected change and how it made you
feel.
 The Lost Colony
 England was in search of gold and silver
in North America.
 In 1585, 100 English men went to
America to set up a colony.
 They settled on Roanoke Island, off the
coast of North Carolina.
 They chose a bad location to grow crops
because of poor soil and they barely
survived.
 SO…they went back to England.

 In 1587, they tried again to set up a colony in
Roanoke and was led by John White.
 John White had to return to England to get
supplies, but was held up there for several
years because of a war that was being
fought between Spain and Britain.
 When he returned, no one was to be found.
There was absolutely no sign of anybody.
The settlement was still there, but no
people.
 The ONLY sign at all was the word “Croatoan”
carved in a tree.
 What happened to the English people is still a
mystery today, thus is why it is called “The
Lost Colony of Roanoke”.
 ****Roanoke is known as the very first
attempt by the British to settle in North
America.
 The Jamestown Colony
 1606, English merchants started the Virginia
Company of London to try to build a settlement
in North America.
 They needed money to buy ships and supplies.
 The king of England gave the English a charter, a
document giving permission to a person or group
of people to do something, so they could go and
set up a colony.
 The Virginia Company tried to get people to invest,
or put money into something to try to earn more
money, so they could buy the ships and supplies
they needed.
 How would investing in the Virginia Company
benefit investors?
 People invested in the Virginia Company by buying
stock, or a piece of ownership in a company.


 1607, 100 men traveled to present day
Virginia and built a fort on the bank of
a river.
 They named this colony Jamestown,
after King James I.
 These men had never been labor
workers and didn’t know how to farm.
\
 The land was swampy, damp, and was
covered in diseased insects.
 These men searched for gold instead.
 In just a few short months, the settlers
ran out of food and over half of them
died of starvation.

 John Smith takes over!!!
 Took command of the colony and ordered
people to plant crops.
 He said “He who does not work, will not
eat!”
 He went back to England in 1609, leaving
the colonists behind to raise their crops,
but most of them died in the process.
 During this starvation time, the colonists
were so desperate for food that they
would dig up corpses and eat them.

 John Rolfe to the rescue!!
 In 1612, John Rolfe learned that a
popular crop called tobacco grew well
in Virginia’s hot climate, and they
could make money because many
people in England smoked tobacco.
 So…they began to use tobacco as a
cash crop, a crop that people grew
and sold to earn money.
 This gave the colonists enough income
to buy food and supplies from
England.

 In 1619, the first women and Africans
arrived in Jamestown.
 The first Africans were probably
indentured servants, someone who
agreed to work for a number of years
in exchange for the cost of a voyage
to North America, but later enslaved
Africans were forced to work in
Jamestown.

 Jamestown and the
Powhatans
 Jamestown was occupied by a powerful group of
Indians known as the Powhatans.
 They would trade food to the settlers in exchange
for European goods.
 The Powhatans wanted the settlers to help them
fight against other Indian groups, but the settlers
refused.
 The colonists would sometimes demand food from
the Powhatans, who would refuse.
 When they refused, the English attacked them.
 The Indians fought back.
 The English leader, John Rolfe, married a Powhatan
woman named Pocahantas in 1614, who was the
daughter of the Powhatan leader.
 The English and Powhatans soon made piece.
 The peace did not last forever.
 The English began to take more land
from the Indians.
 The Indians fought back until 1646, but
the English killed most of them and
took control of most of the land
around Jamestown.

 ***Jamestown was known as the first
SUCCESSFUL English settlement in
North America.
New England Settlements
 Core Lesson 3
 The Plymouth Colony
 Everyone in England was supposed to
belong to the Church of England by law.
 Some people wanted to separate from the
Church of England, because they had
different beliefs, and start their own
church.
 Became known as Separatists
 Pilgrims -group of separatists who went to
the Netherlands in the early 1600s to
find religious freedom.
 A pilgrim is a person who makes a long
journey for religious reasons.
 Pilgrims Sail to North
America
 The pilgrims were not completely happy in
the Netherlands:
› They were living with people of different beliefs
› Their children were learning Dutch customs.
› They went to Virginia to start a colony there.
› They set sail in 1620 on the Mayflower.
› Landed in Massachusetts instead after being
blown off course by a fierce storm.
› Landed on the tip of Cape Cod, a strip of land
that stretches into a body of water.
› They chose a site on the other side of Cape Cod.
› Called their new colony Plymouth, after a town
in England.
›

 Mayflower Compact
 They would not be governed by the Virginia
Company. They could make their own plan
for government.
 The name of this plan for government was
called the Mayflower Compact. It was a
plan to make general laws for the good
of the colony and to abide by them.
 Compact-an agreement
 ***The Mayflower Compact was the first
written plan for government in North
America.

 About half of the Pilgrims died
the very first winter because
they landed in November,
which was too late to plant
crops. They didn’t have
enough food.
 The Pilgrims Give Thanks
 The pilgrims were visited by American
Indian named Squanto.
 He introduced them to Massasoit, the
leader of Wampanoag tribe who lived
nearby.
 The leader of the Plymouth, William
Bradford, and Massasoit agreed to live in
peace.
 Squanto taught the pilgrims how to plant
crops and to hunt and fish.
 Plymouth became more successful
because of Squanto.
 The First Thanksgiving
 The pilgrims gathered with the
Wampanoag to give thanks to their
God for their blessings.
 They celebrated for 3 days.
 This feast is celebrated every year in
November and is called Thanksgiving.
 Massachusetts Bay Colony
 Another English group also disagreed
with some beliefs of the Church of
England but did not want to separate.
 Instead, they wanted to make
themselves and their church pure.
 So, they were called the Puritans.
 Like the Pilgrims, they wanted to build a
colony based on their religious
beliefs.

 They built a new colony and were governed
by John Winthrop, a lawyer.
 HE believed that they should set a good
example for others to follow. IF they lived
by their religious beliefs, their community
would succeed.
 They named their colony the Massachusetts
Bay Colony. It is located in present day
Boston.
 The Massachusetts Bay Colony was very
successful because the Puritans were
much more prepared:
› Skilled people
› Good timing
 Many more Puritans moved here
because the colony was so successful.
 By the 1640s, as many as 20,000
English Puritans had moved to what is
now the northeastern part of the
United States.
 This region became known as “New
England” because so many people
from England lived there.
Dutch and French Colonies
 Core Lesson 4
 New Netherland
 When Henry Hudson explored the Hudson
River, he claimed the land around it for
the Dutch.
 This area became known as New
Netherland.
 These first settlements were fur trading
posts
 In 1626, Peter Minuit, the leader of New
Netherland, bought Manhatten Island
from the Manhates Indians and started a
settlement there called New Amsterdam.
It became the capital of New Netherland.
 Settlers in New Netherland
 Important trading company in New
Netherland called the Dutch West India
Company.
 Owners of this company controlled the
New Netherland settlements.
 They couldn’t get many of their own
people to travel across the Atlantic ,so
they looked for people from other
countries.
 They welcomed everybody, which created
diversity, a variety of people in a group.

 New Amsterdam
 18 different languages were spoken.
 Included German, English, Swedish,
French, and free and enslaved African
settlers.
 New governor took over name Peter
Stuyvesant.
› Very harsh man
› Angered colonists
› Didn’t practice tolerance, respecting one’s
beliefs that are different from one’s own.
› He didn’t want settlers with different beliefs
in the colony.
 The English Attack New
Amsterdam
 1664-English sailed into New
Amsterdam to attack.
 The settlers refused to fight because of
their hate for their leader.
 So, the English took over the colony and
renamed it in honor of the Duke of
York.
 They called it NEW YORK!!
 New France
 New France was the land claimed in
present day Canada by the French in
the early 1600s.
 Most of the settlers were fur traders
who lived near Quebec.
 Missionaries, people who teach his or
her religion to others, also came
there.
 They built missions throughout New
France and taught the people about
Catholicism.
 The Fur Trade
 French merchants made money selling
fur of beaver, fox and otter.
 Fur traders traveled throughout New
France trading with the Indians.
 The Indians would give the merchants
the furs from animals they had
trapped.
 In exchange, the merchants would give
them beads, tools, pots, knives, and
cloth.
 Exploring the Mississippi
 Jacques Marquette-missionary in New
France
 In 1673, traveled by canoe and set up
missions along the Mississippi River.
 An explorer named Louis Jolliet joined him
because he believed the Mississippi
might lead to the Pacific.
 Another explorer name Robert La Salle
claimed the Mississippi River and all the
land around it for France.
 Named this vast area Louisiana after King
Louis XIV.
Look at this picture of the
Mayflower. DESCRIBE the
Mayflower in 3 paragraphs.